There’s one thing in your post that I haven’t seen you mention yet it’s all over the place: depression.

I don’t know anything about you but this post, and I’m not a professional, but from very painful personal experience I’m almost sure you’re severely depressed, maybe even to the point where you need hospitalization.

Depression fucks with your head. It makes you not-do things you’re looking forward to and you don’t understand why. It makes you unable to see anything positive. You cannot get out of it without help after a certain point, and you cannot trust your own thoughts anymore.

These days, after years, I’m better. For me it’s never going completely away, but I recognize patterns, I know how to break the spiraling (and most importantly, no one shames me for how I’m doing it anymore) and I can say " this sounds like depression speaking, let me do something else and return to this thought tmr and see how I feel."

But it took years of therapy and several months of hospitalization. If you’re at the point where your outbreaks scare your family, maybe it’s time to look into that.

Another thing: depression in men is critically underdiagnosed, because most docs look for physical reasons if a man comes to them with symptoms of depression. If you haven’t been diagnosed yet, it may be that it didn’t occur to your doc, maybe because you’re masking well or because he’s just not used to seeing men with depression.

However you go on, I wish you all the best. I hope that you can find a way, with or without meds, to live in peace with your brain.

My special interests are very special to me (ugh, what a terrible pun. Defo not intended!) and I reserve sharing them for people I trust. That alone is a reason for me to mask.

It’s actually harder for me not to mask than it is to mask a lot of the time, even though my mask is far from perfect. But I’m “out” at work and it’s fine if people realize I’m masking.

I think for me donning the mask is like donning armor to protect things I care about from a majorly uncaring world, and if I unmask around you it’s a sign of trust.

Still relatively new to Lemmy and can’t figure out RN how to dm you, but I am not in the US, so most likely we are not in the same country.

I can tell you broad strokes though - I got super lucky with my therapist at that time. Sadly he’s retired now :( I was super exhausted, had gotten out of hospital and then diagnosis and at the same time (since in paper I looked like an easy candidate to find work for) the unemployment agency was hounding me. I told my therapist as an off-comment “I wish I didn’t have to do shit for the rest of the year.”

He said that can be arranged and I thought he was joking - it was October or something. Nope, he stalled and his practice became unreachable. All I could tell the unemployment agency was that I didn’t hear back and I don’t know what’s going on until they got frustrated and backed off. Come new year, everything went back to normal and it went fast-ish. Took maybe a year in total? I think less, maybe roughly 9 months?

I didn’t realize what happened until after the fact, but he bought me the time I needed to process things at that time.

Better - but not through age.

Since I got diagnosed late, my before-diagnosis time was a mess and I had no idea why. Since my diagnosis and me subsequently understanding what’s happening I have become less likely to compromise on things that will cause meltdowns.

I also have disabled status so I can request accommodations at work, and lucky enough my team and workplace are lovely about that.

I can’t tell if time made a difference for me, but I feel like I’ve lost patience for people telling me “don’t be like that”, but that’s probably also due to knowing what’s going on now. I keep asking them if they’d tell a quadriplegic to not be like that and just real quick get them something from the high shelf. Surprisingly efficient, although there’s always people claiming you’re just being dramatic. Thankfully they are a minority around me.

That smug face.

“Hey, it’s me, Amazon. I noticed you recently bought a fridge! Here’s five more fridges for you to look at, on case you need to complete your fridge selection!”

Like. Why?!

Maybe start with what you like, as I found it easier to determine. A lot of time, it just meant following my impulses.

The more stressed I felt, the more I wanted to be in bed. And when I was in bed, I realized I preferred the softest blanket on my skin. So I looked for soft textures to touch when I’m stressed and found it helped me regulate a lot.

Maybe this will help you a) be less stressed and b) if soft textures soothe you, rough ones probably stress you. So it can also be a way to discover your stressors in a roundabout way.

I love it, Ty!

I’m an outsider “looking in”, so to say, as in I met quite a few people attending a local Waldorf-School near where I went to school. I always felt a lot of them were a little out of touch with the real world, not quite prepared for how things are outside. Very sheltered and… For lack of a better word, dreamy? It felt like they hadn’t learned some of the fundamentals of science but focused a lot on soft stuff instead.

It’s hard to put into words since those are impressions of a pretty judgemental teenager x) and stored in a different language than English since my english back then was still pretty bad.

But their education seemed to lack real preparation for anything but social sciences. It’s been a while, though, maybe it has changed by now.

I think Chinese and Korean culture share this concept, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more Asian languages who did. Since a daughter joins her husband’s family upon marriage, their children are considered belonging to the other family. I recently learner that apparently there’s a saying in Korean that daughters always leave things at their mother’s house when they get married so they have a reason to come back despite having left the family.

Just because it is here as a meme doesn’t make it a symptom. People’s crusade against self-diagnosis is really getting ridiculous.

