Also, I can look at my notes to see what issues I’d like to discuss at my next therapy session.

I use the #Dailygreatness Journal which is super handy, but all you really need is a notebook and the commitment to do it. dailygreatness.co/collections/...

Highly recommend trying daily reflections.

Wow.

“I am flawed. I am, in part, broken. Not by my autism, but by my insistence on fighting it and by the stresses it places on me. My being different from most people around me—and the years of living a life not meant for me—have taken their toll.” - Laura James, Odd Girl Out
#ActuallyAutistic ♾️

"Neurotypical syndrome is a neurobiological disorder characterized by preoccupation with social concerns, delusions of superiority, and obsession with conformity. There is no known cure."

- #ActuallyAutistic Laura Tisoncik @webmuskie.bsky.social, in Steve Silberman's book, NeuroTribes.

Love it!

I don't really understand anxiety. My therapist recommended I watch the movie Inside Out 2. So, I did.

Anxiety played a major role. She was strong, and influential, and had a tendency to spin out of control. Honestly, I found it anxiety-inducing just to watch. Urgh.

#ActuallyAutistic

Steve Silberman's book, NeuroTribes, describes how #ActuallyAutistic kids were clinically diagnosed in the west in the early 1900s. It’s fascinating, informative, and tragic. The missed opportunities and misguided theories driven by the egos of a few investigators fills me with rage and sorrow.

Random anecdote from Steve Silberman's book NeuroTribes hits home, "... the fathers and grandfathers of children with autism were more likely to be engineers."

My grandfather, father, and mother were all engineers. Hmmmm. ♾️

#ActuallyAutistic

("The valley" in the full quote is Silicon Valley, CA.)

Credit to Temple Grandin and her uncanny ability to visualize things, which she describes in her book, Thinking in Pictures, for putting me on this train of thought.

Looking back, I wonder why they didn't just use writing in a different language, preferably a language with different characters that the volunteers were not likely to recognize, like Arabic.

But then, this was waaay before Google.

I once signed up to help adults learn to read. Part of our training aimed to make us volunteers experience the discomfort of being illiterate. We were asked to read aloud from a piece of paper with mirror image writing on it. No one could do it, except me. I thought it was easy.

#ActuallyAutistic

"... the behavioral inflexibility seen in autism may result from genes that diminish forgetting."

"... benefits of forgetting: creativity, self-reinvention, mental clarity, big-idea thinking, forgiveness, the updating of knowledge, and the reduction of post-traumatic stress."

#ActuallyAutistic

You never know where Autistics will show up!

The Dec. 2024 issue of Trout Unlimited's magazine, "Trout" has an article about an autistic man who hires a fishing guide to flyfish for trout in Idaho. Both guys did a great job of talking through needs and expectations beforehand.

#ActuallyAutistic

I credit Clara Törnvall's book The Autists for inspiring this train of thought. She included a quote from Robert Bresson (a 1950s French film director), "Nine-tenths of our movements obey habit and automatism. It is anti-nature to subordinate them to will and to thought."

Late-diagnosed, adult-diagnosed #ActuallyAutistic people are so accustomed to being masked, their true selves are invisible *even to themselves*.

See excerpt from Clara Törnvall's book, The Autists.

A few days later, the bear arrived. He's wonderful. He gets me. (Ha!) He’s very good at hugs and cuddling. I named him Smudge, because of the mark on his nose.

Visit 1: I told my therapist I wondered if I was Autistic. She recommended Katherine May's "The Electricity of Every Living Thing." So much of her story resonated with me. "It seems to me now that it's not that I fail to manage the simplest challenges, but that I pass too well." #ActuallyAutistic

Visit 1: I told my therapist about my growing introversion and reactivity. She said it sounded like I wanted to move toward flexibility. That hit me hard. I reacted strongly (no surprise), laughing, "I could be FLEXIBLE?!?" Later, I reflected, if flexibility felt so foreign, then I must be rigid.

2.5 years ago, I saw a sign in O'Hare Airport that said "Sensory sensitivity is a sign of autism". I thought, really? *I'm* sensitive to sensory input. And my family has some autistic tendencies. Might *I* be on the spectrum? I took a photo and didn't think much more about it. #ActuallyAutistic