I feel bad about posting this because for the most part I only use this account when I'm too beat down by the reality of the last 9 years of my life to cope, so then I log on and vent and then run away and don't respond to the helpful comments I get for months because processing what people say in reply is another Task on the Pile of Tasks, many of which are actively on fire, needed to be done years ago, both, etc.

I'll try to stay engaged this time, I clearly need space to communicate about this shit and people to communicate with more than my therapist (half my age bless her heart, but she listens and has ADHD herself) and my one friend with more profound ASD than me who can really only process 2 to 5 texts a day. Who is super loyal and a big help btw.

I will try to make this as concise as I can but it's gonna be long as fuck. I flamed out of my "career" in software over a decade ago when my biofamily imploded, and lost my home about a decade ago. Since then I've lived in a succession of friends' houses trying to get back on my feet, but what I didn't understand before losing my home was that I have an absolute requirement for a certain degree of 1) predictability and 2) quiet / stillness / social downtime. I have hypersensitive hearing and vision, and if I don't get those things, it drives me into unrelenting autistic burnout which at best decimates my ability to do tech work and at worst destroys my ability to think, make decisions, use written & spoken language, and exist as a human being in my own skin.

Nearly a decade I've lived like this, and I'm currently in the second least-worst place I've lived during that time, and I still don't have access to what I need to pull myself out of it. I live on a couch with no door and no privacy and a WFH housemate around the corner 16 to 17 hours a day who is one of those people who never stops moving and making noise for more than 5 minutes unless actively gaming or watching TV. At which point the speech noise from the game or TV (plus that of the other housemate who is able to remain still but who watches Youtube all day at 1.5x speed) would drive me absolutely bugfuck insane after a couple weeks continuous exposure if I didn't have white noise playing 24/7 and if I hadn't finally broken my compulsive need for situational awareness after years of brute force battle in order to wear noise canceling headphones much of the day.

I am aware I am extremely lucky thru all of this, and that many people in my situation have ended up on the street and/or literally dead (as in physically deceased) whereas I have not. There are a lot of reasons for that, I'm sure white privilege is one, my ingenuity in making it work is another (I taught myself to cook, people put up with a ne'er-do-well houseguest a lot longer when that houseguest can feed them delicious lowkey-gourmet meals on the relative cheap with consistency, so that's one way I contribute back). But this is my last stop before true outdoor homelessness.

I don't have any friends left who I could potentially stay with whenever my time is up here. I've been housing insecure for over a decade and food insecure for at least half of that and the reason I haven't got myself out of it since 2016 when I lost my home is because I've had no control of my physical environment, and I can't meet my sensory or social needs because at least one person in every single environment I've inhabited since then has not behaved like how my parents did when I was imprinting or whatever.

When at rest my parents tended to stay at rest, when in motion they tended to stay in motion, my brain attuned itself to that, that is now "predictable," and the other pattern which many humans have - being relentlessly active at fucking random the entire time they are awake, whether continuously or in intermittent small bursts - is absolute kryptonite which freezes my brain like nothing else. I have been trying to adapt for all these years and at this point I'm maxed out. If people would communicate about what's happening in a shared space so I knew what to expect, I could probably cope much better, but I have also discovered that what I thought was normal human behavior - using words to coordinate living in a house together - is not only apparently rare as fuck, but something a great number of people hate so much that they would rather have their skin flayed off or their eyes gouged out by wild birds. To this day this finding astounds me but I have no choice but to accept the evidence that this is how it is.

I honestly don't even really know if there's a point to this, I came here to lament that even though where I am now is less awful than some of the places I've lived since 2016, the level of emotional nourishment I get from my housemates is absolute zero, and I'd probably be chronically suicidal if not for one of their cats, plus the absolute godsend of having found a highly effective medication stack by 2018. But the total lack of warmth or engagement of any depth here is killing me all the same. I endure all the downsides of living on a couch in a sensory torture chamber with none of the benefits that living with more compatible people in the past has offered. I've been here a year and me and my housemates haven't eaten together even once, even when there's a meal prepared for everyone, which is frequent. Not even on Christmas. I hate it so much. I'm beat down, I'm nearing my existential wit's end, my sleep cycle is a mess due to strong incentive to stay up all night due to that being the only time I can have any peace, and after years of positive control since finding that med stack, I have learned that lax circadian control means I will have a bona fide depressive episode sooner or later. I was grazed by one this spring, and in my situation, getting depressed could straight up kill me because it's a risk factor for ending up outdoors (again).

