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I walk into a room and hear things. I hear lights and fridges, heaters, cellphones vibrating on floors above me. It's a cacafony of endless clicks and ticks and humms and beeps and whirs that seemingly no one else notices.
Cats make good sounds though. The merps and meeps and jorps and mreeps and mrops and purrs are nice.
The worst is the whine from cheap chargers and power banks. Ive resorted to buying a few of my coworkers new/ better chargers in order to give myself some peace.
I've a friend who has nothing but IKEA TRÅDFRI lightbulbs. Each and every one of these has a subtle coil whine, and stepping into his home is like stepping into a rainforest, but unpleasant. He doesn't hear a single peep from them, but to me it's hella grating. The noise changes depending on what light it's emitting, as well as the brightness. The worst is when the light is off.
Ewwwwww. I want to die just reading that.
Try firing up a CRT display. I'm 40 and I can still hear that fucking electronic whine from several rooms away.
I knew the scanner had failed before anyone tried using it because I heard it start making a high pitched whine.
How dare you forget the tiny motorcycle sounds.
They're S tier.
Its existence isn't settled science, but I have this too and I've found that Auditory Processing Disorder describes it perfectly. Lots of comorbidity with autism and ADHD, so it's possible it's not a separate disorder but just another manifestation.
But yeah, I can't filter out background noise at all. My brain copes by completely shutting off audio processing when I'm focusing, but it's involuntary and can be pretty inconvenient. I have to read lips a lot when talking anywhere but a quiet environment because I can't separate speech from background noise.
God help you if you need to convey the pattern you recognize though, then language as a tool will escape your grasp
I use a lot of hand gestures to make up for it. It does not help at all.
The thing will do a whatchamacallit, just wait you!
Or it doesn't escape your grasp but it gets actively ignored by people who see your eccentricities as being indicative that you're less than them. Including other autistic people.
Or knowing precisely what point people are attempting to make five words into the first sentence and then politely having to sit there and wait for the next five minutes while they laboriously meander their way through it.
This is a dangerous "skill" to have, though. Very easy to slip into the trap of assuming you know what they're talking about, only to have them end on a different point than you expected and then suddenly you're responding to a point they never actually made
How about being a witness to a conversation between two others and you can tell neither of them understand the point the other is trying to make.
Bonus points for when they actually agree with each other but just haven't put together what the other is saying.
I love that actually. It doesn't happen often, but when it does I go “hold on, A, you're trying to say x, but B understands y, whereas B tries to say v and you understand w”
Always leads to the most flabbergasted double stare when they realize I'm 100% right and they'd have talked past each other for hours.
Sometimes with an undertone of “but I wanted a fight” by one of them.
I can’t do it. I try so hard but I interrupt every time and then they say “that’s not what I mean will you let me finish” then I have to sit quietly while it was exactly what they meant.
It’s critically important to develop patience here in order to deal with people getting older and taking this to the next level
My mom is a great person whom I dearly love but she’s fallen into the stereotype of old people rambling. Nothing is a simple question or statement anymore. It’s always a long meandering story with lots of detours
I have double powers as I’m neurodivergent and grew up in a highly traumatic household so you learn to pick on tiny signs that it’s about to pop off. Feel my life is fight or flight at all times.
Entire too relatable. I grew up in much the same way. Having that feeling as my baseline, my "normal", made everything else feel wrong, but I could never fully put my finger on why. I developed a sense of stoicism so that I could get through each day showing as little outward reaction as possible. However, I confused that stoicism for calmness and stability; inside my mind everything still roiled as my instincts and senses were always watching and waiting, preparing for the next time things became dangerous.
Decades of living with that level of hypervigilance paired with the effort needed to put forward a stoic exterior has worn me down. The physical symptoms of chronic mental and emotional exhaustion are debilitating; the body really does pay a toll for the mind's wounds. Maybe if twenty years ago I had the knowledge and resources that I do now, I could have done something to stave off what I'm going through.
All this to say: if you aren't already, please seek counseling as soon as possible. Don't make the same mistake I did; just like the smoker who denies that their habit it harmful, if you don't work to heal your psychological wounds now, then it will eventually catch up to you. Be well, and take care of yourself.
I became so good at masking because of coming from a environment where my needs weren't met and my true self wasn't safe to exist. I was often more concerned about making sure my parents didn't pop off that I developed an unhealthy way of looking at the world where I put the needs of others above myself - to the point of complete self destruction in front of people who cared about me.
