Something I did as a kid was order my books. I went through various systems. By author, by subject area, etc. I'd get an idea and take all my books off the shelf and put them back up in the new system. I'd get another idea months later, and try that one. My first job was in college working in the library as a student assistant.

My daughter complains about how her mother (my wife) constantly asks her and I to do things for her that don't take a lot of effort. Like, walk the 10 steps from the living room to the freezer or pantry. To find her phone. To get her coffee because it's cold or she doesn't want to dress for outside. My kid wants to know why she can't just do it herself.

I see content, usually from women, about how men, primarily husbands, don't have friends. Most men I know have friends. I don't. I feel like it should be pretty typical for autistic men not to have friends. Difficulties with social cues, theory of mind, and environments where one meets people strike me as a big reason why autistic men struggle making friends.

The difficult part of marriage seems to be that I operate with a mask. Well, a husband/father mask around my wife and kid. Also, their need for socializing means more usage of my social mask. As a bachelor, I would just isolate myself when I felt exhausted from masking too much. It was easy enough to just disappear as needed. Well, not at work, but everywhere else.

This stanza caught my eye from Relationships on the Inside I Am Crying poem blog: I read a lot of books growing up, and later as a young adult, especially when I needed to escape. I learned even more about relationships through their pages. By my teens, I felt ready—eager, even—to date. I had gathered information from so many places. My peers were all becoming interested in relationships too.

Daily writing prompt Where can you reduce clutter in your life? View all responses Where can I? Dunno. Where *SHOULD* I? Almost everywhere. The issue I encounter is that objects have meaning to me. They are associated with certain feelings. They are mnemonics, so they a physical prompts to the memories of things in my life. My grandmother gave me this teddy bear for the Valentine's Day before she died.

There was a miscommunication at work. The client told us to "rollback" some code, which is jargon for put the prior version into place. At the same time, they attached a new version. In the verbal discussion, we noted that because it was a roll back, the director could give immediate approval because it's already approved code being put back. No objections.

I feel like there's not enough discussion about cortisol and sleep. I see so much stuff about people having racing thoughts at night, which to me sounds like stress and anxiety. It's probably causing elevated cortisol. Cortisol is what wakes us in the morning. If it's elevated when we are trying to sleep, it's not going to happen. My wife has for years put an earbud in her ear and listened to the same audiobook.

Most of my life, people have told me that I should be a teacher. They see me infodump on some topic I know more than most, and think that I am a good explainer. Plenty of random areas where that applies. My best general mask is random expert on a narrow topic most people know little about. I guess people feel like I taught them something in a way they felt comfortable.

I tend to favor bottom up processing. I look at details, make connections about how things are related, and build in my head how something works. This mainly involves comparing details to existing understanding. This bottom up thinking is supposedly common for autistics. It makes me good at my job. I know how the under the hood parts ought to work.

Spoon Theory is a way of explaining ego depletion in a chronic illness context. The idea is each decision or activity consumes one or more spoons. When we run out, we aren't capable of dealing. Mosy people have enough spoons until they hit something like a cold or flu or worse. They take a break from life to recover. People with a chronic illness essentially are in the sick state most of the time without the opportunity to take a sick day.

Saw where someone called routines closed system loops, and that resonated for me. Autistics could like routines because we feel comfortable not having to make more changes about ourselves than others. This makes transitions more disruptive, which makes them harder for us than for others. Working in IT, I appreciate consistency, predictability, and routine. I prefer a weekly or daily meeting after I understand the cadence and requirements than an ad hoc.

Ever since my autism diagnosis six years ago, I’ve struggled with my identity. After years of masking my autistic traits, I wasn’t even sure who I really was underneath it all. It’s taken many years…

I think the thing that's frustrating reading about all this emotional intelligence, emotional regulation, etc stuff is that I do all this stuff. I didn't have a name for it, but I do it. The problem seems to be that it's not enough. Like, there's something else above and beyond all this stuff that makes it all ineffective.

A YouTube video hit what it feels like to be me pretty hard: You start something, get momentum, and then it just disappears. It's not that you forgot, it's that the threads slipped away before you could tie it to anything. You crave structure, but you cannot hold on to it. You try new systems, and they work for a while...

I'm interested in figuring out how to improve my emotional regulation. I have these big feelings that are exploding and causing problems within my marriage. The trigger isn't really the problem. It's the other things underneath that created a powder keg that the trigger lit that's the problem. Those things underneath are feelings. But, I don't often have a clue what I am feeling.

Something that's resonated with me ever since I learned about it is this idea that we exhaust our willpower over the course of the day. Every choice requiring self-control uses up the willpower. Resting restores that willpower. It's a controversial effect in psychology circles, but it resonates with people in the popularized concept called Spoon Theory. The trick though, is it's not settled science whether it really exists.

Gil Gerard, the star of 'Buck Rogers in the 25th Century' who battled cancer, advised, "Don’t waste your time on anything that doesn’t thrill you or bring you love"

My wife packed me leftover soup from last night to take to work for lunch. It's good beef and bean soup. It was good not to have to think about it. I was going to grab one of the salads I got the other night for lunch today. Photo by Navada Ra on Pexels.com For lunch at work, the only microwaves are in the breakroom.

Something I've been struggling with of late is that verbal conversation that gets personal devolves into defensiveness and hiding in layers. I'm more likely to lash out than it achieve any kind of revelation. I easily write about personal stuff in quasi-anonymous environments. I talk about my feelings on things in blogs and toots and skeets. Things I'd not bring up in person.

My intention in writing the DSM post started in leaving a few comments about psychological professionals focusing on illness and developmental issues. They help people with problems. I touched on it, but I left out: the whole point of the DSM is getting people assistance who need it. What I see in neurodivergent circles is supporting each other. Completely different complementary mindsets.

Something I struggle with people who don't have a degree in psychology thinking about mental illnesses is the concept of the DSM. People struggling with a thing get frustrated by aspects of their problem behaviors missing from the DSM. I think there are some key reasons: "Diagnostic" means a listing of criteria useful for evaluation to determine if the person meets the criteria.

YouTube video by Triggernometry

Thinking this morning about how my information acquisition focuses on processes and the workflow. I want to know what this physical item or abstract concept does and how it is affected by and affects others. It permeates my thinking to the very core. It's my mnemonic system for retention and recall. Everything has a workflow, and I think about that as I do things.

Reading this sounds quite a bit like my daughter. She loves certain songs, and feels a compelling need to dance and jump and perform acrobatics while listening to them. While the whole house shakes, when I can I want to her to feel uplifted doing. Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com One of my main stims, since I’ve been a very, very, young Autistic Person, has been revolving around music: singing, humming, dancing…