I had no idea how common quicksand death traps like this are for AuDHD/ASD people. But I personally know multiple others in very similar situations, some worse, some better. My friend who can give me a few texts a day has a body covered with self-harm scars and has been thru electroshock and god knows what else because she is trapped with a loud go-getter parent who doesn't care about the impact their behavior has and doesn't give a fuck about the knock-on effects of that. I have a second-degree relative in the same scenario, minus the cutting and electroshock but with just as many psych ward stays, with a hyperthymic autistic parent of the loud sensation-seeking type who sleeps 6 hours a night max and hoards animals like you would not believe (multiple waterfowl next to the cooking area etc etc etc) and thinks their own flesh and blood needs to "toughen up" and so forth. And then two other friends in lesser scenarios than mine, and me in the middle.

Millions of us have lived and died exactly like this. And now I know it.

I'm getting to the point where I don't really see a way out of this for myself. I've had good luck with physical health thus far but I'm in my 40s and I have a hunch that my luck is soon to run out. I have been trying to get back on my feet as a developer (just doing web shit to start) most of this time because it's so much more lucrative than anything else I could do, when I'm able to do it, which is rare due to chronic sensory & social burnout literally removing my ability to think. I strongly doubt I will survive as long as either of my parents managed to do, and I'm near the point of no longer really giving a shit about that. The friends I still nominally have are burnt out and atomized and completely occupied with either struggle or pointless distractions or both. And I'm one of them! There is less to live for every year, people no longer bother to communicate and just leave each other on read, and now far too many of my friends are dead. It used to be from drugs or stupid behavior but now I'm at an age where it is starting to be from random health problems.

I don't have much fight left in me, even with the relative miracle of pharma propping me up. I manage to get a few precious weeks a year of alone time to keep myself alive and nominally sane by watching people's cats when they go on vacation, but it's never anywhere near enough to make progress on my tech projects that will get me some dev cred and open some doors, and it's nowhere near consistent enough to really allow me to work much or pull myself out of high impact burnout. My best friend died 3 years ago, and nothing has even come within a light year of filling that hole. I haven't had even a glimmer of romance in a decade, and at this point I'm so done with inescapable unwanted social contact that I'm legit terrified that a significant other would end up destroying my peace in the same way that all the people who've tried to help me all this time have done.

My only real approach to pull out of it at this point is to somehow ???-profit my way into owning a vehicle large enough to GO AWAY and obtain solitude, and be able to work (tech work) while I am wherever AWAY is. I don't have the vehicle, but over the last 5 years I have cobbled together the gear and the skills necessary to at least be able to work from anywhere with power and wifi/LTE (which is more complicated than most people think when you do actual development work and are too burnt out to rely on shitty always-changing Big Tech infra, or to consistently pay for cellular data, but that's another story).

I guess I will find out what becomes of me, time will tell.

The nice part is that I do feel better having belted all this out, and as an AuDHD with (well controlled) ultrarapid cycle bipolar 2, I've learned how to lean in to my moodiness and, with the help of the meds, rarely ever get stuck feeling irreparably shitty for too long. And having gone thru hundreds of cycles before getting that mood disorder under control, I have the gift of perspective to know that even the worst feelings can change.

If you read to the end - thank you - I will try not to hide from the cognitive load of reading & responding to any comments for 3 to 6 months like I usually do.

I still believe it's possible, in some future timelines, to get out of this and have a life (more) worth living, even if I can't see how from where I am now. Thanks for reading.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/44369720

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/44369720

in my past crusing thru autism posts on the bad site, once in a while somebody would post something talking about this and it was like reading my own experience in somebody else's words.

for those of you who read the subject line and know exactly what I'm talking about: can you also never shut off masking except when alone and in fact can't even relate to the concept of being able to "not mask" around others? or maybe around 99.99999% of the human race apart from a few people you know well and have known for years?