I’m autistic and I do this. My SO who is not (but most likely ADHD - sadly, diagnosis is impossible) does it too. It’s just a fun thing that lots of people seem to relate to. Let’s have some fun here, alright?

You didn’t do anything wrong, both is fine. Me and most of my autistic friends actually prefer to call ourselves autistic. Figure out what you prefer first and foremost :)

Speak for yourself only, please. It’s s fine if you prefer autistic person, but I and many autistics I know don’t. The bottom line is not to teach someone what’ s best but to inform them that there may be preferences and to listen to the reason there talking to, not to make blanket statements about what’s the right thing.

If you want to convince people it’s up to you to bring the evidence. I’m not doing your work for you.

Besides, there have been studies shoing that autistics among themselves don’t have the same communication breakdown as they do when interacting with neurotypicals. So if Japan was truly an autistic culture it should be easier for autistic people, but it’s not.

Besides, I’m very curious to see how you are going to apply diagnostic criteria for a neurodivergence to a culture. Like, how do you even begin? Is the culture averse to bright lights? Loud sounds? Does the culture go into hyperfocus moments? Does it suffer from PDA?

The only way you could do this is if you were to take stereotypes about how autistic people behave and try to somehow match them to cultural traits.

Link to those studies?

Edit: me being autistic make everything I say useless? Really?

I really admire your ability to mental gymnastics. No matter what anybody says, you always find a way to tell them their opinion doesn’t matter. Must be nice to be so secure in your own superiority that nothing can convince you otherwise.

As an autist who studied Japanese and gave up when I realized I just couldn’t connect with any of the Japanese people I met - even the ones where it was obvious we wanted to be friends - I can assure you the culture is even more impenetrable for autistics. And I don’t have such issues with other autistic people usually, no matter the culture.

Don’t mistake your stereotypes for reality and tell everyone people call you out because of political correctness. You’re just plain old wrong in this.

Here’s the deal: even if she’s missing time in “normal” education, time that would normally be spent in class, it’s not the end of the world. People have flunked out of school to have fun and got their bearing later. She, however, has a good reason not to go right now.

I can tell you that me pushing myself through all the normal milestones has not helped me - you don’t want to see my cv or hear about my experiences with work. It’s just sad. And still, finally, last year, I found my niche.

Allow her to be on her own timeline. Don’t worry about her missing out. Allow her to figure out what fhe needs to be comfortable in life. Once I was able to set boundaries and prioritize being comfortable without constant fighting I was able and willing to compromise sometimes if I consider it important. But the base is unconditional acceptance of my needs. Without that I was in constant self-defense and senf-preservation mode.

At some point I sat crying in my therapists office. The agency for benefits was pushing for results, and I was so frigging overwhelmed. I told my therapist “I wish I could just do nothing for the rest of the year.” He looked me dead in the eye and said: “That can be arranged.” I didn’t think much of it but suddenly there were no appointments. They dragged their feet on paperwork and I could only tell the agency that I can’t get the paperworks, I’m waiting too. They eventually gave up, and I had almost four months where there was nothing to do. I only realized in hindsight what my therapist had done for me, but that break helped me rest and heal a lot, so that we could actually work on things in the new year.

Give her the gift of time and acceptance. Once she feels safe and heard, she is hopefully in a position to take on the challenge of therapy and getting better.

Wild theory: maybe she is unhappy with all the changes and feels like she has no say in anything, and this is the only way how she can get some semblance of agency.

Did she want the school change? Did she have a say in which school she is going to? Do you believe her when she says she can’t do something, even if it doesn’t make sense to hsyou?

I’m asking the last question because for 35 years, it was not enough if I told people something is too much or I didn’t like it. They didn’t feel that way, so obviously I was just being difficult. This pattern of accidental gaslighting fucked me up big time.

I’m still in therapy for that, and I still feel unexplainable resistance to doing some things. Nowadays, with the help of a therapist, I found success in not pushing myself, but instead asking myself why I have this resistance. The key is that I’m willing to drop whatever I’m trying to do.

So maybe stop pushing and trying to convince her, and find ways where life currently is difficult for her and work with her to make it less difficult. If she is burned out, time may be the best cure.

That is so cool! Are there any theories as to why elephants have grown so big when one of the closest relatives is so small?

Fun fact: I had to look up what a shrew is, since I’m not a native speaker. It turns out in my native tongue the name has mouse in it, despite shrews not being mice!

That’s so interesting! I didn’t expect convergent evolution to happen so often, I always thought it was a huge accident when that happens. Are there specific areas where it happens more often or is it combletely random?

Are all reptiles dinosaurs, or did reptiles and dinosaurs have a more distant common ancestor? I often heard things like chickens are the distant cousins of t rex or crocodiles are living dinosaurs. How much truth is there to that?