Nice, I love a good battle jacket

A few years ago, I read about how Mary Molony was an Irish Suffragette who disrupted a speech Winston Churchill was giving in Dundee by ringing a bell every time he tried to speak. She wanted him to apologise for remarks he had made about the women’s suffrage movement.

I remember when I read this, it reeked of something awesome that you find online that’s actually false (the story was shared on social media via a captioned photo with no sources), so I went digging for a proper source to check. I found some newspaper articles from 1908 and I learned that this event did happen, but also that people fucking hated Molony for this. There was a lot of “see, this is why everyone hates the Suffragettes”. (Sorry for saying this and then not sourcing)

It makes sense that people would be salty - Churchill was an asshole, but also a great orator, so I can see why one might be disappointed in missing the chance to see him speak, but I was shocked at the level of vitriol aimed at Molony and other Suffragettes from the time. Until this I hadn’t realised just how unpopular they were at the time. It’s drastically changed my perspective on protests and public perception.

How many leftover working parts were there, or was it a perfect fit with no surplus?

In the past, with similar issues, I’ve had good success with requesting the book on Zlib, especially newer books.

I have both autism and ADHD, and whilst it’s difficult to draw the line between the two, I do have some instances of inertia that feel more ADHD flavour than autism. I’ve also seen many of my ADHD friends struggling with something like this too, but it seems like it works differently than autistic inertia.

I think that there’s a decent chance that understanding autistic inertia will help us to understand ADHD inertia, even if they’re distinct modes

I think I would probably be a jerk a few times, and it would escalate until I hurt someone unthinkingly, and seeing the results of that would shock me back to reality and I’d feel so uncomfortable with myself that I’d hopefully go back to being less of a jerk.

To be fair, in many cases, the observable behaviour of things is different at scale. A single water molecule has different properties to a cup of water, in much the same way that a high density crowd of people (greater than 4 people per square meter) starts to behave as a fluid.

I study biochemistry and I’ll never stop finding it neat how when you get down to the teensy tiny level, all the rules change. That’s basically what quantum physics is, a different ruleset which is always “true”, so to speak, but it’s only relevant when you’re at the nano scale

I suppose what I’m saying is that I agree with you, that fathoming scope is difficult, but I’m suggesting that this is a property of the world inherently getting being a bit fucky at different scales, rather than a problem with human perception.

I really relate to your comment, and one of the most rage inducing experiences I’ve ever had was someone lecturing me on how I shouldn’t call myself disabled, and then they badly explained the social model of disability to me.

However, I also find neurodivergent a useful term because I think that what we understand as disability is limited by our current world view. An example that feels analogous to me is how colonialist empires dismissed the art, culture and knowledge of indigenous peoples because they projected their preconceived values onto them.

I think that there’s a lot we don’t understand about autism, and how heavily normative society is holds us back. There are things that I am great at that feel inextricably linked to my autism. That doesn’t negate all the difficulties I also experience, but the word “neurodivergent” and the conversations that have developed around it feel it carves out space where I can lean into my autistic traits in situations where they’re strengths without having to be “super-autistic”; but also I can struggle in ways that neurotypical people can’t fathom, and it isn’t viewed as “negating” my strengths.

A large part of this is because the first chunk of my adult life, I broke myself by trying to act overly neurotypical, and like many autistics, I found that masking to this degree was unsustainable. Now, I’m much closer to a balance where I can pick my battles and not force myself to be something I’m not - like having tinted glasses for the office instead of expecting myself to somehow cope with my light hypersensitivity. In many ways, it feels like a different mode of being altogether - “wellness” for me looks different to “wellness” to a neurotypical, and I’d wager that “wellness” for you and other people in this thread would look closer to my version than the neurotypical version.

That being said, I agree that the way that people talk about stuff like ADHD and autism feels icky as hell. Personally, I find it more depressing to pretend that I’m not disabled, because actually, ignorance isn’t bliss when I can’t run from my reality. Sometimes things just suck, and they’re hard, and pretending otherwise makes it harder to cope with because it’s implicitly saying “I’m lying to myself because the truth is untenable”.