I've found (thru being homeless and couchsurfing starting well into adulthood haha do not recommend) that I can't live with most people, even introverts, because their activity pattern is not like my parents that I grew up with, and so my brain fixates on what they're doing and then I hear every. human. sound. in the house. at full attentional processing. every waking moment of my life. forever.

this decimates my ability to work because I touch computers for a living and I can only touch them correctly in 1 of 2 ways, either collab with others using tools like kanban and a ticket system, or solo hyperfocus for days on end, which has 0% chance of happening without the above going on...

but I got off topic. the question I am curious about is: if you relate to the subject line of the post, do you think the mental energy drain comes from being unable to shut off your awareness of (potentially) being perceived by others in the house; by your having to keep your mask on standby, warmed up and ready to go at all times when others are in the house; or, both? and do you have other thoughts on this particular topic which I suspect is related to a subtle but extremely impactful neurotrait some few tortured souls among us have???

until the last several years of my life I had no good understanding, and then what I suppose must have been my bad karma ripened and the Universe decided to teach me over and over and over again:

it is 100% possible to be an introvert who prefers quiet activities, and also be a motor-driven, always doing something Type A personality who has no concern whatsoever for stillness

I thought I would be okay living with introverts 🥲 but in practice after ending up with ones like this, nothing could be further from the truth 🥲 it is literally destroying my life while shortening my lifespan 🥲

I can actually vibe quite bigly and be very animated/engaged, but at the end of the day, I am an introvert, and a certain amount of mental recharge time is absolutely 100% required or my mind will stop working right.

What I mean by that is, if I am continuously exposed to the presence of "incompatible" human beings (the "compatible" ones seem to be a subset of people with ADHD / ASD / mood disorders), I will literally start showing symptoms similar to dementia, I will progressively lose my ability to speak and understand language, I will eventually start having (boring) hallucinations, etc. All of this is reversible if I am subsequently left the fuck alone, though the cognitive effects can persist for weeks or months after a bad episode.

In part because I do tech work which requires keeping a lot of information in mind at once, the above issue renders me unable to work during acute burnout, and unable to predict when or how much I'll be able to work during chronic (but not acute) burnout.

Because of this, I am (by some definitions) homeless, don't control my living environment, don't even fully control my diet for various reasons, etc. I'm actually writing this post as a tangent from looking up diabetes warning signs and discovering I have a number, all consistent with each other, all of which slowly got worse at the same rate over the last 5 years of chronic burnout. This is a result of not being able to control my diet or my exercise level (wayyy too fatigued from overstim most of the time).

But it's all, 100% of it, a carryover effect of not being able to get enough solitude that my mind can self-regulate sufficiently to be able to do paying work on a regular basis.

I lost my home a few years into the burnout and wound up bouncing thru a series of friends. Every single household had human factors that drove me into burnout. It's people who don't know how be still, who are always Doing Something even if they are sitting still - I can never stop perceiving them or being "on guard" in a house with them. It grinds me right down to the bone and then some. Anyway it was just dumb luck of the draw - some percentage of the population I can live with just fine. 3 years into this phase I ended up in an area that's very sprawly, did get a car for a while but not one I'd trust to take more than 10 or 15 miles, you should have seen this deathtrap, it was like a sitcom car, and anyway it died last year. So, I can't just walk to town and work at McDonald's or whatever. Camping options (uninhabited woods) exist but camping in them is illegal (which I've done on a couple desperate occasions).

I'm not entirely sure why I'm even posting this, other than to say I made a friend diagnosed with ASD a few years back who has a very similar symptom profile to me, but who is even more sensitive than me, and trapped like this with her own family. I know y'all are out there. You're valid. I know you're trying even if you've been so goddamn tired your eyeballs could melt for a month, 6 months, a year, 3 years.

I don't know about you, but I literally just need to be left the fuck alone and I will be fine, and able to pull myself out of the hole in 6-12 months. But that's the problem, this is America, nobody gets that kind of runway unless they're rich (or young and middle class with nice and/or indulgent family).

I don't need to be alone, but with 4 alcoholics having a rager in the rest of the house.

I don't need to be alone, but with occasional random people in and out of the house.

I don't need to be alone, but for only 24 total hours each week in irregular intervals.

I need to be able to access solitude / the company only of people who don't fixate my attention with their human presence, whenever I need, for as long as I need. Period.

Anyway, I'm legit thankful to live in a society where this is even fucking possible. I'm in North America and I know how to tickle computers. I've been on my ass for a literal decade, but if anybody can finagle a way back from it, it's me.

There are a lot of people who started off like I did - lower middle class with bright parents - and who ended up like I did, who beat themselves up relentlessly over it. I went to support groups and I saw how bad they hurt. Fortunately I don't have that problem, but I like to keep myself from developing it by doing shit like meditating, and watching videos of South Asian metalworking factories where dudes pour molten steel into molds while barefoot, and don't wait for the dust to settle in the lead oxide ball mill tumbler before opening the door and taking in a nice big lungful.

