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neuroliminality.bsky.social
Sam (formerly Barisan Hantu) 🇸🇬🍉
@neuroliminality.bsky.social
3K followers 1.1K following 2.8K posts
AuDHD | Neurodivergent | Neuroliminal
Mainstream and SPED teacher
Chinese Singaporean
They/Them

neuroliminality.carrd.co/#
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neuroliminality.bsky.social
www.amazon.sg/dp/180388211...
Autistic Masking: Understanding identity management and the role of stigma
April 1, 2025 at 2:45 AM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
Essentially, I think it's quite useful to reframe rigidity and inflexibility as a need for coherence.
How do we explain autistic behaviour? As the article points out, the facets of rigidity need to be explained separately and conceptually dissociated. We may not be able to reduce rigidity to cognitive inflexibility. We should consider autistic individuals as unique individuals. This means that there are many autistic traitsand facets ofautistic behaviour that require us to consider: -their individual needs and desires -their personality and interests -their rich emotional lives Knowing what autism is one thing. Knowing an autistic person as an individual is another. ----- PAGE 6 ----- Challenging Neuronormativity With discussions of neuroaffirming language, a common mistake is to think only in terms of positive vs negative language. There is a balance to be struck with acknowledging challenges and disability. Moreover, there is a more fundamental and pressing goal of challenging Neuronormativity. Deficit framings presume neurotypical standards to be desirable. Hence, when we reframe neurodivergent traits and suggest shifts in language, we should also consider whether it: -accurately reflects the internal neurodivergent experience,and -presumes the possibility of competence, especially when appropriate support is provided. ---- PAGE 7 ----- Reframing Rigidity “Rigidity” in the context of autism is used to suggest that an autistic person is unreasonably resistant to change. However, autistic individuals can have very good reasons for wanting things to stay the same. Routines can help us to avoid autistic overwhelm (e.g. reducing cognitive load, following a path to avoid sensory triggers), regulate anxiety and manage task demands. I would also like to suggest that cognitive inflexibility is also often a strong need for internal coherence. Rigidity suggests an autistic person is unable to adapt to the external environment. I often find it meaningful to first establish what the internal expectations the autistic person has and how this motivates their desire to create coherence for themselves. Only then will we be able to consider how this does or does not align with the external environment. Of course, given the varied aspects of rigidity, this cannot comprehensively cover all the facets listed earlier. ---- PAGE 8 ----- @neuroliminality Learn stuff with me. Do not perceive me.
March 29, 2025 at 12:33 PM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
Since I've gotten some questions about the idea of the need for internal coherence, I should probably cross post this.
----- PAGE 1 ----- Breaking Down Autistic Rigidity @neuroliminality ----- PAGE 2 ----- Don't Break Down, Just Break It Down Breaking down has two possible meanings: -taking apart by force -to analyse and examine in smaller parts In my experience, neuronormative approaches tend to take the first approach to breaking down autistic rigidity. This means attempting to coerce autistic people out of their “rigid” patterns. Without first unpacking and analysing what rigidity might mean, however, I find that such approaches fail to understand the underlying mechanisms behind apparently rigid behaviour and thinking. Furthermore, I would like to explore what it would mean to move away from a deficit framing of rigidity. ----- PAGE 3 ----- The concept of rigidity is not well-defined I hear the term “rigid” being used frequently to describe autistic people. However, even in the literature, this concept has not received much systematic discussion. One possible and common explanation for rigidity is cognitive inflexibility which can be measured by: -the ability to switch between tasks and demands -the readiness with which one can switch between mental processes However, as Petrolini et al. suggest, such an explanation might be incomplete: “Research does not support the claim that cognitive inflexibility has a cascade effect that could explain the appearance of other rigidity facets.” Petrolini, V., Jorba, M., & Vicente, A. (2023). What does it take to be rigid? Reflections on the notion of rigidity in autism. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 14, 1072362. ----- PAGE 4 ----- Aspects of Autistic Rigidity The article identifies the following facets of rigidity in autistic individuals: Fixed/special interests: interests in autistic individuals differ both qualitatively and in terms of intensity from interests of non-autistic individuals Insistence on sameness and routines/rituals: driven by the “anxiously obsessive desire for the maintenance of sameness” (Kanner) Intolerance of uncertainty: difficulty in dealing with ambiguity, or the tendency to react negatively to uncertain situations and events Black-and-white mentality: being extreme in evaluations of people and actions, or an inability to see nuances and gray areas in one's own or other people’s thinking or behavior Strict adherence to rules: being stricter when it comes to tolerating exceptions to rules Literalism: bias toward understanding figurative uses of language in a literal way Weak central coherence: difficulties in grasping the gist of something because they are absorbed by the details Issues with task-switching: inability to shift between different thoughts or actions, and to disengage from irrelevant tasks to engage in relevant ones
March 29, 2025 at 12:33 PM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
The timing of this Dropout episode is impeccable
Vic Michaelis and Paul Robalino looking concerned as their characters in Very Important People. Paul's character, a hacker, has just hacked into the President's laptop and asks "And this folder here is called Watergate Two?"
