I walk into a room and hear things. I hear lights and fridges, heaters, cellphones vibrating on floors above me. It's a cacafony of endless clicks and ticks and humms and beeps and whirs that seemingly no one else notices.
Cats make good sounds though. The merps and meeps and jorps and mreeps and mrops and purrs are nice.
The worst is the whine from cheap chargers and power banks. Ive resorted to buying a few of my coworkers new/ better chargers in order to give myself some peace.
I've a friend who has nothing but IKEA TRÅDFRI lightbulbs. Each and every one of these has a subtle coil whine, and stepping into his home is like stepping into a rainforest, but unpleasant. He doesn't hear a single peep from them, but to me it's hella grating. The noise changes depending on what light it's emitting, as well as the brightness. The worst is when the light is off.
Ah, the first time I started hearing things my family couldnt, I'd complain or at least take note of it, and they'd look at me like i was growing a second head.at least CRTs also had a nice warm hum to go along with the whine.
The trick is to put a tiny dummy load on the USB charger. Just buy the cheapest USB cable, cut the end off, and solder (or twist) a resistor between red and black. Boom.
Had a whiny USB power strip at my office desk that stopped whining when my phone was plugged in. Small resistor took care of that perfectly, cheaply, and nondestructively. Got a kick out of confused colleagues asking why I had a dangly cable plugged in with nothing but electrical tape on the end.
USB is 5V so I suppose a 10 mA draw (500 ohm resistor) would be sufficient. 20ohm would be 250 mA/1.25W which is certainly overkill for a dummy load. I don't recall exact values but mine barely needed any load to shut up.
Its existence isn't settled science, but I have this too and I've found that Auditory Processing Disorder describes it perfectly. Lots of comorbidity with autism and ADHD, so it's possible it's not a separate disorder but just another manifestation.
But yeah, I can't filter out background noise at all. My brain copes by completely shutting off audio processing when I'm focusing, but it's involuntary and can be pretty inconvenient. I have to read lips a lot when talking anywhere but a quiet environment because I can't separate speech from background noise.
Same for me too, except there’s one noise I can stand and even find it pleasant sometimes, cheap laptop coil whine, since I’ve had 3 school laptops, all have been used for at least 5 and at most 10 years, and I still use one of them daily too.
The daily machine is also fanless, so it kinda confuses me a little occasionally by making me think there’s a fan but really there can’t be lmao
Or it doesn't escape your grasp but it gets actively ignored by people who see your eccentricities as being indicative that you're less than them.
Including other autistic people.
Or knowing precisely what point people are attempting to make five words into the first sentence and then politely having to sit there and wait for the next five minutes while they laboriously meander their way through it.
This is a dangerous "skill" to have, though. Very easy to slip into the trap of assuming you know what they're talking about, only to have them end on a different point than you expected and then suddenly you're responding to a point they never actually made
I love that actually. It doesn't happen often, but when it does I go “hold on, A, you're trying to say x, but B understands y, whereas B tries to say v and you understand w”
Always leads to the most flabbergasted double stare when they realize I'm 100% right and they'd have talked past each other for hours.
Sometimes with an undertone of “but I wanted a fight” by one of them.
Those are the times that make me feel like maybe I have the occasional social insight. lol. While I get confused by so much that happens, I often feel like I pick up on subtle clues and situations like that. So I feel it's a mixed-to-fuck-and-hell bag of social genius and social stupidity. It's confusing. lol
I can’t do it. I try so hard but I interrupt every time and then they say “that’s not what I mean will you let me finish” then I have to sit quietly while it was exactly what they meant.
It’s critically important to develop patience here in order to deal with people getting older and taking this to the next level
My mom is a great person whom
I dearly love but she’s fallen into the stereotype of old people rambling. Nothing is a simple question or statement anymore. It’s always a long meandering story with lots of detours
I have double powers as I’m neurodivergent and grew up in a highly traumatic household so you learn to pick on tiny signs that it’s about to pop off. Feel my life is fight or flight at all times.
Entire too relatable. I grew up in much the same way. Having that feeling as my baseline, my "normal", made everything else feel wrong, but I could never fully put my finger on why. I developed a sense of stoicism so that I could get through each day showing as little outward reaction as possible. However, I confused that stoicism for calmness and stability; inside my mind everything still roiled as my instincts and senses were always watching and waiting, preparing for the next time things became dangerous.
Decades of living with that level of hypervigilance paired with the effort needed to put forward a stoic exterior has worn me down. The physical symptoms of chronic mental and emotional exhaustion are debilitating; the body really does pay a toll for the mind's wounds. Maybe if twenty years ago I had the knowledge and resources that I do now, I could have done something to stave off what I'm going through.
All this to say: if you aren't already, please seek counseling as soon as possible. Don't make the same mistake I did; just like the smoker who denies that their habit it harmful, if you don't work to heal your psychological wounds now, then it will eventually catch up to you. Be well, and take care of yourself.
I became so good at masking because of coming from a environment where my needs weren't met and my true self wasn't safe to exist. I was often more concerned about making sure my parents didn't pop off that I developed an unhealthy way of looking at the world where I put the needs of others above myself - to the point of complete self destruction in front of people who cared about me.
Over the years I finally realised what was going on, but it took being with another person who also has autism and C-PTSD to observe the behaviours in one another and finally take control. In some ways it is a little tragic we both went through so much hardship while having our basic needs ignored from a young age, but in another way I'm so grateful for the miracle of having found a person who perfectly fits my broken parts so we can guide each other through it with understanding and experience.