Badly. I have an awful short term memory, so my priority when making notes is capturing fleeting thoughts I’d otherwise lose. This means I end up with snippets on random pieces of paper or a random note on whatever is the default app on my phone. Then, every so often, I have a big clear out where I aggregate and process all these fragments, usually when I am finding fragments everywhere.

I need to have an inbox of sorts, and make processing things from there a more routine activity. Alas.

Ea-Nasir has got to be one of my favourite internet phenomena

Explainer link for people who are blessed enough to be hearing of this for the first time: https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/who-is-ea-nasir-and-why-are-people-complaining-about-his-copper-the-viral-complaint-tablet-meme-explained

I feel like it can be over used, but generally I like it, it fills a lexical niche for me. I could use non autistic, but that feels clunky. Sometimes it’s useful to talk about non autistic people’s experiences in relation to autistic people, and sometimes I want to talk about autistic experiences in relation to allistic experiences, so I may prefer a term like allistic.

A thing that feels similar to me is the word allosexual, which means not asexual. I guess I would identify as being on the ace spectrum, but not ace (I’m demisexual), so allosexual is often a useful word

I don’t feel especially well poised to give advice here, because I’m still struggling with this, but maybe that’s the point; increasingly, I think that my idea of what “coping well” means is false and unattainable, and that real progress involves a bit of self acceptance.

On that front, my advice would be that living with ADHD means learning what battles are worth fighting, and only you can figure out.

A friend of mine used to struggle with extended chunks of work of one kind, and she spent a long while trying to force herself to work with timers and stuff, but her actual productivity shot up when she gave herself a bunch of tasks to cycle between. She enjoyed breaking up work with household tasks like washing the pots, because it’s simple, and has a defined end. Amusingly, sometimes she’d work at my place when we were students, and she’d tidy up for me and later say thank you for the opportunity.

One of my issues was I kept expecting myself to remember stuff when my short term memory is trash, even by ADHD standards. I got better at training myself to write stuff down, including sometimes asking for a break in the conversation to give me a chance to write it down so I don’t forget. That was awkward at first, but it got easier, and most people were understanding - most people seemed to respond positively in fact, because it shows that you care about what’s being discussed (certainly more positive than if I’d forgotten and incorrectly given them the impression that I didn’t care)

I spent a long time trying out different apps and systems, because novelty seeking brain wanted a silver bullet to solve all the things. Sometimes I still fall into that trap, but nowadays I know that even the best todolist or calendar app in the world won’t help if I don’t use it. It’s a me problem, and integration problem. Part of what helped me there was actually evaluating where my various systems kept going wrong. Like instead of calling myself lazy for not keeping things tidier, I made actual progress by buying a bunch of bins so that there’s always one at hand. I stopped berating myself so much. Beating yourself up for not being able to do things is internalised ableism.

Medication helps a lot, but I found that there were a bunch of maladaptive coping measures I’d built up over the years that I had to unlearn once I had medication. And then when I had a period without medication, I found myself struggling more than ever. It’s a combo approach, is what I’m saying. Don’t expect yourself to function at the same level as you would if you were medicated.

What you describe reminds me a lot of about how untreated ADHD traps you on depression.

I don’t have time to elaborate much now, but I want to add my voice to the conversation.

I’m someone who often rants and rambles about the limitations of CBT. I think it’s overused, is part of why. I’ve had 3 or 4 different courses of CBT, largely because I haven’t been able to access any other kind of therapy. The last few years have been spent trying to get access to literally any other therapy and it’s frustrating to be told time and time again that I’m “too complex”. For me, it’s about “right tool for the job” and there definitely are jobs where CBT is an ineffectual tool.

In this analogy, “jobs” aren’t people, but particular situations and points in their life. Right now, I need basically any tool but CBT, because where I am now, I think more CBT would be actively harmful. I do feel that CBT was helpful for me, but that it has reached its limit in what it can offer me. I think the second course of CBT was probably useful, but anymore beyond that was pointless, for me. The second course was helpful because I wasn’t in a place where I could effectively engage with the stuff the first time round, it feels like rereading what was once a difficult book.