March 28, 2025 at 2:51 PM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
Post a fictional character who you think would be an antivaxxer.

Hard mode: No villains

(too easy)
White Lotus cast from Season 1 The Ratcliffe family from White Lotus Season 3
March 20, 2025 at 12:42 AM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
Milchik asks Mark S: "Do you know how to make eye contact, Mark?" Autistic people (represented by Mark): Makes a facial expression with his brows slightly raised. He is attempting to make his eyes kind based on original scene but looks uncomfortable. Milchik: *looks judgemental Autistic people: looks confused and disturbed, his brows uneven and furrowed
March 11, 2025 at 11:40 AM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
Why are you doing the meme
Britta from Community says "I can excuse racism but I draw the line at animal cruelty"
March 9, 2025 at 9:46 PM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
Neurotypicals trying to sort autistic people into bins
What Are The Four Kinds of Numbers? As a Macrodata Refiner, it is important to learn the four different types of numbers you will encounter throughout the process of refining a data set. Every number will elicit one of four emotional responses within you, and it is important to be aware of the four types so that you can more quickly assess and categorize your emotional response. This will, in turn, allow you to more quickly sort the numbers into their appropriate bins. Here, Sevy will teach you about the different types of numbers. 1 WO (Sevy character with a sad face) These numbers elicit melancholy or despair. 2 FC (Sevy character with an open smile) These numbers elicit joy, gaiety or ecstasy. 3 Dr (Sevy character with a look of fear) These numbers elicit fear, anxiety or apprehension. 4. MA (Sevy character with an angry look) These numbers elicit rage or a desire to do harm.
March 6, 2025 at 4:16 AM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
Evergreen
Image of a little girl looking pensive. She is wearing a cream t-shirt or sweater with snoopy characters on it. The text below reads: I wish I was a cat no school no work just meow meow
March 3, 2025 at 6:06 AM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
Just saw this on Instagram that accurately describes how I feel about the issue (as an autistic individual, a SPED teacher and a parent)
Screenshot of an Instagram video. User itsthatparent adding spices to a pot as she cooks. Text reads: This week, a national tabloid magazine cut my comments from an article-because I wouldn't share personal stories about my kids. Speaking out about how the education system is failing neurodivergent children is so important, but it constantly pushes against our boundaries as parents around privacy and consent. I just wish we didn't have to expose our children's hardest moments to get the engagement this issue deserves.
