There’s one thing in your post that I haven’t seen you mention yet it’s all over the place: depression.

I don’t know anything about you but this post, and I’m not a professional, but from very painful personal experience I’m almost sure you’re severely depressed, maybe even to the point where you need hospitalization.

Depression fucks with your head. It makes you not-do things you’re looking forward to and you don’t understand why. It makes you unable to see anything positive. You cannot get out of it without help after a certain point, and you cannot trust your own thoughts anymore.

These days, after years, I’m better. For me it’s never going completely away, but I recognize patterns, I know how to break the spiraling (and most importantly, no one shames me for how I’m doing it anymore) and I can say " this sounds like depression speaking, let me do something else and return to this thought tmr and see how I feel."

But it took years of therapy and several months of hospitalization. If you’re at the point where your outbreaks scare your family, maybe it’s time to look into that.

Another thing: depression in men is critically underdiagnosed, because most docs look for physical reasons if a man comes to them with symptoms of depression. If you haven’t been diagnosed yet, it may be that it didn’t occur to your doc, maybe because you’re masking well or because he’s just not used to seeing men with depression.

However you go on, I wish you all the best. I hope that you can find a way, with or without meds, to live in peace with your brain.

My special interests are very special to me (ugh, what a terrible pun. Defo not intended!) and I reserve sharing them for people I trust. That alone is a reason for me to mask.

It’s actually harder for me not to mask than it is to mask a lot of the time, even though my mask is far from perfect. But I’m “out” at work and it’s fine if people realize I’m masking.

I think for me donning the mask is like donning armor to protect things I care about from a majorly uncaring world, and if I unmask around you it’s a sign of trust.

Still relatively new to Lemmy and can’t figure out RN how to dm you, but I am not in the US, so most likely we are not in the same country.

I can tell you broad strokes though - I got super lucky with my therapist at that time. Sadly he’s retired now :( I was super exhausted, had gotten out of hospital and then diagnosis and at the same time (since in paper I looked like an easy candidate to find work for) the unemployment agency was hounding me. I told my therapist as an off-comment “I wish I didn’t have to do shit for the rest of the year.”

He said that can be arranged and I thought he was joking - it was October or something. Nope, he stalled and his practice became unreachable. All I could tell the unemployment agency was that I didn’t hear back and I don’t know what’s going on until they got frustrated and backed off. Come new year, everything went back to normal and it went fast-ish. Took maybe a year in total? I think less, maybe roughly 9 months?

I didn’t realize what happened until after the fact, but he bought me the time I needed to process things at that time.

Better - but not through age.

Since I got diagnosed late, my before-diagnosis time was a mess and I had no idea why. Since my diagnosis and me subsequently understanding what’s happening I have become less likely to compromise on things that will cause meltdowns.

I also have disabled status so I can request accommodations at work, and lucky enough my team and workplace are lovely about that.

I can’t tell if time made a difference for me, but I feel like I’ve lost patience for people telling me “don’t be like that”, but that’s probably also due to knowing what’s going on now. I keep asking them if they’d tell a quadriplegic to not be like that and just real quick get them something from the high shelf. Surprisingly efficient, although there’s always people claiming you’re just being dramatic. Thankfully they are a minority around me.

Maybe start with what you like, as I found it easier to determine. A lot of time, it just meant following my impulses.

The more stressed I felt, the more I wanted to be in bed. And when I was in bed, I realized I preferred the softest blanket on my skin. So I looked for soft textures to touch when I’m stressed and found it helped me regulate a lot.

Maybe this will help you a) be less stressed and b) if soft textures soothe you, rough ones probably stress you. So it can also be a way to discover your stressors in a roundabout way.

I love it, Ty!

Just because it is here as a meme doesn’t make it a symptom. People’s crusade against self-diagnosis is really getting ridiculous.

I’m autistic and I do this. My SO who is not (but most likely ADHD - sadly, diagnosis is impossible) does it too. It’s just a fun thing that lots of people seem to relate to. Let’s have some fun here, alright?

You didn’t do anything wrong, both is fine. Me and most of my autistic friends actually prefer to call ourselves autistic. Figure out what you prefer first and foremost :)

Speak for yourself only, please. It’s s fine if you prefer autistic person, but I and many autistics I know don’t. The bottom line is not to teach someone what’ s best but to inform them that there may be preferences and to listen to the reason there talking to, not to make blanket statements about what’s the right thing.

If you want to convince people it’s up to you to bring the evidence. I’m not doing your work for you.

Besides, there have been studies shoing that autistics among themselves don’t have the same communication breakdown as they do when interacting with neurotypicals. So if Japan was truly an autistic culture it should be easier for autistic people, but it’s not.

Besides, I’m very curious to see how you are going to apply diagnostic criteria for a neurodivergence to a culture. Like, how do you even begin? Is the culture averse to bright lights? Loud sounds? Does the culture go into hyperfocus moments? Does it suffer from PDA?

The only way you could do this is if you were to take stereotypes about how autistic people behave and try to somehow match them to cultural traits.

Link to those studies?

Edit: me being autistic make everything I say useless? Really?

I really admire your ability to mental gymnastics. No matter what anybody says, you always find a way to tell them their opinion doesn’t matter. Must be nice to be so secure in your own superiority that nothing can convince you otherwise.

As an autist who studied Japanese and gave up when I realized I just couldn’t connect with any of the Japanese people I met - even the ones where it was obvious we wanted to be friends - I can assure you the culture is even more impenetrable for autistics. And I don’t have such issues with other autistic people usually, no matter the culture.

Don’t mistake your stereotypes for reality and tell everyone people call you out because of political correctness. You’re just plain old wrong in this.