Eh, that's probably enough for now. I see you and love you, obligate introverts.

Background: I've been in burnout at some level for 10 years. Chronic the whole time, sometimes also what I would describe as semi-acute to acute for many periods as well.

My current situation is that I won't have a place to live in about a month, and I need to raise my income, but I can't predict or guarantee that my brain will actually be functional enough to work. (I do tech stuff... right now I'm a web monkey but I'm trained as a software engineer, haven't written nontrivial code in several years tho)

In my case I'm worried that getting a job and then losing it because my brain went on strike for a few weeks/months could potentially kick off a blockbuster depressive episode. I get those lonnnnnnng slowwwwww deep shutdown, lose 50 IQ points as you stare into the deadlights depressions. One more of those could quite literally kill me. That said, my med stack works and my mood is controlled better now than at any point in my life, so, I need to worry about this less.

My current income is thru gig work and I want to increase that rather than get a "job," but here it's the same problem, if I land a client and my brain goes AWOL, it's going to be a problem. I have put a ton of work into my hardware+software stack though, and self-host nearly all my own shit, which is a big advantage when you're permanently overwhelmed, because you save big bucks on hosting bills, and the open source upgrade treadmill is a lot slower than with corporate software.

Anyway, enough about me. Anybody want to share stories or tips?

who else has the forbidding and incomputable Pile of Mail 💀

mood: currently opening mail 1 week to 4 months old because I know there's a $7 check in it somewhere that'll pay for gas money for my friend to drag my ass around town and to the pot shop

I'm crossposting this widely because every single person with a noise sensitivity who previously tried noise-canceling headphones and found them not useful should know: it might be time to give the technology another shot.

This is a plug for a product. I'm not getting paid for it. I'm actually broke and couchsurfing and unable to work (until now maybe????) due to noise sensitivity, so if this info changes your life, I will put my tip jar in my profile after I post this :)

The story

I got a pair of Sony WH-CH720N for Christmas this year.

I had noise-canceling headphones on my wish list, but very low down, as previously I'd tried a couple pairs, including the expensive and highly-rated Bose QC III, and found them very lacking.

My experience with older headphones: the noise canceling was pretty good, but they caused a pressure sensation on my ears which I can only describe as like having a piece of meat behind saran wrap pressed against my eardrum. They also used to be a lot heavier than the WH-CH720N is. Both these factors made them very hard to wear for any length of time (for me) and greatly limited their usefulness.

So, I put the Sony model on my wish list more because I need a solution for wireless-from-my-laptop Zoom calls and don't have one, and less for the noise canceling feature.

My experience

I'm really impressed with these headphones, especially at the $99 price point.

The noise canceling feature isn't an absolute miracle, but it's very very good, equal or better to the Bose QC III which retailed for more than 3x the price back when it was new.

The weird ear pressure sensation is drastically better than with older noise canceling headphones. It's not nonexistent, and it does tend to flare up with certain bass sounds (like people stomping on hardwood floors), but it's waaaaaaaay better than older models I've tried, to the point where I can wear the Sony model for hours without fatigue from ear pressure.

The WH-CH720N headphones are not durable. They do seem a bit delicate. This is their weak point. But they are very lightweight!! This makes it much easier to wear them for extended periods. If you need to carry them around, maybe there is some kind of headphone case that can be found? I will be looking, and if I find one, will post in the comments on the orig post at lemmy dot ml slash c slash autistic_adults.

So anyway. Hopefully this helps somebody out.

Personally, my noise sensitivity is destroying my life - keeping me penniless and semi-homeless due to inability to work - and getting these 'phones for Christmas changed my entire idea of how noise canceling tech might help me out of this situation, after previous disappointing experiences.

What is this??? I know some of you have experienced it, because on very rare occasion it's come up in the past on other autism discussion groups I've been a part of. Sometimes somebody will make a post about burnout and say something like "the knowledge just fell out of my head" when talking about trying to work/think about complex topics while burnt out.

In my case, once I get too burnt out from overstimulation or nonstop social exposure, I get cognitive effects that last for days or weeks afterwards. In some sense, I get "dumber." But this isn't that, exactly, though I'm sure it's related.