It can very much depend on the therapist you get, but I think that’s true for neurotypicals doing CBT too (which isn’t to say that it affects equally, I think a therapist who you can’t connect to is way harder to cope with as an autistic person, and probably more likely). But what I mean to say is that I think that CBT, when done well, has a lot of potential, especially as a front line treatment (it’s very accessible to people who haven’t done therapy before). There also branches such as trauma informed CBT, or eating disorder informed CBT, or indeed, neurodivergence informed CBT. I don’t know anyone who has done CBT aimed at autistic adults, but I’m not the only autistic I know who felt CBT had helped them.

I think one of the tricky parts about CBT is how accessible it is. It is, in its base form, quite versatile, and can be tailored in more structured ways, as discussed above. It’s probably useful to bring back my tool analogy here, because something that feels important is that when I talk about different tools, one valid way of looking at that is the therapy program by itself as the tool, existing separately from the therapist. In this framework, the therapist is someone who uses a particular tool to do a job, where the job is something that you’re struggling with in life. This framing is useful because it allows us to think about bad therapists as people who are using a tool incorrectly.

I imagine most trained therapists have some knowledge or experience on how to use CBT as a tool, because it’s so accessible. Some people become experts in one particular tool, and some people learn it and never use it again, but find their knowledge of that tool useful in understanding the overall landscape of what’s available.

My point is trailing away a bit, so I’ll try to sum up where I’m going with this. Some people say that CBT is an inherently harmful tool, even when used skillfully by a Good Therapist ™. I disagree with that, but I sympathise. I see the harms they point out and in my opinion, that could be improved by having therapy in general be more accessible, especially more specialised therapy yours - I think CBT works as a first step, but only if it’s not the last and only step. Some people believe that CBT is inherently harmful to autistics specifically. I think I disagree with this one, but I’m a lot more split.

Here are a couple of autism/disability specific limitations that I found: 1.) I am physically disabled in a way that makes it hard to budget energy. Sometimes I have to deal with situations where I need to do more than what my body is capable of, and if I push myself too far, I will make things much worse. I didn’t find CBT techniques very useful for situations where I would be paralysed by anxiety because I’d be having to choose between wetting the bed and attempting to get to the bathroom and hoping I don’t fall (it’s easier to change a bedsheet than to come back from the acute injuries of a fall). No-one should have to make decisions like that, but I regularly have to and it sucks. My anxiety is pretty reasonable in those situations, I can’t logic my way out of it with CBT methods. Once you get the bad brain stuff out of the way, what can remain is the fact that sometimes things just suck and have to be weathered. Excessive use of CBT thinking in these situations often led to internalised ableism, where I put too much onus on myself to do or think about things differently, when my disabilities do put some practical limitations on me.

2.) An autism related example involves how coping with change is rough. I have a particular cereal that I have had for years, it’s my old reliable and is one of my safe foods. One day, I see that it’s packaging has changed a little: nothing too major, just the shape of the box and one of the logos. This makes me anxious and I do not like it for reasons I can’t explain. My CBT trained instincts might ask about why I’m anxious - do I fear that the formula has changed? Is the new box size likely to cause issues with storage? Realistically, none of these capture the issue (the formula change thing is a valid fear, but I checked online and got confirmation that the product itself was the same). I don’t know why this makes me feel uncomfy and none of the therapists I’ve worked with have either. We hit a wall on this problem, which makes sense to me - like, as helpful as CBT has the potential to be, it can’t realistically (and doesn’t aim to) make me into a neurotypical. Maybe CBT tailored for autistics might be better, but I don’t know.

So to cap off those examples, the question was “when used by a Good Therapist ™ who understands autistic people, is CBT inherently harmful to autistics?” and my answer to that is that I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think it’s probably limited in some ways, but I don’t know if that’s unique to CBT. Most if not all therapies are likely to share the same problem, because in my eyes, the harm here stems from a normative way of looking at things.

