Mastodawn

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️

🧵 Ok so I’m just starting a thread of autism research/thoughts so that it can be muted if you want/need that:

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 20, 2023

“Many autistic people report not being able to enjoy humour if it’s at somebody else’s expense.”

This is the kind of thing that makes me worried about people as a whole, I always figured this was true for everyone and the only reason people laughed at “punching down” jokes was because they didn’t properly understand what the joke was about. I don’t know how to feel about a world where people really do understand and just, find it funny anyway…

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 20, 2023

As an example, when I was little my dad got me some books of anti-Irish jokes and at the time I loved them. I could read them out and everyone laughed, but then I grew up and realised wow, Irish people are actually people! That kind of thing just isn’t funny to me at all anymore. So I always assume laughing at someone’s expense is a result of immaturity or being ill informed? Can people learn and then still be assholes? This can’t be right, right?

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 20, 2023

Part of what I’m doing is listening to a lot of autistic people to hear about their internal experiences and see what resonates, and in the process I’m finding people I wish I knew about on YouTube much sooner. Eg, this is a great video worth watching outside the context of this thread

https://youtu.be/Nnd74yyf4nQ

You're Wrong About Autistic Emotions

YouTube

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 20, 2023

Okay, yeah, I’m autistic.

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 20, 2023

In the end I couldn’t really find anything that could disagree with that conclusion, I even went to research melt/shutdowns and that only triggered some stuff I didn’t need to remember. It all just makes so much sense, it’s so relatable, I’m autistic. Feels like it’s heavy and a relief at the same time somehow.

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 20, 2023

So yeah, expect toots from me on this topic as I figure things out personally. Like I’ve had a lot of thoughts on where stims and tics meet/overlap and I expect it’s going to take me a while longer to know what the fuck is up with that, especially since I’ve heard personal descriptions of both that are fucking IDENTICAL.

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 20, 2023

Also given I’ll be tooting about the topic, I feel I better add a disclaimer to my bio that the puzzle piece in my username is unrelated…

… I mean, it’s completely related since it’s my current special interest, but it’s not related in THAT way.

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 21, 2023

So I saw a couple of things about how autistic folk who have been masking without realising for a very long time tend to dissociate a lot from their bodies to cope with overwhelming sensory information, and that it can be beneficial to consciously try to listen to your body more, a little at a time.

Anyway I’m rediscovering all kinds of sensations and it’s A LOT. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised but yeah, it’s no wonder I had to switch off to cope. A middle ground would be nice.

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 21, 2023

Examples:
- I haven’t shaved my legs for a little bit, they feel like sandpaper against each other
- I feel like I’m noticing every bump and motion in the building, when a neighbour moves around I worry the floor will collapse
- The carpet feels like scratching on my eyes if I look too long
- Some lights are just too bright, I have to cover my eyes to be in the room
- Water on your hands, not the wetness necessary, but the change in temperature, it starts to feel like freezing ice

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 21, 2023

There’s a lot of other things too, and it can feel like I’m aware of it all at once. “Listening to your body” seems more like a “floodgates opening” thing than a “try a bit at a time” thing.

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 21, 2023

I guess I’m glad I gave it a shot though, by experiencing it presently and knowing what I do now, it means I can recognise all the things I did without realising to cope with it. I can make actual choices about which I want to keep up, whether they are worth it, what other options might be, and maybe I’ll find times I can turn off the numbing and enjoy it.

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 21, 2023

I probably should try to find ways to make my sensory experience a little easier I guess, even if I’m dissociating and ignoring my senses, it doesn’t mean they aren’t still screaming.

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 21, 2023

Um, holy fuck, it seems like most of my childhood memories are linked to senses? I just remembered SO MUCH about my first year of primary school! I was feeling chilled so I tried to imagine a time when I was warmer, cue a memory of summer in the playground and then a flood of connected memories came!

Bonus: the memory of being warm helped! I don’t really understand but maybe my memory isn’t as bad as I thought, I just don’t know how to use it?