I regret the times I've treated others unfairly because of the pressures of life and not having the resources or wisdom to do things properly. I'm doing my best now to make amends for my past mistakes, heal myself and move into the future with healthy boundaries. I've been hurt in ways I can't even begin to explain, I require a certain amount of medication just to function but I'm still here and I feel optimistic for the future. It's going to be hard work to rebuild the things I've lost, but I'm motivated to do good for myself and for the new family I'm building.
I can't speak for OP, but in my case I could tell how "bad" a day was likely to be based on small clues that most people wouldn't see. Tiny things like a slight increase in the pitch of a parent's sigh, how quickly keys were put down as they came through the door, the position of their shoulders as they picked up a dinner fork. How the almost invisible deepening of the creases around their mouth and eyes matched the increasing tension in the air. Instantly knowing by the timbre of the footfalls climbing the stairs if I needed to pretend to be asleep.
Growing up in an abusive, trauma-inducing household fosters a talent to sense the proverbial "blood in the water," and how likely it is to send the sharks into a frenzy.
The worst part is when you try to gently warn people, and they look at you like you’re the crazy one—only for the exact thing you predicted to happen five minutes later.
Neurotypicals pick up on emotional queues their partners miss, try to warm them that they're committing a faux pau, and are dismissed until things spiral out of hand.
I joined a large friend group that had been together for 7 or so years. There was a person that I noticed would tell different people slightly different versions of stories. Normally I'd dismiss these as white lies but I noticed a pattern. The person in question saw relationships as transactional and I highly suspected that these white lies revealed a much deeper penchant for emotional manipulation.
I tried to warn some people that I thought I could trust within the friend group, but this upset some people and I had the step way back. After all, who is the new person to come into this group and fuck things up? I kept my mouth shut and out of the drama as I had to watch this person build a giant rift within the group.
Thankfully a few people had finally remembered the warning I had given years before and started comparing notes on the stories this person had told everyone. In the end I was vindicated when people started confronting the lies, but a lot of people had to go through therapy for the years of suffering that person caused in the meantime. I'm not giving too many details, but it got bad: suicide attempts, cops, legal battles. I had to just sit there and watch it all.
I think the actual worst part about this is that pattern recognition isn’t supposed to be a neurodivergent thing. Pattern recognition is like a built in feature in humans, but most people have it beat out of them in school
I thought that's part of the reason we excelled as a species, seeing the patterns to eat or run from and knowing which is which. Plus getting curious about new ones and if they dont eat us figuring out what to do with them.
Pattern recognition is like a built in feature in humans, but most people have it beat out of them in school
Like so much else, it's a trained skill. You don't have pattern recognition beaten out. You just aren't so heavily invested in a subject that you get it stamped in.
It's not as though we're born with the ability to hear Morse Code, for instance. You have to develop an ear for it.
It's also a double edged sword, especially when you queue in on a pattern without understanding the reason behind it. Plenty of patterns are purely coincidental.
Picking out a "message" in a series of sounds doesn't mean the dish washer is talking to you.
I agree and disagree. Pattern recognition is a trained skill, for you have learn to recognize each pattern. Pattern recognition is not, however, a trained skill in the way that you have to learn to recognize patterns at all.
However, during school most people have their ability to recognize patterns at all severely diminished due to “gotcha” questions on tests, questions that specifically are designed to catch you out using pattern recognition. This trains the person to not trust their pattern recognition, and in some cases people will actually learn to go against their pattern recognition because they assume things are trying to catch that
However, during school most people have their ability to recognize patterns at all severely diminished due to “gotcha” questions on tests, questions that specifically are designed to catch you out using pattern recognition.
The joke of that technique is these questions become a pattern unto themselves. Despite middling grades in high school, I aced a number of standardized tests in large part because the "bullshit" gotcha questions stuck out like sore thumbs to me.
This trains the person to not trust their pattern recognition
Again, I throw back to the person listening for conversational queues in the banging of their washing machine.
You shouldn't trust pattern recognition on its face. It's deceptively easy to pick out a false signal in white noise.
There's more to be said on this, with certain schools (particularly religious or highly ideological academic settings) focusing on uncritical acceptance of official dogma or a state-designated axiomatic understanding of a certain subject. But that goes above and beyond teaching people not to trust their pattern recognition skills.
I’m not autistic, but I hate it when other people just ignore the obvious things. Like come on. Is this the result of evolution? How did your lineage survive for this long?
the way i think it's something akin to a linked list in file system speak. I think of one thing, which leads to the next thing, which leads to the next thing, etc. it takes me a while to think of stuff, which often makes people think I'm stupid.
Sort of but like the post is saying, I've been way more right then wrong over my life. The amount of times I've argued online with people about things only to have that thing become the big issue 5 years from the point I was arguing it is disgusting. I remember 20 years ago sitting in a bay at work being made fun of because I kept talking about Russia and how they have started to allocate a higher percentage of their budget to cyber warfare that was unseen in budgets outside of wartime. It indicated they were building something. Stuff like that I get hyper interested in. I think I have a good nose for sources. I get into those sources and then find some weird thing nobody else is aware of and then you're just aware of this looming issue and all you can do is watch it unfold.
Same thing with online bots. I can see when certain activity spikes. Certain topics get AstroTurfed and all of a sudden we're talking about nuclear power for a week or some other topic that is really a facade for some bigger issue we're slowly being steered towards. AI was a big one, go to any AI article and tell me that is not the exact same approach Republicans use against immigrants. It's the same fucking thing. "they're taking your job" "they're going to destroy your culture" "they're coming after your women and children" "They're using up all the resouces"
AI has it's issues. But you cannot convince me that there wasn't something pushing articles and headlines on left wing spaces when it was first introduced. There was a massive push to set the tone.
