I’ve had to be the lead technical advisor on a process refinement activity at work. We have some other consultants helping guide the conversation with our vendor who has a lot of problems in their process that our clients are unhappy with.

Needless to say, i’m your guy for a process discussion but maybe not the best at dealing with a bunch of neurotypical social dressing amongst a bunch of folks that I don’t work closely with.

Working sessions were LONG and informationally dense and, while I was able to get great results on our process work, it became pretty evident that folks were increasingly treating me according to the social standing that I enjoy as an autistic person. Of course, I understand this well and wasn’t overly bothered.

Usually I just let these things slide because its usually pretty trivial and not worth the trouble, and ive never been great at punishing poor treatment in a way that leaves me clean in the exchange.

Well we got to the end if the exercise and I was surprised to find that ‘someone’ would now need to make a 20-slide presentation to the bosses and the whole group about everything we did and that it was already scheduled. That someone was obviously meant to be me in this situation and so I let them know if I were to do it that I would need more time to prepare than was being given. (I need to write a script, run through it, revise it for it to be consumable by NTs. Especially when there is a lot of people attending.) What followed was all manner of badgering and belittling attempts to pressure me into doing it as and when prescribed. But I just stuck with my stance until a colleague less versed in the issues volunteered out of what I assume to be feeling uncomfortable by me not caving to the pressure.

I thanked him privately and explained that it was just an autism thing and I needed more runway for prep. They could have let me know any time along this workshop that I would need to also do this and I could have done the work to be ready as needed.

In any case, we were given the opportunity to give feedback for the experience to the consultants: what went well, what was tricky, what could be improved and of course they asked me last.

I gave them positive sounding feedback in all areas, i mean, largely we accomplished what we set out to do.. but I did have notes for improvement that as a person with accessibility requirements and specific needs, not having any expectations communicated about what ‘next steps’ might entail as we worked through the exercises throughout did not let me properly prepare for the work that might be needed.

They immediately did a 180 in attitude. I also got a very prompt follow up call where they were oh-so-pleasant and they apologized (and made excuses ofc)

Even so, I could tell they felt like jackasses and I never lost my cool one bit as I explained I just needed a heads up and prep time, but that they would have to present themselves if they wanted to stay on that schedule. Of course they can tag me in for context and commentary.

Bonus is I outted myself as disabled to a ton of folks who had no idea.. and it feels good.

I think, in some ways, the Lemmy autistic community is the most reasonable and balanced-perspective collective of ASD folks that I've found online so far. It might be the only one that I can really say I've found in my own experience.

Other spaces seem to get overtaken by obsession and negativity to an unhealthy degree. Which, of course, I understand but sad to see it drown out positive posts all-too-often. It's odd, because I figured it would require a lot of active moderating to achieve what we seem to have here.

Anyway, to the post topic.

I lived a life as a thoroughly miserable autistic person until I was 33, I'm 43 now. Once driven by a envious, misanthropic, self-toxic ego that was desperate to protect itself from pain and shame; I can understand how deeply entrenched your personality can become affected by negative patterns and to start from a position of very little effective supports. I now consider myself to be a pretty optimistic and resilient person. Context to understand my follwing thoughts.

What I need to live a good life:

1. I need to take responsibility for changing what I can within myself

This is really fundamental, and pretty difficult depending on what your starting mindset is. It's true that a lot of the conditional aspects of life that give me difficulty are not my fault, but focusing on that to any significant degree will make it a barrier to self-change. In the simplest sense, blame of any kind is a blocker to taking responsibility and when my thoughts and words tell a story of blame (whether towards myself, others, the world) then I try to figure out how to use that story as a prompt to act responsibly.

2. I need one person who understands me and believes in me

A person. More would be nice, maybe, but one is all I need. I realize that's still a pretty big hurdle given that practically all of us are living isolated kinds of realities, but its a numbers game. Do the work to meet other neurodivergent people in a way that might allow for a connection, expect nearly all of those interactions may be misses anyway. It doesn't have to be neurodivergent people, but from my perspective it's gonna save a lot of time. I never thought there was anyone in the world who was like me, part of what drove my misery, and finding someone similar and supportive helped me do difficult self-work and helped pick me up whenever failures and setbacks happened. A good fit in therapy can help here too, but thats its own journey to find the right person.

3. I need to understand my specific autistic needs and limitations

I started my self-work from the position of being undiagnosed. I didn't really even begin to consider the possibility that I was autistic until the COVID pandemic, and I eventually got assessed in 2022. The pandemic really opened my eyes because all of the social changes that came about in society (lockdown, physical distancing, wearing masks, etc) came as a massive relief to my day-to-day instead as a painful imposition to endure. That offered me a lot of clues to investigate and led me to understand how my social and environmental needs are very different from the norm, effectivley matching the autistic template. Really, for the first time I could believe there was a framework and others out there with a shared kind of experience where understanding myself could be achieved. I think this is ongoing work for me, to understand myself and others like me, especially because I lived so much of my life trying to fit the neurotypical culture and behaviour template. When you don't know you're autistic, there's a high risk of trying to mask as neurotypical beyond your capacity to do so. The burnout from that can be catastrophic and life-changing, but luckily I was able to draw upon items #1 and #2 from this list to heal and remake myself into a healthy person instead of it driving me the other way into (probably) my own end.

4. I need to accept that I am autistic

Again, fighting my societal programming here. I expect myself to easily be able to do a lot of things that are commonly in reach for most people but the list of things that I forgive myself for is growing. That doesn't mean I abdicate my responsibilty to try or to work on those things, but understanding that there is a different path, a different level of support required, and a different definition of success for those things lets me take responsibility for them. It also helps me do the work of forgiveness more broadly. I forgive myself for the things that are totally out of my control, forgive others for their misjudgements and unfair expectaions, forgive myself for when I feel the old feelings again that once held me back.

5. I need to behave according to my actual values and needs

Figuring out what these are and putting them into practice is what taking responsibility looks like. Keeping a reflective and honest eye on myself to ensure that I'm not falling into the complacency of self-delusion that this kind of work should ever end. It's easy to do that. To make significant milestone accomplishments that lead you to rest for too long, satisfied that becoming a relatively better person than you were is enough to carry you forwards indefinitely. No, I've learned that leads to a backslide. To be a better person, you must resist the idea that you are one and always work to become one... whatever that may look like, in all areas of life.

To wrap up this post...

Okay, so thats my thoughts on what I need for a good life. Of course there are specific actions that I take to make this a reality. Those actions are evidence of me taking responsibility and fulfilling my values and needs and, if you are starting from a place of negative blackhole self-esteem, doing so can bring you a healthy self and way of being in a world that seems to naturally discourage that for you.

I hope you are having a good day today.

For me, it's the near-universal social rejection. To a large degree, I've learned how to live with it, accept it, not blame myself or others too much. It's not always a bad thing, either, or not as bad as it might seem.. there are positives.

But it is easily the thing that adversely affect my life the most. Every group rejects me, eventually, if not immediately. Every friend becomes unfriendly, many work relationships are strained. Finding a way to be okay when it seems like everyone would rather you just go away.

Today, it feels more difficult than usual but I know I will feel better soon. I wish I had some ND friendships to help me recharge. It's funny, I left a comment on another post on how to best deal with this kind of thing but, honestly, my capacity to be resilient is not so great rn. Hopeful it will be better tomorrow.

Sad to see. We should all know cloudlfare decrypts our data before it reaches the service it protects. A perfect surveillance man-in-the-middle.

I was happy to find a home in the fediverse that uses Anubis instead.

https://anubis.techaro.lol/