March 1, 2025 at 12:04 PM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
I'll be hiding behind a book One thing I struggled most with: Greetings Greetings, as I've mentioned before, are difficult for me. I generally find it hard to initiate social interactions. Given that my command of the Chinese language isn't great, this makes it even harder. Tell me to greet my elders and some part of my brain goes "Well, now I'm definitely not doing it. I can't". One thing that helped me cope: Books I started having a book with me wherever I went at a pretty young age. Not only did this dissuade people from interacting with me, reading is seen as an academic activity, which tends to be praised in Chinese culture. I only learnt that bringing books to weddings might not be the most appropriate as an adult! Do... autistic people survive CNY? Admittedly, I got through most CNYs but not every autistic person or child will be able to. Some things that autistic adults and children might struggle with during CNY celebrations: - large numbers of people in small spaces - interacting with unfamiliar relatives who expect - physical contact and greater social intimacy - multiple changes in environments as you move from home to home - sensory issues: the sounds of mahjong, people playing games, lion dance music (thankfully we don't do firecrackers here) - changes in plans for the day and being out for long periods of time Not every autistic person will be able to participate in CNY without getting overwhelmed. Cultural factors in discussing autism Sitting out the holidays in eurocentric cultures seems to be less of an issue, but CNY is at once a massive series of festivities as well as a familial obligation. Being unable to go through with all the visitations (which is increasingly true for me) can be equated with being unfilial and neglecting your family. Moreover, not every autistic person (or their family) wants to miss out on the 热闹 (excitement) of CNY. As an autistic person, I find that I struggle more with the hierarchical and duty-driven aspects of Chinese culture than with the social pleasantries other autistic people from other countries describe. Hence, seeing autism through a multicultural lens will give us better insight into what autism actually is, rather than a set of social deficits primarily defined through Western culture. Learn stuff with me. Do not perceive me. @neuroliminality
February 2, 2025 at 10:15 AM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
Happy CNY! I still struggle with cross posting 😭
Happy Year of the Snake! What is CNY like for an autistic person? Celebrating Chinese New Year can be... a lot Chinese New Year can be overwhelming, even for the neurotypicals. It's no wonder that as an autistic person, I live in fear of the annual affair that is CNY. My thought process every Chinese New Year (An old meme about being taken hostage: Surviving your first hostage situation. 1. Stay Calm. 2. Call your mother. 3. Test car auto-lock 4. Play the race card: "Is it because I'm Chinese?") We... need to do this? Look, maybe you don't understand the chaos My extended family is huge. Celebrating Chinese New Year used to mean going to visit almost all of them in the span of three days. This includes my grandparents, uncles and aunties on both my paternal and maternal sides, but also my grandfather's sisters' families and my grandmother's siblings. At the minimum, this meant visiting 7 different homes on the first day alone. I don't remember signing up to speed run the whole of Singapore every year. How are we related again? I might get into some trouble for this but... With so many relatives, it's sometimes an annual affair of meeting strangers whom you're related to. It's hard to track the names of people and how we're related. I recall that when I was very young, meeting so many relatives was a little scary, especially since their interactions could be a little aggressive (e.g. putting me on their lap to play mahjong). Small talk as you get older feels more and more like a progress update: - how are you doing in school? - have a girlfriend yet? - when are you getting married? - when are you having kids?
February 2, 2025 at 10:15 AM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
This still from Doechii's Denial is a River series has so much meme potential I just don't know for what yet
Zach Fox crying in a straw hat with the subtitles "cries in Spanish"
January 30, 2025 at 8:24 AM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
Going back to twitter only for the explicit purpose of taking potshots at Elon Musk. Proud to be the number 1 most dedicated Elon Musk hater in the world. No one can take the title away from me
Do you remember when you joined X? I do. Back when it was still called Twitter! Go to back to hell where you came from Elon Musk!
January 30, 2025 at 4:28 AM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
Like the dinnerless dinner parties from Severance?