Not sure of their intended reference but:
Cassandra in Illiad esp Trojan Horse incident
Legolas, LotR, and many other Elves in Silmarrilion and Apendices
Various Atreides in Dune (though they can force people to listen, lol)
I had the (mis)fortune of later viewing video of an incident where I "activated." Atm it seemed to me a very long slow progression (like 10 seconds?) But video-wise it all played out in like a second. The other takeaway was that all the stuff that I saw as "obvious" was greatly exagerated in my perception, so it was obvious to me, but impossible to get neurotypicals to credit (even to want to do) the zoom in and slow motion analysis that would be needed. I found the experience very upsetting/isolating because it proved impossible to get people to understand my perspective.
It's simple: The OP Trojan horse a Legolas elves while Atreides Dune lol'd an ATM on the slow while the obvious was exaggerated. And it was upsetting impossible perspective.
First, they're saying that this is a longstanding trope in mythology and literature, the character who can see the future but isn't believed, like Cassandra. Lord of the Rings isn't my thing, but I assume they're giving examples from there as well. Dune is kind of a digression, in that those characters could see the future by recognizing how patterns were going to play out, but there wasn't any element of not being believed.
Second, they're talking about being neurodivergent themselves, and having experienced this kind of pattern recognition prediction thing. They're saying that once someone caught this on video. It's not clear exactly what they predicted, but apparently, looking at the video, it's still obvious to them what the cues were that they observed and used to predict whatever it was. I guess the people around them didn't see it, and were mystified about how they knew to do whatever it was they did in response. They think that the others should be able to look closely at the video of the incident, maybe zoom in and play it at reduced speed, and understand how they recognized what was going to happen, because they could point out all these cues; but they're frustrated to know that won't happen. Subjectively they experience the situation as though it lasts much longer than it does in the video, as though time slows down, which they tried to explain by using video game references.
Alan Watts died in 1973 and yet this clip has him saying "scroll social media". Only possible "social media" at the time of his death was email or a chatroom and those were in their infancy and the internet hadn't been invented yet either. Methinks you may have been fooled.
I'm 99% sure the narration is AI-generated using Watts's voice, and I don't think it was quoting Watts directly. The on screen text needed quotation marks to show what, if any, words were taken directly from Watts. Misleading, yes, but I don't think intentionally so.
I got the impression the first half is Watts proper and the second half is ai to put a modern spin on it. I didn't hate it tbh. Provoked emotion from me as it really hits the nail.
I am so autistic that when I went for my adhd assessment recently, they had me do this computer test with letters and sounds, and the sounds one, I recognised the pattern within maybe 2-3 minutes of a 30 minute test. Which voided my adhd results
Sadly this describes every day of my life and has led to some serious, serious depression problems. Being able to spot things from miles out sounds pretty amazing on paper, but it's really truly a special kind of hell when you can't actually do anything about all the horrible, horrible things you see in the horizon. To anyone else who is also like this, I truly hope you shoulder it well. It is not an easy thing to live with.
I spent so long being part of /r Collapse. It was a bit latter than expected, but it is finally here.
Spent too much useful time going for longshot jobs, and trying to be something I'm not, instead of settling for what little I can get, like other people.
In the short-term, I have co-workers questioning why I'm doing things "wrong" and "correcting" me, then I watch as my back gets strained, and we lose time, making the "mistake" I had seen coming.
It feels anecdotal, but I felt like I had a voodoo doll for my last manager. He was a nice enough guy but just hyper and careless. So he would do stuff all the time without thinking about what came next. I would see him on my commute sometimes following close behind other cars, speeding to red lights and such. Said to my coworker, 'He is going to not be here one day because he got in a car accident.' A few weeks later and he is out because he totalled his car into the back of another car. Another time the company was cheaping out on hiring someone to replace lightbulbs and he was like, I'll just change them myself! I said, "you need insurance to do stuff like that in an office, thousands of people fall off ladders every year" A few weeks later he was out for days, found out he fell off a ladder at his house. I didn't cause these things to happen, but I stopped vocalizing what I was predicting. As the wise Michael Scott once said, "I'm not superstitious, but I am a little stitious."
My least favorite part today: Waiting for someone to read from a mandatory script written for the least common denominator.
Before we let your wife talk to us about the bank account, you'll need to answer some questions to prove your identity, you must wait for all answers to be read before responding.......
We've been doing this so long that the people who invented it have died. Can I just use a fucking YubiKey and a pin?
time and again news things about bad things there is some stuff about wierd feelings or this seems strange. I gtfo when anything feels wierd or seems to be going somewhere wierd. unless im in about as safe an environment as I can be in. maybe. maybe then I will give a little benefit of the doubt.
Hey, Chat! That's a great point. It sounds like you're trying to prompt users to generate content to feed your garbage LLM in the laziest way possible.
No idea why you are being downvoted but these are the times when things just don't feel right. I was downtown at a festival and there was some mounted police and some guys playing with fireworks and its been awhile but there was something else where it was like. I can totally see this being a news item about a riot the next day. So I went home. Nothing happened. No riot. But I would do the same if I felt the same. This has come up again and again and I have talked about some things my wife had to. Someone put something in her drink and luckily she got home fine but she talks about how even before that things were wierd. woman should follow the wierdening way even more honestly.
Look at their history and it's clear they're not a bot. The definitely transgressed against the social norm in this thread asking four times like that, but they aren't a bot.
I call it Cassandra syndrome, and it fucking sucks.
You know why it is true? because a fucking neurotypical decoded that she deserves the title because she was married to one. No relationship with the myth, just that she hated her autistic partner and wanted to be the victim.
Boy howdy, do I have a book suggestion for you....