Background, and an example: I do web & software development for work. I also live in a place which is a poor fit for my sensitivities, so I've been in chronic burnout for years, and I'm pushed further into acute high-intensity (as in, I become "lower functioning") burnout a few times a year.

I find that once I pass a certain point in burnout, I get to the point where I need to do a complex task, such as some web dev work, or for another example, filling out a bunch of government forms to keep some critical benefit or another flowing while I figure this all out. And I get inertia. But the inertia feels different than the usual inertia. The only way I can describe it is that it feels like in order to do the task, it's going to "rope in" knowledge of so many related things, that my brain realizes it's going to become overloaded and just sort of freezes up and deadlocks at the prospect.

These are tasks that require a good deal of focus and thinking, but which are well within my ability when I'm able to meet my sensory needs.

Anyway ... just wanted to make a thread for speculation and chatting about this, I guess. What is it? Demand avoidance? Conditioned response? Creepily accurate emotional representation of some kind of actual brain overload failure condition??

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/6713283

This study is unique in considering difficulty initiating tasks of any type in real life settings, and by gathering qualitative data directly from autistic people. Four face-to-face and 2 online (text) focus groups were conducted with 32 autistic adults (19 female, 8 male, and 5 other), aged 23–64 who were able to express their internal experiences in words.

[...] Participants described difficulty starting, stopping and changing activities that was not within their conscious control. While difficulty with planning was common, a subset of participants described a profound impairment in initiating even simple actions more suggestive of a movement disorder. Prompting and compatible activity in the environment promoted action, while mental health difficulties and stress exacerbated difficulties. Inertia had pervasive effects on participants’ day-to-day activities and wellbeing.

This study is unique in considering difficulty initiating tasks of any type in real life settings, and by gathering qualitative data directly from autistic people. Four face-to-face and 2 online (text) focus groups were conducted with 32 autistic adults (19 female, 8 male, and 5 other), aged 23–64 who were able to express their internal experiences in words.

[...] Participants described difficulty starting, stopping and changing activities that was not within their conscious control. While difficulty with planning was common, a subset of participants described a profound impairment in initiating even simple actions more suggestive of a movement disorder. Prompting and compatible activity in the environment promoted action, while mental health difficulties and stress exacerbated difficulties. Inertia had pervasive effects on participants’ day-to-day activities and wellbeing.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/5546920

As someone facing homelessness myself due to issues beyond my control, I just wanted people to know they're not alone.

These conditions are real, and people's misunderstanding - and willful refusal to understand - wrecks lives.

I hope you can get to a safe place where you can exist in your own skin in peace.

As someone facing homelessness myself due to issues beyond my control, I just wanted people to know they're not alone.

These conditions are real, and people's misunderstanding - and willful refusal to understand - wrecks lives.

I hope you can get to a safe place where you can exist in your own skin in peace.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/5236945

I'm curious if anyone out there reading who lives with ADHD and/or ASD w/executive dysfunction ... when it comes to tasks that aren't just your own but that involve (or are needed by) others, for example household tasks when living with others ... do you find that you actually need consensus and/or discussion on the topic of tasks in order to get them done?

What I'm realizing is that for me, part of executive dysfunction means I don't have the internal watchdog that keeps track of stuff I need to do in relation to others, and just personally speaking I cannot rely on (or be tormented by) guilt as a way to work around the lack of a watchdog.

The one thing that does work for me is talking about it with the people involved, especially if they are people I respect or care about. Either coming to consensus, or at least maintaining shared understanding of the shared space / task list / etc. For some reason, the process of coming to a shared-state perspective on shared effort, and understanding how my responsibilities impact others and at what time others need me to have completed them, is like sprinkling magic pixie dust on the task-item in my brain that allows me to remember it exists at all once it's 5 days later in the week or whatever. I still suck at scheduling and prioritizing and whatnot, but at least I remember the damn task exists and am trying to get it done!

The reason I've figured all this out is kinda grim, long story short I ended up on my ass about 10 years ago, and lost my home about 7 years ago, and then people took me in... and those people don't do the above. They don't discuss things and they don't build consensus or shared state, they just do stuff. And it's utterly and completely paralyzing because I spent the first 3 decades of my life living with people who did discuss things that affect others around them, and now my entire repertoire of human behavior is based on the premise that people attempt to keep each other informed like this, and that's just not the case for a great number of people.