Over the years I finally realised what was going on, but it took being with another person who also has autism and C-PTSD to observe the behaviours in one another and finally take control. In some ways it is a little tragic we both went through so much hardship while having our basic needs ignored from a young age, but in another way I'm so grateful for the miracle of having found a person who perfectly fits my broken parts so we can guide each other through it with understanding and experience.
I regret the times I've treated others unfairly because of the pressures of life and not having the resources or wisdom to do things properly. I'm doing my best now to make amends for my past mistakes, heal myself and move into the future with healthy boundaries. I've been hurt in ways I can't even begin to explain, I require a certain amount of medication just to function but I'm still here and I feel optimistic for the future. It's going to be hard work to rebuild the things I've lost, but I'm motivated to do good for myself and for the new family I'm building.
The worst part is when you try to gently warn people, and they look at you like you’re the crazy one—only for the exact thing you predicted to happen five minutes later.
The part that depresses you is that somehow it's your fault for noticing it sooner and not trying hard enough to convince others.
Nah, the worst part is when they gang up to say it's your fault even though you were the one warning them and not participating in whatever happens
I think the actual worst part about this is that pattern recognition isn’t supposed to be a neurodivergent thing. Pattern recognition is like a built in feature in humans, but most people have it beat out of them in school
I thought that's part of the reason we excelled as a species, seeing the patterns to eat or run from and knowing which is which. Plus getting curious about new ones and if they dont eat us figuring out what to do with them.
I’m not autistic, but I hate it when other people just ignore the obvious things. Like come on. Is this the result of evolution? How did your lineage survive for this long?
For mine, it was resistance to various flus and sicknesses.
Most of my family has shit for brains, and I'm convinced the only reason they survived up to me is having all the good genes for physical health.
Too bad mental health didn't get points put into it too ...
Having to eat has to be my least favorite part of neourdivergence. "Oh, it's been a few hours since eating and I really want to eat"
This cited phenomenon is not a particularly neurodivergent one. Pretty much everyone sees the train wrecks coming.
If you are neurodivergent, not everything about your life and how your mind works is defined by that.
Object permanence has to be me least favorite part of neurodivergence. "Oh I walked away from that tree but I know it's still there."
Everyone is taking as if pattern recognition gives you some kind of oracle powers of seeing the future.
Just to clarify, pattern recognition ≠ foretelling.
More often it just causes people to overthink and invent conspiracy theories.
"I see where this is going"
Goes in a different direction
"Oh, so this is part of the pattern where everyone is trying to fuck with me"
Not sure of their intended reference but: Cassandra in Illiad esp Trojan Horse incident Legolas, LotR, and many other Elves in Silmarrilion and Apendices Various Atreides in Dune (though they can force people to listen, lol) I had the (mis)fortune of later viewing video of an incident where I "activated." Atm it seemed to me a very long slow progression (like 10 seconds?) But video-wise it all played out in like a second. The other takeaway was that all the stuff that I saw as "obvious" was greatly exagerated in my perception, so it was obvious to me, but impossible to get neurotypicals to credit (even to want to do) the zoom in and slow motion analysis that would be needed. I found the experience very upsetting/isolating because it proved impossible to get people to understand my perspective.
I'm not going to lie- I understood none of this.
It's simple: The OP Trojan horse a Legolas elves while Atreides Dune lol'd an ATM on the slow while the obvious was exaggerated. And it was upsetting impossible perspective.
Makes me think of this Alan Watts snippet.
(imginn.com instagram frontend link)
Looks like this AI generated and not the original Alan Watts. My apologies, I was bamboozled.
Alan Watts died in 1973 and yet this clip has him saying "scroll social media". Only possible "social media" at the time of his death was email or a chatroom and those were in their infancy and the internet hadn't been invented yet either. Methinks you may have been fooled.
EDIT: rephrasing
Inside the clip "HE" refers to himself in the 3rd person "Alan watts said once..." - it's definitely Ai stealing his voice
Sadly this describes every day of my life and has led to some serious, serious depression problems. Being able to spot things from miles out sounds pretty amazing on paper, but it's really truly a special kind of hell when you can't actually do anything about all the horrible, horrible things you see in the horizon. To anyone else who is also like this, I truly hope you shoulder it well. It is not an easy thing to live with.
I am so autistic that when I went for my adhd assessment recently, they had me do this computer test with letters and sounds, and the sounds one, I recognised the pattern within maybe 2-3 minutes of a 30 minute test. Which voided my adhd results