Edit: I'm surprised how many people are not familiar with Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Not as ground breaking as Neuromancer but his biggest commercial/critical success.
I have noticed a back and forth in engineering companies between prioritizing project teams, who focus on a single customer each, and product teams who focus on generic development, overarching the individual projects.
Upper management will see that a lot of products are sold (each sale is a project), and the company now actually has to deliver projects. So product teams are ripped up, and everyone is dedicated to specific projects, because making these deadlines is the most essential thing in the known universe.
A couple of years later, they hire expensive consultants to tell them how to optimize their business. These consultants will note (after simply asking the engineers) that there is a lot of development being done many times over, once for each project. So the entire organisation is optimized by ripping up the project teams, and placing the engineers in product teams.
The result is a new standardized product, of which the company can sell a lot, which eventually brings us back to step 1.
A good company will realise that going 200% into 1 direction will make it way harder to steer back once the inevitable pull into the other direction arrives. So a more temperate approach, tends to win in the long term. But explaing that to a manager is usually a waste of your time.
I worked around 18 wheelers for awhile. Eventually you develop a sense for who is going to be a problem driver before they've even fully pulled onto the lot.
Obvious signs are the company they drive for. Some companies stress hiring competent drivers with good track records, others get theirs by training people with zero record. Condition of the tractor is another easy tell. Some states generally seemed to send worse drivers as well, for example we got a lot of bad drivers from IL.
And then you've got how they pull inside in the first place. Missing the turn in, not a big deal. But missing the turn in when they were going 40mph? Did they fly or creep through the gates? Either side of the spectrum is a worry. Once through the gate were they able to follow the preponderance of signage and context clues to direct them where to go? How did they brake as they came to a stop? Speaking of brakes, do you smell theirs? Not a great sign if you do. Did you have to tell them to engage their air brakes?
Then you've got the driver. Young driver? Not a good sign. Are they in a hurry or agitated in some way? Do they have a pet jumping all over their lap as they check in or a spouse/co driver they're fighting with? Music absolutely blasting to keep them awake? Is the driver acting like this is all new to them? How good is their english and are they going to be able to follow simple directions?
And then you've got how they actually approach their dock. Wasn't a large lot, so some drivers before they've even started to back up have already put themselves in an unwinnable position just by the way they approached the dock. Did they decide to circle round the lot in a weird way? If they're having to back up at an angle did they choose the correct way, or are they trying it blind side for zero reason?
If a driver started checking a few too many of those boxes, I knew they were going to do their best to hit something. You'd tell these drivers to open their windows, literally follow you around the lot and hand hold them as they backed up, and they'd still manage to hit something.
Every couple weeks for the last 11 years my blueMaga family members are convinced this latest thing is going to put Trump in prison and then all the bad things they've been hearing about will go away again. Currently we're at "Bill Clinton is going to blow this whole thing wide open".
Same with "Russia's finished this time, Ukraine is about to turn it around!" since the invasion.
I walk into a room and hear things. I hear lights and fridges, heaters, cellphones vibrating on floors above me. It's a cacafony of endless clicks and ticks and humms and beeps and whirs that seemingly no one else notices.
Cats make good sounds though. The merps and meeps and jorps and mreeps and mrops and purrs are nice.
The worst is the whine from cheap chargers and power banks. Ive resorted to buying a few of my coworkers new/ better chargers in order to give myself some peace.
I've a friend who has nothing but IKEA TRÅDFRI lightbulbs. Each and every one of these has a subtle coil whine, and stepping into his home is like stepping into a rainforest, but unpleasant. He doesn't hear a single peep from them, but to me it's hella grating. The noise changes depending on what light it's emitting, as well as the brightness. The worst is when the light is off.
Ewwwwww. I want to die just reading that.
Try firing up a CRT display. I'm 40 and I can still hear that fucking electronic whine from several rooms away.
Ah, the first time I started hearing things my family couldnt, I'd complain or at least take note of it, and they'd look at me like i was growing a second head.at least CRTs also had a nice warm hum to go along with the whine.
Coil hum.
The trick is to put a tiny dummy load on the USB charger. Just buy the cheapest USB cable, cut the end off, and solder (or twist) a resistor between red and black. Boom.
Had a whiny USB power strip at my office desk that stopped whining when my phone was plugged in. Small resistor took care of that perfectly, cheaply, and nondestructively. Got a kick out of confused colleagues asking why I had a dangly cable plugged in with nothing but electrical tape on the end.
What are we talking here when you say "small". 20 ohm? 50 ohm?
USB is 5V so I suppose a 10 mA draw (500 ohm resistor) would be sufficient. 20ohm would be 250 mA/1.25W which is certainly overkill for a dummy load. I don't recall exact values but mine barely needed any load to shut up.
I knew the scanner had failed before anyone tried using it because I heard it start making a high pitched whine.
How dare you forget the tiny motorcycle sounds.
They're S tier.
Its existence isn't settled science, but I have this too and I've found that Auditory Processing Disorder describes it perfectly. Lots of comorbidity with autism and ADHD, so it's possible it's not a separate disorder but just another manifestation.
But yeah, I can't filter out background noise at all. My brain copes by completely shutting off audio processing when I'm focusing, but it's involuntary and can be pretty inconvenient. I have to read lips a lot when talking anywhere but a quiet environment because I can't separate speech from background noise.
Hmmmm. I'm still not sure you aren't a cat.
Or Maureen Ponderosa maybe?
Same for me too, except there’s one noise I can stand and even find it pleasant sometimes, cheap laptop coil whine, since I’ve had 3 school laptops, all have been used for at least 5 and at most 10 years, and I still use one of them daily too.