Here’s the deal: even if she’s missing time in “normal” education, time that would normally be spent in class, it’s not the end of the world. People have flunked out of school to have fun and got their bearing later. She, however, has a good reason not to go right now.

I can tell you that me pushing myself through all the normal milestones has not helped me - you don’t want to see my cv or hear about my experiences with work. It’s just sad. And still, finally, last year, I found my niche.

Allow her to be on her own timeline. Don’t worry about her missing out. Allow her to figure out what fhe needs to be comfortable in life. Once I was able to set boundaries and prioritize being comfortable without constant fighting I was able and willing to compromise sometimes if I consider it important. But the base is unconditional acceptance of my needs. Without that I was in constant self-defense and senf-preservation mode.

At some point I sat crying in my therapists office. The agency for benefits was pushing for results, and I was so frigging overwhelmed. I told my therapist “I wish I could just do nothing for the rest of the year.” He looked me dead in the eye and said: “That can be arranged.” I didn’t think much of it but suddenly there were no appointments. They dragged their feet on paperwork and I could only tell the agency that I can’t get the paperworks, I’m waiting too. They eventually gave up, and I had almost four months where there was nothing to do. I only realized in hindsight what my therapist had done for me, but that break helped me rest and heal a lot, so that we could actually work on things in the new year.

Give her the gift of time and acceptance. Once she feels safe and heard, she is hopefully in a position to take on the challenge of therapy and getting better.

Wild theory: maybe she is unhappy with all the changes and feels like she has no say in anything, and this is the only way how she can get some semblance of agency.

Did she want the school change? Did she have a say in which school she is going to? Do you believe her when she says she can’t do something, even if it doesn’t make sense to hsyou?

I’m asking the last question because for 35 years, it was not enough if I told people something is too much or I didn’t like it. They didn’t feel that way, so obviously I was just being difficult. This pattern of accidental gaslighting fucked me up big time.

I’m still in therapy for that, and I still feel unexplainable resistance to doing some things. Nowadays, with the help of a therapist, I found success in not pushing myself, but instead asking myself why I have this resistance. The key is that I’m willing to drop whatever I’m trying to do.

So maybe stop pushing and trying to convince her, and find ways where life currently is difficult for her and work with her to make it less difficult. If she is burned out, time may be the best cure.

Not culturally dense, but absolutely unwilling to consider cultures outside their bubble other than as mere curiosities for entertainment. I stand by that.

Not unable to learn a new layout, but unwilling, because I don’t see the point. Why would I waste time and energy on something that will at most bring me one more shortcut to use? Programming is not about typing speed. If the bottleneck for you is typing speed, your job is very different than anything I’ve seen or heard of.

I have never seen anyone but my computer-illiterate mom use two fingers for ctrl-z, hence I was expressing my bewilderment about that. I’ll probably be able to do that move blind with one hand, and so are all of the people I know who use the computer in a professional setting. The only explanation I had for that was that they have exceptionally small hands so it’s a necessity. If you want to take that as an insult of your hands, be my guest, but I’m done here.

Wtf, who needs two hands for that? Do they have children’s hands?

It’s all a matter of habit - for me all layouts but my native sucks for anything to do on a keyboard. The only thing that sucks is if keybinds are set to shift-/ because / is already shift-7. I haven’t found a replacement for that yet. Forgot which program used that and for what, but I remember it was a bummer. Still wouldn’t spend all that time and energy and slowdown learning a different layout.

There’s lots of programmers on languages that need more keys readily than us keyboard has. Äöüß, just to give an example.

I don’t know, every time I read a post like this I’m kinda speechless. I know lots of Americans and many of them are brillant and open-minded, but then there are posts like this which are completely oblivious that there are reasons for other keyboard layouts.

The reason OP can’t fathom programming on those is that they aren’t used to it. If you grew up with non-us layouts you similarly couldn’t fathom programming on the us layout.

Sometimes I feel like people refuse to even think about acknowledging that there are other experiences than their own. Go out, try out new things, exercise your brain and callenge yourself.

I get where you’re coming from. But if everyone thought your way, adversity will only ever grow.

You need to be upset, and you need to be working to reduce adversity for those who don’t have the resilience it takes. Adversity is like chaos, if you never do anything it will overwhelm even the strongest person.

Your perspective is not wrong (perspectives rarely are), I just think it’s unhelpful for the greater picture. It works for an individual, but it will do nothing for your peers. Instead, it serves to protect those who benefit from other people suffering and being disadvantaged, because if everyone practiced that there would not be enough anger to fuel change. And change is needed.

Anger and frustration is your energy. If you never get angry you’ll never have the incentive to change the world. Your perspective is probably helpful with chronic conditions, because there’s nothing to change about that, but in my opinion it’s wrong to apply it to every situation.

If you find yourself facing human-constructed adversity, like in a society that doesn’t want to do minimal changes that would only slightly inconvenience them but would greatly benefit some of their peers, I think your advice is harmful - because it quells the flames that are needed to fight for a better society.

You’re missing the point here. This is not about making someone feel better about themselves but about making others realize how bad it was to finally spur them into action. Because it’s so much easier to “admire” someone strong than just to do something about the adversity.

I know nothing about you, but if I just read your comment in this context I want to scream at you: You, too, think you’re making a differene by trying to make someone feel good about themselves, but what have you done about easing their suffering? It’s not like it has stopped, it will go on for the rest of our lifes.

You’re just taking the easy way out by giving a pep talk then it’s back to normal.

Now, like I said, I know nothing about you, and maybe this pep talk was from one survivor to another, but I’m just so damn tired to hear the same song and dance over and over. We don’t need pep talks that make the talkers feel good about themselves, we need change. Good change.

I definitely feel I am. Lights and sounds get me, but that feeling in my stomach? Am I hungry, angry, or do I simply have to poop? Time will tell, I guess x)