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 21, 2023

Anyway, we had frogs! They were so cute! I cried when the last one was released into the school pond because it was my friend (one that was perfect, because we were always on opposite sides of glass lol)

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 22, 2023

Just so many things clicking into place, like “how come everyone else can look forward on a bright sunny day and I can’t?” There’s hundreds of little things like that and suddenly I have an answer for all of them.

It’s simultaneously like I’m knowing myself better than ever, but at the same time it’s so huge a change in perspective of myself I feel like I have no idea who I am. There’s maybe some version of me that can know who they are in the world? That’s wild and scary.

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 22, 2023

Learned that sympathy and empathy are not the same thing and I’ve only kind-of been performing one and feeling the other. Which is like, okay sure, yes it’s mind blowing but add it to the list or whatever.

What is not okay are that one place’s definition of one matches others’ definition of the other and vice versa. And then there is affective empathy vs cognitive empathy and all the terms and definitions are just put in a blender.

Fucking standardise your shit, society!

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 22, 2023

tbh I think this is probably something that just isn’t understood properly anyway, since my emotional experience is hard to map exactly to any of the definitions I find.

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 22, 2023

Like, I think sympathy is something I perform as an immediate response to stuff, but it turns into deep empathy given time and thought? It takes less time if it’s something I’ve experienced before (first hand or with someone close).

When someone says something rough and others are like “I feel bad for you” I’m usually at “I don’t understand yet but I want you to know I care about you so I’ll say I feel bad for you because that’s what people who care do.”

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 22, 2023

My main feelings at the time are ones of distance and sadness at the distance- that someone I care about is out of reach and I can’t understand or help them.

Plus the usual “wait fuck what is this some new social test? Quick, act like a human, how would a human act right now?”

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 22, 2023

Also of course there are a bunch of times I don’t react at all because I don’t even realise a problem has been presented until way later. And then I spend a long time wondering if I am supposed to go back to the person to talk about it or if that is weird.

Esme Povirk Apr 22, 2023

@Sophie This relates so strongly to plurality for us. Some of us are good at feeling one or the other of those, some of us are good at emotionally supporting others in different ways, and some of us are not and if no one is there who knows how to give support then we can't do that even though we want to and we're learning to accept that.

Owen Raccuglia Apr 21, 2023

@Sophie My partner got me ear plugs despite my insisting I didn't need any - and I use them a lot now. Whoops!

It was really interesting to hear about the memory stuff - I've always thought of memories as needing the right key/map to access, but until your post, I couldn't imagine someone just... finding them later.

ferunando Apr 21, 2023

@Sophie i'm still scared of doing it outside of the safe space my therapist provides. but in there, it's liberating 😳 noticing all the little things my body is trying to tell me, before i start worrying about the big things it's trying to hint at.

Martijn Frazer Apr 21, 2023

@Sophie Damn, that does sound like a lot!

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 21, 2023

@Tijn it’s definitely not as bad as a lot of others, I think I’m just overwhelmed by how stark the contrast is after not noticing it for so long.

Martijn Frazer Apr 21, 2023

@Sophie I hope you can learn to filter it a bit so it's more manageable without having to shut it out again

Esme Povirk Apr 21, 2023

@Sophie We seem to have one sysmate that doesn't dissociate from the body the way the rest of us do. One of our theories about system origin is that the system is there so we don't have to experience that when it would cause sensory overload.

Mike Kasprzak 🦖Apr 20, 2023

@Sophie That's something I've often wondered about myself, as I try to better understand symptoms I will occasionally exhibit beyond hyperactive ADHD. Clinically I'm pretty sure the answer is no, but there are many things I find very relatable.

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 20, 2023

@mike yeah there’s a lot of overlap between the two and they are often comorbid. I’ve thought I probably had adhd for a while now but for some reason felt like it wouldn’t be acceptable to self-diagnose? Maybe because my focus can vary so much and I can’t focus on my focus very well, if that makes any sense at all lol.