The daily machine is also fanless, so it kinda confuses me a little occasionally by making me think there’s a fan but really there can’t be lmao
God help you if you need to convey the pattern you recognize though, then language as a tool will escape your grasp
I use a lot of hand gestures to make up for it. It does not help at all.
The thing will do a whatchamacallit, just wait you!
Or it doesn't escape your grasp but it gets actively ignored by people who see your eccentricities as being indicative that you're less than them. Including other autistic people.
But then the reality starts striking exactly how you laid it out but by that time you've already submitted your two weeks notice.
Perhaps lojban.
Or knowing precisely what point people are attempting to make five words into the first sentence and then politely having to sit there and wait for the next five minutes while they laboriously meander their way through it.
This is a dangerous "skill" to have, though. Very easy to slip into the trap of assuming you know what they're talking about, only to have them end on a different point than you expected and then suddenly you're responding to a point they never actually made
That would be nice, but I can't remember the last time that happened.
That's probably cause you do it without noticing
Had it happen a few times here.
How about being a witness to a conversation between two others and you can tell neither of them understand the point the other is trying to make.
Bonus points for when they actually agree with each other but just haven't put together what the other is saying.
I love that actually. It doesn't happen often, but when it does I go “hold on, A, you're trying to say x, but B understands y, whereas B tries to say v and you understand w”
Always leads to the most flabbergasted double stare when they realize I'm 100% right and they'd have talked past each other for hours.
Sometimes with an undertone of “but I wanted a fight” by one of them.
Disclaimer: Severe ADHD here
Those are the times that make me feel like maybe I have the occasional social insight. lol. While I get confused by so much that happens, I often feel like I pick up on subtle clues and situations like that. So I feel it's a mixed-to-fuck-and-hell bag of social genius and social stupidity. It's confusing. lol
My parents didn't argue often, but when they did, they always had the opinion. Sometimes it would be half an hour until they decided they could agree.
I can’t do it. I try so hard but I interrupt every time and then they say “that’s not what I mean will you let me finish” then I have to sit quietly while it was exactly what they meant.
It’s critically important to develop patience here in order to deal with people getting older and taking this to the next level
My mom is a great person whom I dearly love but she’s fallen into the stereotype of old people rambling. Nothing is a simple question or statement anymore. It’s always a long meandering story with lots of detours
I had that working at a call-center and i'm not autistic (to my knowledge), it just came with experience.
I have double powers as I’m neurodivergent and grew up in a highly traumatic household so you learn to pick on tiny signs that it’s about to pop off. Feel my life is fight or flight at all times.
Entire too relatable. I grew up in much the same way. Having that feeling as my baseline, my "normal", made everything else feel wrong, but I could never fully put my finger on why. I developed a sense of stoicism so that I could get through each day showing as little outward reaction as possible. However, I confused that stoicism for calmness and stability; inside my mind everything still roiled as my instincts and senses were always watching and waiting, preparing for the next time things became dangerous.
Decades of living with that level of hypervigilance paired with the effort needed to put forward a stoic exterior has worn me down. The physical symptoms of chronic mental and emotional exhaustion are debilitating; the body really does pay a toll for the mind's wounds. Maybe if twenty years ago I had the knowledge and resources that I do now, I could have done something to stave off what I'm going through.
All this to say: if you aren't already, please seek counseling as soon as possible. Don't make the same mistake I did; just like the smoker who denies that their habit it harmful, if you don't work to heal your psychological wounds now, then it will eventually catch up to you. Be well, and take care of yourself.
I became so good at masking because of coming from a environment where my needs weren't met and my true self wasn't safe to exist. I was often more concerned about making sure my parents didn't pop off that I developed an unhealthy way of looking at the world where I put the needs of others above myself - to the point of complete self destruction in front of people who cared about me.
Over the years I finally realised what was going on, but it took being with another person who also has autism and C-PTSD to observe the behaviours in one another and finally take control. In some ways it is a little tragic we both went through so much hardship while having our basic needs ignored from a young age, but in another way I'm so grateful for the miracle of having found a person who perfectly fits my broken parts so we can guide each other through it with understanding and experience.
I regret the times I've treated others unfairly because of the pressures of life and not having the resources or wisdom to do things properly. I'm doing my best now to make amends for my past mistakes, heal myself and move into the future with healthy boundaries. I've been hurt in ways I can't even begin to explain, I require a certain amount of medication just to function but I'm still here and I feel optimistic for the future. It's going to be hard work to rebuild the things I've lost, but I'm motivated to do good for myself and for the new family I'm building.
Hello my friend.
CPTSD & HP => knowing what people are going to do. But if you act on it people think you're some sort of stalker, creep or manipulator.
give an example?
Dudes, why all the downvotes?
People feel attacked by basic scrutiny
Thats pretty difficult as its almost like intuition. Your brain has learned about these micro signals and must picks up on vibes.
Just describe the situation
I can't speak for OP, but in my case I could tell how "bad" a day was likely to be based on small clues that most people wouldn't see. Tiny things like a slight increase in the pitch of a parent's sigh, how quickly keys were put down as they came through the door, the position of their shoulders as they picked up a dinner fork. How the almost invisible deepening of the creases around their mouth and eyes matched the increasing tension in the air. Instantly knowing by the timbre of the footfalls climbing the stairs if I needed to pretend to be asleep.
Growing up in an abusive, trauma-inducing household fosters a talent to sense the proverbial "blood in the water," and how likely it is to send the sharks into a frenzy.
The worst part is when you try to gently warn people, and they look at you like you’re the crazy one—only for the exact thing you predicted to happen five minutes later.
