I love my Thursday boots. I do a fair amount of standing and walking in them and wear them all the time and they’ve always been comfortable for me.

I appreciate this community and am grateful for the work you do to organize it and support its growth!

Oh this is fascinating! An example of the inverse could be maybe that Old/Older English didn’t have spelling rules so much as habits?

My anecdotal experience is that my pain threshold is much higher when I’m in a particularly critical phase of my depression

Oooh, let’s see if they’ve got Bluetooth earbuds Edit: kickass

Thank you, hearing that my words were valuable to you is probably the most valuable gift you could have given

What you describe is eerily similar to my story. In summary, being so good at masking all the various symptoms of depression/anxiety/autism that I never considered it possible I was autistic. My entire life I’ve never belonged to the group I was participating with, I was always a step removed because the “language” of the group wasn’t native and took a degree of effort/concentration to use. That’s a tangent…

The question was raised by a new friend a few years ago and I finally got professionally evaluated a few months ago. Yeah, I’m obviously autistic.

Having that label, in my experience, has been intensely validating. No longer was my status as a social failure an implication of my lack of effort or disrespect for others or oversensitivity. Now I knew that I didn’t fit for a reason, a reason outside my control and not just laziness or selfishness.

That separation–being other, not belonging–absolutely still exists and it still is painful but now the difference I guess is that I know I’m not imagining it.

To your case; maybe getting evaluated could be a good idea. It opens up access to workplace accomplishments [EDIT: accomodations] that can, so easily, make a living less painful to earn. Or it can just bring a sort of peace-of-mind like mine did.

The label itself isn’t terribly important. So long as you understand yourself and are comfortable with who you are, maybe you don’t need a doctor to certify that you are exactly this-kind-of-weird. I went into my evaluation expecting I wouldn’t qualify for an autism diagnosis but rather satisfied already with my own conviction that I was not neurotypical.

I feel like it did take a while to have the open-but-connected feel of Breath of the Wild. It has got there now but I was pretty concerned for a while about how disconnected the world felt. That was what made BotW so memorable, every part of the world had a characters with their own important story and the interaction Link had with those characters and their story mattered and would have meaningful effects on them.

Oh my god! This is Theory of the Mind! What you’re referring to as the ‘conception of the reality of others’ is I think what is called Theory of the Mind!

I was chasing the idea down through google-available scholarly journals the other day. The theory of the mind is the ability for a person to understand others don’t share the same experience of reality as themselves. This is something that people develop around three or four years old. I was reading about how the possession of language affects the development and retention of this ability that humans are supposed to achieve.

It’s easier for me to describe my understanding of Theory of the Mind by explaining the way it’s tested for in children.

The test proctor shows the child where they hide an object in a room, then leaves the room. While the proctor is outside, another person comes into the room and moves the object from where it is hidden to some other place, the child is watching them do this. The proctor returns to the room to retrieve the object and someone asks the child where the proctor will look. Children who haven’t reached the mental development / maturity where they recognize others aren’t simply copies of themselves will answer that the proctor will look where the child saw it moved. Children who have obtained a ‘theory of the mind’ will know the proctor didn’t see the object moved and will look first for it where the child saw the proctor hide it.

I was ruminating on this and thinking how Theory of the Mind is the missing piece to so much of the culture war bullshit conservatives obsess over;

• When a homeless person who doesn’t ‘look’ disabled is begging for money, they know the person is just lazy;

Because laziness is the only reason they would beg on the street ‘obviously’ laziness is the only reason a person would beg!

• When somebody has an undiagnosed mental health issue and is discussing suicide, that person is just making immature and manipulative threats;

Nobody has a mind that doesn’t work exactly like theirs and since they can’t imagine craving suicide this person’s reasons are obviously fabrications!

• They can’t understand that male-bodied persons who identify as anything-other-than-male would want to use women’s restrooms for any reason other than horny rape shit because that’s what they would do!;

They don’t understand that different people have different reasons and desires and haven’t lived exactly the same life as them.

I am lost too
~ English Native Speaker

God fuck, this is such a beautiful illustration of how well you understand each other! I hope the two of you enjoy to the fullest the time that you share!

Holy fucking goddamn christ your description of how you parent your child is so incredibly heartwarming! God, if every parent could care like you the world would be a paradise within two generations!

naturally…

Sir… (said I, “or Madam truly-”)
I believe you have identified the issue exactly. How does a person do this “natural” thing or, if it does somehow happen, how does a person avoid interfering with its progress?