5 characters from Severance sit around a table with placemats but only glasses of water
January 25, 2025 at 1:03 AM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
Sorry I forget people don't know every single pop culture reference I have in my head
The Bear Season 2 poster: picture of the cast arranged around food and the restaurant at the bottom of the poster
January 20, 2025 at 12:53 PM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
I really think of neurodiversity as an exercise of the imagination, specifically the neurodivergent imagination
The Impact of the Neurodiversity Movement The landscape of autism and neurodiversity discourse has shifted drastically in just the last four years. I've seen large strides happen for my autistic and/or ADHD friends and their communities overseas, while watching very little progress happen in Singapore. I am shaped by the fact that I encountered autistic students first, before figuring out that I am autistic. What seemed foreign and bizarre about my students to others always seemed to make sense to me. As it dawned on me that I am autistic, I began to understand that how autism is described from the outside begins with so many wrong premises and assumptions about how to interpret behaviour and communication that the internal worlds of autistic people were very poorly understood. People seem to take it for granted now in the international community that the inner worlds of autistic people can and should be understood. I wish we had that luxury here too. Revisiting Neurodiversity Perhaps it's simply that the world is not a hospitable place for autistic people to begin with. For allistic people who have not experienced the distress of unpredictability, of sensory overwhelm and of having meltdown, autistic behaviours can just seem inconvenient and difficult to manage. But as an autistic person myself, all I ever see is autistic children and teenagers in distress, without the ability to understand why, communicate their needs or figure out how others can help them. I know because I grew up the same way before starting to find my answers. Without a frame of reference for the internal workings of autism, we won't be able to support them. I don't have all the answers for every autistic person because autism is so incredibly heterogeneous. But I hope to share the answers I have found so that living and growing up can hurt a little less for them. So the way I see it is that neurodiversity owes quite a bit to the advocacy of Jim Sinclair. Neurodiversity is about radically re-envisioning how we think about, talk about and imagine what it means to be neurodivergent, especially from an internal perspective rather than one that assumes we are defective. NEURODIVERSITY IS IMAGINING AND EMBRACING DIFFERENT WAYS OF BEING
January 19, 2025 at 8:50 AM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
I've been struggling a bit to find my voice on a more visual platform like Instagram but I think I like my latest post about neurodiversity-lite and some issues with how the neurodiversity movement is going
NEURODIVERSITY IS NOT AN AESTHETIC NEURODIVERSITY IS NOT ERASING DISABILITY NEURODIVERSITY IS NOT ABOUT BEING PALATABLE Neurodiversity-Lite What neurodiversity isn't but seems to have become, in my opinion, has to do with the emergence of what we might call neurodiversity-lite, which is a phenomenon others have observed and described for a while now. It is important to understand the origins of the neurodiversity movement and how it is essentially about the rights of autistic people to be understood on our terms. Neurodiversity-lite, especially how it has evolved on social media, has scoped the focus of the movement to a specific subset of autistic people, emphasising marketable solutions rather than actual advocacy for disabled autistic people. I do think that autistic people should be allowed to exist in all the different ways we exist, which is to say that it can be surprising even to autistic people how other autistic people present, behave and live. But we don't have to tear one another down for that. The last thing I hope autistic people do is to repeat the violence the world so often inflicts on us, only on one another.
January 19, 2025 at 8:50 AM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
No kidding
Graph showing that the name Aslynn peaked at 23 in 2011. It ranges from 5 to 23 per million babies.
January 18, 2025 at 11:10 PM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
Admittedly the rest of my thread was a rambly mess
Literacy is a privilege. Reading is a privilege. I'm perplexed by leftists who claim it isn't, because disability and education are two core working class issues. The two things are privileges precisely because there are systemic barriers to both.
January 17, 2025 at 2:05 AM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
Most concering to me were stats on education

"Only about three in 10 support education for children with disabilities to focus on allowing them to reach their fullest academic potential possible rather than just focussing on providing them with basic skills to be independent"
Level of comfort with students in different scenarios. There was strong discomfort towards student with dyslexia, autism, down syndrome, ADD/ADHD, cerebral palsy and poor motivation/disruptive tendencies.
December 26, 2024 at 4:40 AM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
Concerns in social spaces:
Most cited was the concern that they would not know how to respond if people with disabilities require assistance. This point accounted for 42.4% of all concerns raised (see Figure 19 below). Not knowing how to interact with people with disabilities accounted for another 37% while fears that interactions with people with disabilities would be dangerous made up a further 19.6%.
December 26, 2024 at 4:36 AM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
Concerns about inclusion in the workplace:
Most cited was the perceived difficulty in making special arrangements to effectively accommodate people with disabilities in places of work. This point accounted for 34.2% of all concerns raised (see Figure 17 below). Not knowing how to work with people with disabilities accounted for another 32.1% while worries that people with disabilities would not be able to fit in made up a further 20.4%. The fear that working with people with disabilities would put respondents in danger comprised another 11%.
December 26, 2024 at 4:34 AM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
This lives permanently in my head honestly bc I am a bit of both
Hayao Miyazaki and Junji Ito being contrasted as artists with their art. Hayao Miyazaki is a gloomy man who makes cheerful art while Junji Ito is the opposite.
December 26, 2024 at 2:47 AM
neuroliminality.bsky.social
As an educator I feel like this is something that perplexes me and compels me all the time like - what stops people from learning?
It makes no damn sense. Compels me though.
December 25, 2024 at 11:19 PM