The part that depresses you is that somehow it's your fault for noticing it sooner and not trying hard enough to convince others.
Nah, the worst part is when they gang up to say it's your fault even though you were the one warning them and not participating in whatever happens
Just don't say anything then. If that's the mir reaction maybe they don't deserve the warning
It's funny, because this is more often diagnosed the other way around.
Neurotypicals pick up on emotional queues their partners miss, try to warm them that they're committing a faux pau, and are dismissed until things spiral out of hand.
Then they look at you again in shock and exclaim, "omg! You were right!" To which I typically reply, "I know."
They just continue on in frustration, annoyed, not understanding why things aren't working out.
Their response: who told you?
Implicit: you probably knew all along, you bastard.
give an example?
Where the PATRIOT act ended up
Where GWOT ended up
Where the dotcom and housing bubbles ended up
Where the ai bubble is going to end up
I joined a large friend group that had been together for 7 or so years. There was a person that I noticed would tell different people slightly different versions of stories. Normally I'd dismiss these as white lies but I noticed a pattern. The person in question saw relationships as transactional and I highly suspected that these white lies revealed a much deeper penchant for emotional manipulation.
I tried to warn some people that I thought I could trust within the friend group, but this upset some people and I had the step way back. After all, who is the new person to come into this group and fuck things up? I kept my mouth shut and out of the drama as I had to watch this person build a giant rift within the group.
Thankfully a few people had finally remembered the warning I had given years before and started comparing notes on the stories this person had told everyone. In the end I was vindicated when people started confronting the lies, but a lot of people had to go through therapy for the years of suffering that person caused in the meantime. I'm not giving too many details, but it got bad: suicide attempts, cops, legal battles. I had to just sit there and watch it all.
I think the actual worst part about this is that pattern recognition isn’t supposed to be a neurodivergent thing. Pattern recognition is like a built in feature in humans, but most people have it beat out of them in school
I thought that's part of the reason we excelled as a species, seeing the patterns to eat or run from and knowing which is which. Plus getting curious about new ones and if they dont eat us figuring out what to do with them.
Like so much else, it's a trained skill. You don't have pattern recognition beaten out. You just aren't so heavily invested in a subject that you get it stamped in.
It's not as though we're born with the ability to hear Morse Code, for instance. You have to develop an ear for it.
It's also a double edged sword, especially when you queue in on a pattern without understanding the reason behind it. Plenty of patterns are purely coincidental.
Picking out a "message" in a series of sounds doesn't mean the dish washer is talking to you.
I agree and disagree. Pattern recognition is a trained skill, for you have learn to recognize each pattern. Pattern recognition is not, however, a trained skill in the way that you have to learn to recognize patterns at all.
However, during school most people have their ability to recognize patterns at all severely diminished due to “gotcha” questions on tests, questions that specifically are designed to catch you out using pattern recognition. This trains the person to not trust their pattern recognition, and in some cases people will actually learn to go against their pattern recognition because they assume things are trying to catch that
The joke of that technique is these questions become a pattern unto themselves. Despite middling grades in high school, I aced a number of standardized tests in large part because the "bullshit" gotcha questions stuck out like sore thumbs to me.
Again, I throw back to the person listening for conversational queues in the banging of their washing machine.
You shouldn't trust pattern recognition on its face. It's deceptively easy to pick out a false signal in white noise.
There's more to be said on this, with certain schools (particularly religious or highly ideological academic settings) focusing on uncritical acceptance of official dogma or a state-designated axiomatic understanding of a certain subject. But that goes above and beyond teaching people not to trust their pattern recognition skills.
I’m not autistic, but I hate it when other people just ignore the obvious things. Like come on. Is this the result of evolution? How did your lineage survive for this long?
For mine, it was resistance to various flus and sicknesses.
Most of my family has shit for brains, and I'm convinced the only reason they survived up to me is having all the good genes for physical health.
Too bad mental health didn't get points put into it too ...
You might be HP (HIP/HEP).
Do you think linearly, or more in a tree like way (I feel it like a probability cloud)?
the way i think it's something akin to a linked list in file system speak. I think of one thing, which leads to the next thing, which leads to the next thing, etc. it takes me a while to think of stuff, which often makes people think I'm stupid.
That's how most people think. Linearly.
It's a matter of learned behavior, not genetics.
Pattern recognition is inherent to how the human brain works...
Yeah idk if this is specific to autism
You wish.
I don't need to, it's a fact, it's inherent for the cognitive process.
Some people with autism (isn't it a spectrum now?) do display those characteristics, yes.
Mind quoting a bit from your link that had anything to do with what you said in this thread?
Superior pattern processing is the essence of the evolved human brain
Having to eat has to be my least favorite part of neourdivergence. "Oh, it's been a few hours since eating and I really want to eat"
This cited phenomenon is not a particularly neurodivergent one. Pretty much everyone sees the train wrecks coming.
If you are neurodivergent, not everything about your life and how your mind works is defined by that.
Object permanence has to be me least favorite part of neurodivergence. "Oh I walked away from that tree but I know it's still there."
I like your example so much better than my own.
"I see where this is going"
Goes in a different direction
"Oh, so this is part of the pattern where everyone is trying to fuck with me"
confirmation bias averted ... this time
That's also a thing, overthinking and obsessive interests.
And the talker types see the ability to see through their lies as "uncanny".
Sort of but like the post is saying, I've been way more right then wrong over my life. The amount of times I've argued online with people about things only to have that thing become the big issue 5 years from the point I was arguing it is disgusting. I remember 20 years ago sitting in a bay at work being made fun of because I kept talking about Russia and how they have started to allocate a higher percentage of their budget to cyber warfare that was unseen in budgets outside of wartime. It indicated they were building something. Stuff like that I get hyper interested in. I think I have a good nose for sources. I get into those sources and then find some weird thing nobody else is aware of and then you're just aware of this looming issue and all you can do is watch it unfold.