Brief vocab lesson, “normative” roughly means “things that are considered normal and acceptable at a systemic/societal level to the extent that they’re built into the unspoken assumptions we make when perceiving the world”. The unspoken assumptions are tricky. Like when I say I want garlic bread, I mean garlic bread with cheese, because that’s the only way I have ever, or would ever have it. A friend inadvertently broke my heart by ordering the wrong thing (because I’d told them I wanted garlic bread). I was devastated, but it was an important lesson in how your unspoken assumptions can sneak up on you when you meet people who don’t share them. Normativity is how those assumptions interact on a societal level. Like if I say “imagine a couple, in love”, you probably imagine a man and a woman, which is an example of heteronormativity, the implicit belief that being straight is the default. This doesn’t mean that imagining a straight couple in this scenario is bad, it’s just a way of saying that we should be mindful of the consequences of normative thinking, especially when with responses that are automatic, or when we build stuff on top of our assumptions

In theory, being aware of this stuff could mitigate a lot of the autism related issues with CBT. I’d argue that the reason why ABA is so harmful is because normativity is baked into it. That’s part of why I believe that ABA is always harmful, no matter the therapist. In my view, “Good Therapist” and “Good at doing BA” are mutually exclusive, and I wouldn’t be comfortable getting therapy of any sort with someone who endorsed ABA.

In terms of other therapies, there’s been some research on Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) for autistics, I believe. That’s the one that’s most been recommended to me (if I could get a bloody referral, angry sounds).

This got longer than planned because apparently I’m using this comment as an excuse to procrastinate, my apologies for rambling. I can’t tell from your post whether your interest is academic in nature, or whether you’re asking this because it’s a possibility you’re considering for yourself. If the latter is the case, my answer is squarely “worth a try”. Bad therapists happen across the spectrum of different therapists, and much more common than that are therapists who aren’t a good fit for a particular patient. It can take time to find someone you click with and even then, I remember spending most of my sessions thinking “ugh, I don’t know what the point of this is, it doesn’t make a difference”. It did though, it just snuck up on me.

Not the person you were asking, but I can provide an answer. Pansexual generally means attraction to people regardless of gender - sort of gender blind. A bi person (like me) might find that the attraction they experience to different genders is shaped differently, qualitatively — or the magnitude of attraction may be different — like if you were a 1 on the Kinsey scale, which means “predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual”. Someone who’s pan is more likely to be a 3 on the Kinsey scale, but also, it’s possible to be bi and a 3, and that’s subtly different.

There aren’t set rules on this, it mostly comes down to what terms resonate with people. I’m someone to whom pansexual as a label could apply, but I identify as bisexual because that was the word that made me go “wait, this is a thing that’s possible?”. The terms people use are often rooted in history, personal or otherwise.

It’s trickier to explain the lexical niche when I myself am not pan. It’s like if you’re working on a project and have someone passing you tools, and you reach a step that needs a particular spanner, of which you have two. You ask for one of those spanners, but despite it fitting many of your requirements on paper, it isn’t quite right for what you’re trying to do. You try the other spanner and it’s perfect. Keeping both spanners is probably useful because on simple jobs, they are interchangeable, but when getting into nuanced, complex situations, having the choice is useful.

By this, I mean that I have also had the thought that “[Pansexual] seemed a meaningless term because bi already covers basically everything”, but when you’re talking to someone about different spanners and they say “that one isn’t the same as that one. I need the other one”, it’s generally wisest to assume that this person has some insight that you don’t have on these spanners, or their particular use cases — who am I to tell people what tools are most useful for them, after all? Like a lot of identity stuff, it’s hard to explain, but it matters a lot to some people.

God, I love the internet.

There’s not a shortage in stores, to my knowledge, but I directly know a large number of people struggling to make ends meet. Multiple people being made homeless due to gas and electric bills, or building their life schedules around opportunities to get a free or cheap meal because even people with jobs are feeling the pinch.

So mostly what many others elsewhere in the world are experiencing, it just feels extra grim because much of the problems can be directly attributed to the Tory government who are currently in power. They’re almost certainly going to be voted out next year, but I wonder whether it’ll be possible to repair the damage that’s been done since 2010.

Oof. A friend of a friend who was studying in Israel cried when Netanyahu was elected and I feel like I increasingly understand why

Finally, something that isn’t vetoed

Your instinct is right, because it does take a little bit of time to be familiar enough that it’s automatic, but it doesn’t need to be a big daunting thing - I first dabbled with Linux running in a virtual box. Then I dual booted for a while. Now I’m running just Linux. Dipping your toe in the water is good

I was doing something similar for a while, but I found I struggled with inertia enough that I kept doing non-gaming stuff on Windows. I switched to using Fedora as my main operating system, getting rid of Windows entirely, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how straightforward gaming has been. (Though as I understand it, it’s trickier for people with Nvidia GPUs)