And that process of communication or shared-state rehashing, which I thought all humans engaged in because both my parents did and almost everybody I lived with early in life did, is absolutely critical to wallpapering over my lack of ability to keep track of / remember that tasks exist, especially as my level of overwhelm gets high or my energy gets low.

What really made this sink in was remembering that my dad had endless conflicts with a kid of his from another marriage when he would go to visit, because she also doesn't communicate like this, and just like me, my dad was also absolutely critically dependent on it in order to be able to do anything at all really. In fact that's how I realized that he had a very similar neurological profile to me. In some ways our behavior is starkly alike and now I understand why.

BTW, that dad who almost certainly would be diagnosed with the same dreamy 'primarily inattentive' adult ADHD that I have today, got a Ph.D., retired as a Lt. Colonel in the Air Force, and went on to lead a small college language department and then have a long retirement doing occasional work in advanced linguistics. He later decided to learn Italian, and succeeded, in his 70s. Every time in his life when he had either autonomy and resources to do his own thing, or external structure + social glue that agreed with him, he was able to excel. Without those conditions, he would drift badly and become depressed. Understanding this has helped me understanding myself. My dad was a poor parent in a lot of other ways, but his ability to succeed when he had enough pieces of the puzzle does give me hope.

I'm curious if anyone out there reading who lives with ADHD and/or ASD w/executive dysfunction ... when it comes to tasks that aren't just your own but that involve (or are needed by) others, for example household tasks when living with others ... do you find that you actually need consensus and/or discussion on the topic of tasks in order to get them done?

What I'm realizing is that for me, part of executive dysfunction means I don't have the internal watchdog that keeps track of stuff I need to do in relation to others, and just personally speaking I cannot rely on (or be tormented by) guilt as a way to work around the lack of a watchdog.

The one thing that does work for me is talking about it with the people involved, especially if they are people I respect or care about. Either coming to consensus, or at least maintaining shared understanding of the shared space / task list / etc. For some reason, the process of coming to a shared-state perspective on shared effort, and understanding how my responsibilities impact others and at what time others need me to have completed them, is like sprinkling magic pixie dust on the task-item in my brain that allows me to remember it exists at all once it's 5 days later in the week or whatever. I still suck at scheduling and prioritizing and whatnot, but at least I remember the damn task exists and am trying to get it done!

The reason I've figured all this out is kinda grim, long story short I ended up on my ass about 10 years ago, and lost my home about 7 years ago, and then people took me in... and those people don't do the above. They don't discuss things and they don't build consensus or shared state, they just do stuff. And it's utterly and completely paralyzing because I spent the first 3 decades of my life living with people who did discuss things that affect others around them, and now my entire repertoire of human behavior is based on the premise that people attempt to keep each other informed like this, and that's just not the case for a great number of people.

And that process of communication or shared-state rehashing, which I thought all humans engaged in because both my parents did and almost everybody I lived with early in life did, is absolutely critical to wallpapering over my lack of ability to keep track of / remember that tasks exist, especially as my level of overwhelm gets high or my energy gets low.

What really made this sink in was remembering that my dad had endless conflicts with a kid of his from another marriage when he would go to visit, because she also doesn't communicate like this, and just like me, my dad was also absolutely critically dependent on it in order to be able to do anything at all really. In fact that's how I realized that he had a very similar neurological profile to me. In some ways our behavior is starkly alike and now I understand why.

BTW, that dad who almost certainly would be diagnosed with the same dreamy 'primarily inattentive' adult ADHD that I have today, got a Ph.D., retired as a Lt. Colonel in the Air Force, and went on to lead a small college language department and then have a long retirement doing occasional work in advanced linguistics. He later decided to learn Italian, and succeeded, in his 70s. Every time in his life when he had either autonomy and resources to do his own thing, or external structure + social glue that agreed with him, he was able to excel. Without those conditions, he would drift badly and become depressed. Understanding this has helped me understanding myself. My dad was a poor parent in a lot of other ways, but his ability to succeed when he had enough pieces of the puzzle does give me hope.

I suspect this probably varies across the entire population to some degree, but for me it feels like my senses and my mind aren't fully "bound together" properly when I wake up, and it takes a while of being conscious, QUIETLY, for them to come together and be functioning right. This process takes far longer if I'm in a state of serious/chronic burnout, up to several hours.

If I skip it and jump directly into activity, things usually stabilize quicker, but in a crappy muddled way, and much of my day can be off, I feel dumber, forget things, lower threshold for confusion/distress from random events, etc.