Same thing with online bots. I can see when certain activity spikes. Certain topics get AstroTurfed and all of a sudden we're talking about nuclear power for a week or some other topic that is really a facade for some bigger issue we're slowly being steered towards. AI was a big one, go to any AI article and tell me that is not the exact same approach Republicans use against immigrants. It's the same fucking thing. "they're taking your job" "they're going to destroy your culture" "they're coming after your women and children" "They're using up all the resouces"
AI has it's issues. But you cannot convince me that there wasn't something pushing articles and headlines on left wing spaces when it was first introduced. There was a massive push to set the tone.
Not sure of their intended reference but: Cassandra in Illiad esp Trojan Horse incident Legolas, LotR, and many other Elves in Silmarrilion and Apendices Various Atreides in Dune (though they can force people to listen, lol) I had the (mis)fortune of later viewing video of an incident where I "activated." Atm it seemed to me a very long slow progression (like 10 seconds?) But video-wise it all played out in like a second. The other takeaway was that all the stuff that I saw as "obvious" was greatly exagerated in my perception, so it was obvious to me, but impossible to get neurotypicals to credit (even to want to do) the zoom in and slow motion analysis that would be needed. I found the experience very upsetting/isolating because it proved impossible to get people to understand my perspective.
I'm not going to lie- I understood none of this.
It's simple: The OP Trojan horse a Legolas elves while Atreides Dune lol'd an ATM on the slow while the obvious was exaggerated. And it was upsetting impossible perspective.
They activated ass to mouth. That's what I picked up.
I go Prince-of-Persia/MaxPain. It has probably saved me sometimes, but mostly it just results in people thinking I'm a spaz.
...this has not helped my understanding at all lol.
I think their comment has two parts.
First, they're saying that this is a longstanding trope in mythology and literature, the character who can see the future but isn't believed, like Cassandra. Lord of the Rings isn't my thing, but I assume they're giving examples from there as well. Dune is kind of a digression, in that those characters could see the future by recognizing how patterns were going to play out, but there wasn't any element of not being believed.
Second, they're talking about being neurodivergent themselves, and having experienced this kind of pattern recognition prediction thing. They're saying that once someone caught this on video. It's not clear exactly what they predicted, but apparently, looking at the video, it's still obvious to them what the cues were that they observed and used to predict whatever it was. I guess the people around them didn't see it, and were mystified about how they knew to do whatever it was they did in response. They think that the others should be able to look closely at the video of the incident, maybe zoom in and play it at reduced speed, and understand how they recognized what was going to happen, because they could point out all these cues; but they're frustrated to know that won't happen. Subjectively they experience the situation as though it lasts much longer than it does in the video, as though time slows down, which they tried to explain by using video game references.
I love you and your wrinkly brain lol. Thanks
Glad I could help!
OP felt like she was recognizing problems that others failed to acknowledge, often with extreme clarity.
It seemed obvious and urgent to OP, but was difficult to convey to others, leading to OP feeling isolated.
Makes me think of this Alan Watts snippet.
(imginn.com instagram frontend link)
Looks like this AI generated and not the original Alan Watts. My apologies, I was bamboozled.
Alan Watts died in 1973 and yet this clip has him saying "scroll social media". Only possible "social media" at the time of his death was email or a chatroom and those were in their infancy and the internet hadn't been invented yet either. Methinks you may have been fooled.
EDIT: rephrasing
Inside the clip "HE" refers to himself in the 3rd person "Alan watts said once..." - it's definitely Ai stealing his voice
I'm 99% sure the narration is AI-generated using Watts's voice, and I don't think it was quoting Watts directly. The on screen text needed quotation marks to show what, if any, words were taken directly from Watts. Misleading, yes, but I don't think intentionally so.
I got the impression the first half is Watts proper and the second half is ai to put a modern spin on it. I didn't hate it tbh. Provoked emotion from me as it really hits the nail.
I am so autistic that when I went for my adhd assessment recently, they had me do this computer test with letters and sounds, and the sounds one, I recognised the pattern within maybe 2-3 minutes of a 30 minute test. Which voided my adhd results
Sadly this describes every day of my life and has led to some serious, serious depression problems. Being able to spot things from miles out sounds pretty amazing on paper, but it's really truly a special kind of hell when you can't actually do anything about all the horrible, horrible things you see in the horizon. To anyone else who is also like this, I truly hope you shoulder it well. It is not an easy thing to live with.
I spent so long being part of /r Collapse. It was a bit latter than expected, but it is finally here.
Spent too much useful time going for longshot jobs, and trying to be something I'm not, instead of settling for what little I can get, like other people.
In the short-term, I have co-workers questioning why I'm doing things "wrong" and "correcting" me, then I watch as my back gets strained, and we lose time, making the "mistake" I had seen coming.
It feels anecdotal, but I felt like I had a voodoo doll for my last manager. He was a nice enough guy but just hyper and careless. So he would do stuff all the time without thinking about what came next. I would see him on my commute sometimes following close behind other cars, speeding to red lights and such. Said to my coworker, 'He is going to not be here one day because he got in a car accident.' A few weeks later and he is out because he totalled his car into the back of another car. Another time the company was cheaping out on hiring someone to replace lightbulbs and he was like, I'll just change them myself! I said, "you need insurance to do stuff like that in an office, thousands of people fall off ladders every year" A few weeks later he was out for days, found out he fell off a ladder at his house. I didn't cause these things to happen, but I stopped vocalizing what I was predicting. As the wise Michael Scott once said, "I'm not superstitious, but I am a little stitious."
