Memes that are autistic memes without explicitly mentioning autism

Call the Doctor?

A “memory-go-round”, if you will.

Eyyyyyyyy <double finger guns>

I don’t know if they’re trolling, but I do know that some people apparently have this ability. It’s baffling to me

I’m still a relative noob with Linux and I find stuff “breaks” more on Linux (‘breaks’ as in does something I don’t want it to), nursing and it can take me a while to fix those things because I’m still learning. It takes a while in part because I want to actually understand what’s going wrong (and how to fix it), rather than just doing the thing.

With Windows, when it’s doing something I don’t want it to, it’s usually a much more straightforward troubleshooting process because often, it’s a problem I can’t solve. The stuff I can change is quicker because I have more experience with Windows, but overall, the experience is much more frustrating because of all the stuff I need to tolerate. It makes it feel like my computer isn’t my own.

I don’t think the person in the OP is necessarily assuming diagnoses. I agree with you that arm-chair diagnosing based on little information is generally a bad thing to be doing. However, there is a disproportionate number of girls and women with undiagnosed/late diagnosed ADHD. People (understandably) put a lot of weight on official diagnoses, but also, institutional bias exists (though has been improving on this front, in recent years)

This isn’t about trusting or distrusting the assessment of doctors. If the daughter in the tweet had been assessed for ADHD and was deemed ineligible for a diagnosis, then I might be more in agreement with your comment. However, the crucial step before being sent for an assessment for ADHD is often an informal one: teachers, family or friends commenting on a child’s behaviours and saying “you should get him/her assessed for ADHD”. Institutional bias is one thing, but sociocultural bias is insidious and hard to challenge. That’s why in my opinion, the person in the OP is doing a positive thing, because the daughter might not have been assessed for ADHD, and if no-one says “have you considered she might have ADHD?”, it’ll stay that way for many years.

I apologise for the wall of text. My intention isn’t to just talk at you, I am genuinely interested to hear your opinions on what I have said, especially if you find some parts of my comment more disagreeable than others.

My analogy that I like to use for this is being able to fit in a box that society has produced for you. Most people can fit in the box and I spent years attempting to fit myself into it. I contorted myself into painful shapes in a desperate attempt to please the world and even when I thought I was doing it right, it was never enough. Properly acknowledging that I will never fit in that box was immensely liberating in the long run.

Sometimes I see people who can fit in the box, but not comfortably, and I experience a mix of pity, and relief. I reflect on how grim my life would’ve been if I had been successful in carving myself into a shape that would fit what had been demanded of me — just because someone can fit in doesn’t mean that that’s good for them. Certainly, it denies one the ability to grow if you’ve already had to cut off parts of yourself to be palatable to the world.

In this light, I feel an odd sense of privilege for having found myself in the people who can’t blend in, despite trying. “Privilege” is definitely the wrong word for this, but I struggle to articulate it otherwise. I think mostly, I’m just glad to finally be free of wasting what little energy I have trying. Even if it changes little in how the world regards me, I’m just glad to no longer think of myself as a broken neurotypical. I don’t know what it means to be a functioning neurodivergent person, but I’m sort of excited to be a part of building that, alongside people like you and many others on this thread and this site.

I’m really happy for you. Big props to the doc who suggested it as a possibility, and for you for persevering long enough to get the diagnosis — it is unfair that you had to struggle for so long, but I am glad that you are now afforded the opportunity to learn how to work with your brain, rather than against it.

What domain of your life did ADHD meds most help with?

I think it is at least in part due to it manifesting differently. This is slightly different because it pertains to autism, but a while back I read about how one of the theories of why autism seems to be lower prevalence is girls is because the social norms of girls/boys are different. For example, young boys tend to socialise with team sports, which can be highly reliant on non-verbal communication. In contrast, because neurotypical girls are (implicitly and explicitly) taught to take on caring roles, an autistic girl is more likely to be “taken under the wing” of a neurotypical girl, providing more opportunities to develop social skills via social mimicry.

I’m just one autistic woman, but this certainly scanned with my lived experience. As a result of this, I wasn’t diagnosed until my teens, after a full on mental breakdown led to a psych eval.

I agree with you that institutional bias plays a huge role: I had a partner who had ADHD and was diagnosed quite young. When we discussed our experiences of the early years of school, I was struck by how similar our experiences were in terms of our behaviour, but how he was read as being a naughty boy (which is what led to his much earlier diagnosis) whereas my distractibility and fidgeting was seen as either me being unstimulated in class, or anxious. I think I’d have probably been diagnosed way sooner if I were a boy acting as I did.