Mike Kasprzak 🦖Apr 20, 2023

@Sophie Yes that makes sense. It sounds like executive function (I.e. ADHD). I know for me, there were a lot of moments where "doing what I should be doing" was almost painful (certainly way less desirable). It might sound extreme, but fear is one of my biggest motivators. Fear of letting others down or losing my job often pushes me through my roadblocks, but it hurts because that often means crunch. I'm in my 40's, and my body can't handle crunch anymore, which is why I started meds.

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 20, 2023

@mike yeah that sounds VERY adhd.
to me. I don’t usually benefit from fear/deadlines myself, I think it’s probably deman avoidance - I’m way more likely to just shut down and nuke the whole thing and maybe see if I can get it done later.

Mike Kasprzak 🦖Apr 20, 2023

@Sophie My wife is similar (also ADHD). She'll just "nope" and do something else, where I might get sucked into the stupid meaningless thing for way too many hours. 😅

Mike Kasprzak 🦖Apr 20, 2023

@Sophie That's not to say meds solved my ADHD. Instead they simply made it easier to get out of crippling situations (laying in bed or on the couch) where I can't use fear or other methods to motivate myself. I can focus on nearly anything now, but I need to be extremely careful about choosing the right thing, else I might get sucked into something wasteful. 😅

ferunando Apr 20, 2023

@Sophie this video helped settle me, and i quite enjoy her other videos as well https://youtu.be/1yva4RZW_s0

Autism diagnosis criteria: explained (DSM-5)

YouTube

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 20, 2023

@gureito I do normally avoid the DSM criteria (for anything really), for reasons she actually goes into in the video which I appreciate. Whilst according to that I think I’d register as definitely autistic, I think the most interesting part was her story about smiling when telling her friend about princess Diana’s death - I have a memory of telling my parents about that exact thing and they told me it’s not the kind of joke I should tell. Makes me wonder how I looked at the time…

(moved to @[email protected] )Apr 25, 2023

@Sophie this was a good video, thanks! Was wondering if she'd mention and debunk Ekman, and not only did she, she mentioned münecat's video too. Given I was reading his work twenty years ago but didn't have the confidence to speak out about it seeming terrible and wrong, I'm delighted to now see people dismantling his bullshit

Esme Povirk Apr 20, 2023

@Sophie [Dreamer] I'm pretty sure allistic people can learn and choose not to be assholes. But maybe it's harder for them to make the connections and easier to ignore them?

But, all things being equal, I strongly believe we all have the power to modify our attitudes over time. There's at least some choice in there.

aesmael Apr 23, 2023

@Sophie oh, I had something like that! I loved the incongruity but not the making fun of people bit. So in primary school when tasked to write some jokes I took the Irish out and called them "thoughtful inventions"… but we got marked down for them "not actually being jokes"

Esme Povirk Apr 20, 2023

@Sophie [Iore] I think for me this is more of a consent thing? Like, if I know someone is ok with/enjoys being made fun of, then it doesn't bother me.

Maybe caring about this level of precision is also an autistic thing.

Sophie 🎲🏳️‍⚧️Apr 20, 2023

@madewokherd yeah I totally get that too, I can especially laugh a lot at people making jokes at their own expense. Somehow that is even funnier to me?

(moved to @[email protected] )Apr 20, 2023

@Sophie Was discussing this a lot with some friends in the past few years. We didn't necessarily get to a final conclusion, but one of the ideas we knocked around is that laughing *at* someone can be a way of disconnecting empathy.

Conversely, me and those friends have noticed we can't laugh at things like videos of people falling over until we know the person is unhurt. It can be such a quick sequence of actions that it can be hard to notice though.

Matt Wood Apr 20, 2023

@Sophie I just want to chime in and say I’m not autistic and also never liked punching down jokes.

The “golden rule” was the basis for most of my childhood morality which is a shortcut to empathy.

And those jokes typically violate the golden rule.

I wish you luck on your journey! But remember that everything is fuzzy and basically every trait is a spectrum that we’re all on!