Pattern recognition with history autism has to be the worst version of this.
Unless you like fascism.
Great news if you do, because all patterns indicate a global speed running to Germany, circa 1939ish.
Yes, though its also the basis for all conspiracy theories
My least favorite part today: Waiting for someone to read from a mandatory script written for the least common denominator.
Before we let your wife talk to us about the bank account, you'll need to answer some questions to prove your identity, you must wait for all answers to be read before responding.......
We've been doing this so long that the people who invented it have died. Can I just use a fucking YubiKey and a pin?
time and again news things about bad things there is some stuff about wierd feelings or this seems strange. I gtfo when anything feels wierd or seems to be going somewhere wierd. unless im in about as safe an environment as I can be in. maybe. maybe then I will give a little benefit of the doubt.
give an example?
Hey, Chat! That's a great point. It sounds like you're trying to prompt users to generate content to feed your garbage LLM in the laziest way possible.
Have you tried fucking off?
Was this helpful? Yes/No
Wow, you're toxic.
Is this example guys alt?
Look at my comments history and make your decision
shrugs
I'm not that bored.
No idea why you are being downvoted but these are the times when things just don't feel right. I was downtown at a festival and there was some mounted police and some guys playing with fireworks and its been awhile but there was something else where it was like. I can totally see this being a news item about a riot the next day. So I went home. Nothing happened. No riot. But I would do the same if I felt the same. This has come up again and again and I have talked about some things my wife had to. Someone put something in her drink and luckily she got home fine but she talks about how even before that things were wierd. woman should follow the wierdening way even more honestly.
The same account asked the same question like four times in this thread. Weird behaviour.
Bot behavior.
Look at their history and it's clear they're not a bot. The definitely transgressed against the social norm in this thread asking four times like that, but they aren't a bot.
I mean wanting more detail is fair I think at least in the case of my reply.
No. Your pattern gets boring.
I call it Cassandra syndrome, and it fucking sucks.
You know why it is true? because a fucking neurotypical decoded that she deserves the title because she was married to one. No relationship with the myth, just that she hated her autistic partner and wanted to be the victim.
https://www.psychiatrist.com/news/cassandra-syndrome-causes-anger-frustration-in-autism-relationships/
Boy howdy, do I have a book suggestion for you....
Edit: I'm surprised how many people are not familiar with Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Not as ground breaking as Neuromancer but his biggest commercial/critical success.
Well... What is it? Lol
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.
Is it Mein Kampf? Don't say Mein Kampf.
What is your suggestion?
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.
Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality?
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.
You're surprised that a novel from 20 years ago isn't what everyone thought of on a post about neurodivergence?
you must not be very good at...
give an example?
I have noticed a back and forth in engineering companies between prioritizing project teams, who focus on a single customer each, and product teams who focus on generic development, overarching the individual projects.
Upper management will see that a lot of products are sold (each sale is a project), and the company now actually has to deliver projects. So product teams are ripped up, and everyone is dedicated to specific projects, because making these deadlines is the most essential thing in the known universe.
A couple of years later, they hire expensive consultants to tell them how to optimize their business. These consultants will note (after simply asking the engineers) that there is a lot of development being done many times over, once for each project. So the entire organisation is optimized by ripping up the project teams, and placing the engineers in product teams.
The result is a new standardized product, of which the company can sell a lot, which eventually brings us back to step 1.
A good company will realise that going 200% into 1 direction will make it way harder to steer back once the inevitable pull into the other direction arrives. So a more temperate approach, tends to win in the long term. But explaing that to a manager is usually a waste of your time.
Every single decision that every single middle manager has ever made and forced everyone to follow through with.
I worked around 18 wheelers for awhile. Eventually you develop a sense for who is going to be a problem driver before they've even fully pulled onto the lot.
Obvious signs are the company they drive for. Some companies stress hiring competent drivers with good track records, others get theirs by training people with zero record. Condition of the tractor is another easy tell. Some states generally seemed to send worse drivers as well, for example we got a lot of bad drivers from IL.
And then you've got how they pull inside in the first place. Missing the turn in, not a big deal. But missing the turn in when they were going 40mph? Did they fly or creep through the gates? Either side of the spectrum is a worry. Once through the gate were they able to follow the preponderance of signage and context clues to direct them where to go? How did they brake as they came to a stop? Speaking of brakes, do you smell theirs? Not a great sign if you do. Did you have to tell them to engage their air brakes?
Then you've got the driver. Young driver? Not a good sign. Are they in a hurry or agitated in some way? Do they have a pet jumping all over their lap as they check in or a spouse/co driver they're fighting with? Music absolutely blasting to keep them awake? Is the driver acting like this is all new to them? How good is their english and are they going to be able to follow simple directions?
And then you've got how they actually approach their dock. Wasn't a large lot, so some drivers before they've even started to back up have already put themselves in an unwinnable position just by the way they approached the dock. Did they decide to circle round the lot in a weird way? If they're having to back up at an angle did they choose the correct way, or are they trying it blind side for zero reason?
If a driver started checking a few too many of those boxes, I knew they were going to do their best to hit something. You'd tell these drivers to open their windows, literally follow you around the lot and hand hold them as they backed up, and they'd still manage to hit something.
Every couple weeks for the last 11 years my blueMaga family members are convinced this latest thing is going to put Trump in prison and then all the bad things they've been hearing about will go away again. Currently we're at "Bill Clinton is going to blow this whole thing wide open".
Same with "Russia's finished this time, Ukraine is about to turn it around!" since the invasion.