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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   1229 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for April 22, 2026

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Yes, this happened to me in my early 30’s too. I made a longer post about it when I joined this site.

It was a series of small things that added up over a long time, then one day I looked back and made the connection that it was likely autism.

  • I was heavily into Magic the Gathering for a ten-year period starting in high school.
  • I struggled with social milestones, especially romantic ones.
  • I am awkward in social situations. When I was younger it was giving short answers, fearing that I would run out of things to say, and trying to come up with social scripts to follow. Now it is noticing that I cycle through a lot of perspectives and think about wierd patterns/connections.
  • Frustrations with small talk, tribal political discussion, and people trying to peer pressure me into being on the right side and getting offended when I ask them to provide logical evidence for the belief they want me to go along with.
  • Ruminating over past social interactions and getting frustrated that I have a hard time saying the right thing at the right time.
  • Frustration when people use social manipulation to bypass the agreed upon rules, then I become obsessed with figuring out the actual unwritten social rules.
  • Openness to odd ideas and questioning the status quo.
  • Watching content about autistic people (like Asperger’s Are Us) and recognizing that it sometimes overlaps with my own behaviors.
  • Watching a streamer with a formal autism diagnosis and realizing he was high-masking and many people didn’t notice his autism unless he told them about it. His story matched a lot of my own experience.

It has made it easier to navigate life and look for situations where I fit in rather than trying to mask to prevalent social norms.

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