But what’s really interesting to speculate on is the way that my behaviour and understanding of my self changed over the years, as a result of that institutional bias. I think that there’s a self reinforcing cycle at play, where an institutional bias leads to women and girls with ADHD (and/or autism) developing a particular set of masking skills that makes them further illegible to the systems that dispense diagnoses (which then reinforces said institutional bias).

That being said, I’ve noticed a lot of progress in recent years on this front, especially in the community. My friend is a high school teacher who almost certainly has ADHD but is on the very long waitlist for an actual diagnosis. Despite not having a diagnosis, understanding herself better has helped her to cope better in her life, and through community and solidarity, feels that she is better equipped to understand and support neurodivergent students in her classroom. People like my friend are one of the ways that the reinforcing cycle of institutional bias, even if progress on that front is slow.

That’s super interesting, thanks for sharing. Sometimes my friends use the phrase “AuDHDer” (autistic person who also has ADHD) or “ADHDer”.

I agree with you about the phrasing in the post being weird. Do you find that it feels different if it’s said by someone who has ADHD, potentially towards other neurodivergent folk? I ask because whilst I don’t think I really use phrasing “I am ADHD”/“She is ADHD”, I do know that the way I speak about neurodivergence is different when I am amongst other people who are neurodivergent.

I think that there are some groups of people who prefer person-first language. For example, “person with epilepsy” is generally preferred to “epilectic person” (n.b. I do not have epilepsy). I also just looked into the history of person-first language and apparently it first arose in the context of people with AIDS, who were sick of being referred to as “AIDS victims” or similar.

In that light, I can understand why some people prefer person-first language. Myself, I am in accord with the general autistic community in calling myself autistic (as an adjective). Occasionally, amongst friends and kin, I may even call myself “an autistic”.

There are others on this wider thread that capture some of my reasons why: I remember, shortly after I was diagnosed, I pondered whether I would take a cure for autism, if one existed. I concluded that I wouldn’t — not because being autistic was a strictly positive thing for me (it certainly made my life harder in many respects), but because I didn’t think that it would be possible to extricate the autism from what is intrinsically me — in short, any “cure” might as well be death.

I’m getting real tired of invoking Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification” , but if the shoe fits… ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

Enshittification is actually a really useful lens to apply here because late stage enshittification involves the company fucking over its business users, and I’m increasingly seeing that with Amazon. I read a great example recently: apparently a small independent reusable diaper business almost went out of business because of relying on Amazon for fulfillment and logistics: a customer had received a used diaper and was (justifiably) horrified and posted this on social media. It seems that someone else purchased a diaper, used it, and then returned it via Amazon, who then sent it out as new without checking it. Besides just not using Amazon for order fulfillment, there’s nothing the business could’ve done to prevent this, so it sucks that their reputation suffered so much for Amazon’s fuck-up.

Then there’s also the way that Amazon used data from sellers on its platform to create their Amazon Basics range, and then outcompeted those same sellers using its platform advantage.

I genuinely wonder how much longer it can go on for. The only remaining stage of enshittification that Amazon is yet to do is dying, but that feels long overdue. I haven’t checked, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon Web Services is propping up the rest of their business.

I had to do it for the first time last year and I was slightly giddy from the novelty of it.

Once upon a time, a thing happened. And then there was a facsimile of narrative conflict, but everything worked out in the end, because that’s how all the short stories by LLMs seem to work.

This is an excellent comment, thanks for writing this up

I know, right? I bloody love this site and its weirdos

(I realise you may not find such weirdness endearing as I do. This comment is partly a self directed joke because whilst I don’t have Opinions on soil like the person you replied to, I live for that niche nerd internet shit (which is one of the things that makes me weird too)

As a gamer, I was anxious about switching to Linux as my daily driver, but I needed to fully immerse myself to improve at Linux, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how few gaming related problems I’ve had.

I think Larian’s response is them leaning into joke — by replying at all, they’re boosting the original query, but they’re also drawing a line on how far they’re willing to indulge that side of things (officially). I refuse to believe that Larian are actually shocked or perturbed by this question, as their reply suggests, because bear sex is within the game itself, so they’ve definitely fed the fire. Pretending to be confused is part of the joke, I reckon

Proud of your restraint! It’s difficult, but you’re doing well!

#Girlboss