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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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).
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
The first time I googled the phrase "autistic burnout", one of the top results was an article titled "Help, I'm getting more autistic!" I was kind of pleasantly surprised to see that other people experienced it this way--as literally "getting more autistic" when burnt out--because perceiving it as such but not thinking that was possible or typical had me kind of feeling like I was just going crazy. This was in ~2019, shortly after the scales first fell from my eyes and I realized that relating to my (long-diagnosed Asperger's) brother but being able to route around the same inclinations so that I didn't act quite like he does was not the same thing as not being autistic. It's funny to me though, that the common opinion chalks burnout up to psychological factors. As someone with co-occurring chronic fatigue etc. type of issues, it's long been obvious to me that my social function worsens when my physical health worsens, even before the autism possibility had entered my brain. Burnout, in my opinion, is as much an energy or at least medical issue as it is a psychological one.
I live in vicious merry-go-round cycles like this: I overextend myself, live inauthentically to fit in, don't take care of myself because my needs (both in terms of health issues and in terms of autism) are weird, fake, made-up, just be normal bro--and I ruin my health, burn out, withdraw, and struggle to recover until I burn every bridge so I can start over finally listening to my own instincts/intuition again about what my needs are. However, as I get older, I seem to maybe be making strides at leveraging smaller epicycles to lessen the dramatic swings of the mega cycles. The net result, at the moment, is that I have made good strides on my physical health recently* without having indulged in the formerly-prerequisite "complete social withdrawal" step. And I'm feeling pretty rapidly quite a bit more socially functional. And feeling quite a bit of whiplash.
*I've seen it theorized that autistic regression, seen as a uniquely unstable subtype of autism, is usually a case of Autism secondary to Mitochondrial Dysfunction. Given that I have been able to document my own mitochondrial dysfunction, it makes sense to me that over-extending or conversely, improving, my energy could cause fluctuations to the degree I experience. But it might make me more of a weird outlier than I'm giving credit to, idk.
Anyway, the reason I bring this to The Motte: I'm curious if anyone else goes through times in your lives where you are more socio-culturally-politically more "normie" and times when you are more "extreme", outlier, believe things that could get you cancelled, etc? I feel like the one-way-street is the default: you start out normie and something "radicalizes" you (lol). Has anyone else swung back and forth?
I hate to say it but is this, unironically, a female issue? Are most of you are strong men laden with the social-pressure-resistance benefits given by a nice healthy blood level of testosterone, and immune to this changeability? I can't help think about Alex Kaschuta (loved her podcast), who often described herself as "to the right of Atilla the Hun", later being quoted in that hit piece against the online right, after the twitter right ousted her. She seems to have gone from normie left feminist in college, to normie-scaring far right to... whatever she is now, but seemingly something more moderate. It's sad but I also kind of get it. We're not in COVID times anymore: right-wing twitter sucks now. I leave my house and interact with a variety of people. My favorite podcasts have gone away or fallen off. I can't maintain the same psychological (social?) quarantine I used to that made it less stressful to hold would-make-everyone-think-I'm-a-bad-person opinions, and my improved ability to interact socially has my disagreeability softening, leaking out of me by the minute, it feels...
Frankly, I don't think this is just a me thing, just a byproduct of my autistic burnout cycles, or just (but I do think it might be partially) a woman thing. The tone and culture even here has changed since COVID, and the falling off of right-wing twitter is much discussed. To me it's for sure at least partly due to the lack of COVID-era social quarantining, where differences in virus-avoidance behaviors had the two sides of the culture war interacting with each other a lot less in-person.
But honestly the why is not super the point. This is Wellness Wednesday. I can feel this opinion-normifying happening to me, and I think everyone outside these kinds of circles would tell me that's normal and good for me. I know for myself it is not. I will think it's fine while the dissonance eats at my subconscious until it wrecks me again at some later date. Does anyone else experience this? What do you do to hold onto things? Is this why everyone is going to church now? My astrologist (don't laugh) tells me I need to figure out what I really believe to be able to move forward, exist at all really. But I'm feeling so susceptible to I guess groupthink lately that I'm having trouble even embarking on that process. I would love to talk to anyone who relates at all to being in this boat.
Get off the internet and learn to have a disgust reaction whenever someone IRL brings the internet into RL.
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