I agree with the “don’t use your autism as an excuse” side, but as a middle-aged AuDHD woman who can no longer hold any kind of paid work due to burnout caused by years of faking it in a high pressure career that I loved dearly and would have done for life if burnout hadn’t disabled me- I’m really repulsed the idea that all of us should just try harder to fit in. I did that, and it eventually destroyed me. It is not something that I’d advocate anyone else doing.

Yes, it’s so important to listen to your body. A HSP should not just ignore what they’re feeling or fight to endure discomfort, especially long-term discomfort like unsafe housing…if you are able to move, I hope you will, because constant negative overstimulation can lead to burnout, which can have a really severe mental health toll over a lifetime. I was rendered pretty much non-functional for much of my 40s because of it. Now I know I have to put self-care first or i will pay for it.

I identified as HSP for many years prior to my ASD/ADHD diagnosis, but for my entire adult life I’ve done the same: first, I’ve made my bedroom a haven, with a weighted blanket, blackout curtains, fairy lights, etc. and I feel free to retreat to my room when the world is too much. My room is my space, designed for my comfort. (I have a house, but naturally it’s family space and when I’m overwhelmed I really need to be alone).

I don’t force myself to stay on overstimulating situations because I “should”- if there’s a pressing reason I have to stay a bit longer but I just can’t, a five minute breather outside can make a huge difference.

I already mentioned the weighted blanket, but if you don’t already have one, you should get one- and make sure you get one that’s around 10% of your body weight for best effect. I bought mine at the start of the Pandemic and I swear it saved my life, it allowed me to feel safe when absolutely nothing felt safe. Another tool in my box that I would never trade is good noise-cancelling headphones. I’m so glad it’s acceptable to wear them in public nowadays, they have been a lifesaver.

As an autistic who has been online since the early 90s, this article didn’t speak to me at all. My autistic internet comprised IRC and USENET, and it died when LiveJournal died. I still have close friends from those days, when I have no close friends “IRL”- I can’t say that for anyone I met on Twitter or Facebook, in fact I found both of those platforms to begin enshittifying looong before any of the NTs began to notice it.

I don’t think it’s just because I’m an older AuDHD woman, I think the existence of Facebook and Twitter from the mid to late 00s killed the autistic internet.

I know I’ll die with student loan debt, because I dropped out of college after four and a half years, never have had a decent job, and finally moved to another country without leaving a forwarding address. They found me once after I filed an absentee ballot, then I moved again. Welp, guess I can’t vote in the US anymore.

However, I refuse to be held back for life because of contracts I signed when I was 18 and too stupid to know what I was getting into. I didn’t even want to go to college but my mom made me.

The whole thing is ridiculous and stupid and it sucks that the way I took is the only way out, as most don’t have the option to leave the country and never come back.

Most wildflowers need full sun for at least part of the day. Must houseplants are species that do reasonably well in shade.

So yes, they’d likely just die. You could always experiment if you’ve found some shade-loving species or if you have a window that gets full sun for a good part of the day.

Fair enough, I was mistaken. I still actually prefer this layout.

I honestly don’t know. I had been using old.beehaw.org for a day or so when I noticed my browser had populated some communities to the shortcuts across the top, which is when I posted the previous comment, but when I tried to rearrange them (as you can do in RES) that didn’t work. So maybe it’s not actually RES but just an attempt to make it visually the same as RES?

It appears to work with RES. I am sold.

Even back in the 80s we didn’t excuse bigotry, no matter the age or the history of the person. We maybe didn’t feel as safe calling it out publicly back in the day, but it was certainly discussed. A bigot is a bigot, end of story. There was no excuse for it in 1983- when the ones “from a different time” were young!- and there’s still no excuse for it forty years later.

Once I learned that the thing had been unrefrigerated overnight, it was no longer going into my mouth. My husband was hoping I’d rethink that, so I was actually pleased when the melted plastic made it inedible even by his very lax standards.

This was not actually my mistake, but last year we bought an expensive fresh turkey two days before Christmas, and unbeknownst to me, my husband decided to store it in the oven (mistake #1) then my son turned on the oven to cook something else, causing the turkey’s plastic bag to melt to the turkey (mistake #2).

We had ham for Christmas.

I have been online since the early '90s, and used to be extremely active on many different forums. I even ran a fairly large forum on my own website, using Simple Machines Forums- which, to my surprise, still exists- from 2005-2008 or so.

I can’t say I have a favourite- I really liked SMF back in the day but I have no idea what it looks like now. I really can say that I really miss the pre-Facebook Internet when there were loads of extremely active forums in every imaginable topic, and people found them and used them instead of just creating a Facebook group and pretending that everyone will just use that by default (I refuse to use Facebook for anything).

I don’t think of Reddit and Lemmy as forums, really, not in the old-school sense. Reddit was a poor substitute, as for many years more weight was put on links than on self-posts, and in the old-school forums I’m thinking of, things like upvotes and “likes” didn’t become a thing until they were used on Reddit and Facebook, and I honestly don’t think having those features makes the Internet better.

In 1981, I won a goldfish at the fair. My parents were annoyed about having to buy a bowl for it. It died within days (no living creature should be kept in a half gallon bowl), but I pestered my mom into buying a ten gallon tank for the replacement. This was the beginning of a lifelong hobby- I now have nine aquariums in my living room, and in the past forty-some years have spent many thousands on tanks, fish, plants, fish food, and so on. My most expensive tank cost me €5000 to set up.

And all this began because I spent a quarter and managed to get a ping-pong ball into a cup.

This is amazing. I would like to see more user-generated content and discussion in this community, so yes, it’s very welcome indeed, though I’m so sorry that your poem rings true for me and probably for most women.

I’m staying right where I am. I live in a country (non-US, not really wanting to be more specific) where there is a clear geographical divide between the two sides, and I’m deep into the territory of the side I prefer and think would win easily.

Also, I have anarchist friends, and that’s who I’d personally be turning to if I needed help or was able to be helpful to others.

So someone stole some stolen items.

Don’t get me wrong, of course it’s important that items are kept safely and nobody gets to walk off with shiny things. But it’s a bit hypocritical, because the British Museum is full of things stolen from all over the world, they even have a page about it.

Yeah, that would be part 2. Part one is not generally played on radio- they would have had to start out with fans of the band or at least fans of that album, which is why I wonder “why that song?”

Of all the Pink Floyd songs they could have chosen, why on earth “Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 1”? Still, this is awesome.

I knew something was very different about me from childhood, but I didn’t have a name for it for the first half of my life. Then my children were both diagnosed with autism and ADHD as children because it was obvious and unmistakable. Three of my niblings also were diagnosed with ASD. Then my brother got an adult ASD diagnosis, apparently during his assessment for Disability. However, the only person qualified to assess an adult where I’m living now required cash in hand, and it was fifteen years between beginning to think “maybe I’m neurodivergent too” to my own ASD/ADHD diagnosis at age 46.