Honestly, being a woodworker for yourself is fantastic fun. I would recommend learning about it on your own and not limiting yourself to woodworking only as a career. If you love it you can do it on your own terms and in your own time. If you make things people want you can sell them. If you make things you like you can keep them. The skills you develop are yours and you can benefit from improving them. Having someone else employ you means they take your labour and turn it into profit for them, so they end up reducing your autonomy and ability to explore while also extracting money from you.

Lol, clear goals can be helpful for sticking to a plan.

Wow, that is the most see what sticks approach I’ve seen for a while. Definitely a good time to try the steroids, how effective has it been? When you say deaf was it like everything was underwater, like a blocked ear, like low volume? Or something else entirely? My family has a history of hearing loss but it was the mundane gradual loss for the most part.

Damn, what kind of inner ear issue? Is it impacting your balance? Hearing?

True, though I heard a saying and it stuck with me. I prefer toes to potatoes, meaning I would rather not eat potatoes than lose my toes to diabetes.

I used to work in IT, mostly around web hosting as a systems admin. It was all wonderfully fun and interesting technology turned to the most awfully mundane and soulless profit motive.

Now I work in disability support. I work with kids who are autistic to help develop skills and engage with the world. I also help their families and at home carers to get difficult things done which means every day is different. One day I am helping get kids ready for school, another I am replacing a door, another I help someone fix their TV and learn the new menus, another I help someone shower. It varies a lot but the part I like best is being strong for the kids.

They love vestibular stimulation and really need it sometimes so I get to pick them up, flip them over, spin them around, and use an excess of strength to do it safely and without hurting them. The kids literally shout my name when i arrive and run out to see me, so I’m clearly not doing a bad job, and kids a super honest so I would definitely know if I was.

I also help people with dealing with systems like our social security system and things like licenses and voting. For some of my clients they have real trouble navigating systems like that and because I am also autistic/ADHD I can understand their perspective viscerally and actually accept and support them where they are. I personally hate those systems, but I have worked with them enough to understand then now and can help others with them.

So from a medical perspective the relief of inflammation can be extremely liberating and can feel godlike indeed. Getting that by suppressing your normal immune function is a very short term and unsustainable option, but there are a few other options that can have similar if less intense experiences.

Reducing inflammation by removing something you are allergic to can have a similar relieving impact, though it can take weeks to even months for the immune cascade to settle and it may remain overactive for even longer if it is a long term exposure.

Removing a long term stressor like changing job, fixing your ergonomics, changing your shoes, or moving more can have a similar impact.

Changing your diet to remove highly inflammatory foods and replace them with less inflammatory foods can also work well, though finding out what is or is not inflammatory for you can be a bit of an experimental process, some people respond to different things with an inflammatory response for reasons I don’t understand.

I found that getting rid of dairy, dropping carbs to very low, cleaning out mould, getting a much more physical job, and getting rid of chairs in general all helped me a lot with my long term inflammation issues. My nasal issues cleared, my back stopped hurting at all, my pants fit better rather than being tight on the thighs, my headaches went away, and generally life improved.

I would recommend a pattern of testing for you. When you reach for your phone to do something figure out how you would do that on your postmarketOS device. For example, if you go to your phone to check the weather take that opportunity to get weather working on your postmarketOS device. Do that over the next few days and you will find something that is harder and needs some help to get going. That’s a good thing to bring back to here. For example, can you access your bank from your postmarketOS device? What about maps?

The cool thing is if you switch those things that work over to the postmarketOS device as your default you will start picking it up first and trying to do the thing without really considering it, only to go back to your other device when it fails.

I would love to hear your results after you have tried this for a few days or a week. What works, what doesn’t, and what took the most work to get sorted. Those are all useful things for other people considering using it, and useful for developers too.

Nobody is actually shitty here but some things seem like they are not going to work long term. It is reasonable to have a need for some quiet time and to unwind from work. It is reasonable to need connection and validation of the relationship. It is reasonable to be upset.

He is not being reasonable about how he interacts with you. He is taking your lack of ability to be social at the level he needs as a rejection of him and in turn rejecting you. This is a lashing out response and it is not appropriate or effective. It will either result in the dissolution of the relationship or it will result in longer term toxic behaviours which will then result in the relationship falling apart.

You need to work a little less. That is basically the conclusion you have come to above and that may take time to enact, but it needs to happen. Neither of you will be happy until then. So your action should probably be to reduce just as you have said.

On your partner’s end he needs to build his own supports to take some of the load off you. He has a lot of free time that he could use going to a rock climbing class or something similar. That would give him the social interaction he cannot get from you at the moment. He also needs to work on how he talks to you about needs and his responses. He can’t put his self worth entirely in your hands. It is unsafe for his wellbeing and horribly damaging to your relationship. He needs to internally validate his worth and that is a skill, not a trait, he can learn that.

Some of what you describe above sounds like he doesn’t really understand ASD/ADHD very well and doesn’t get how burnout works. Maybe he could spend some time learning about how to be safe and healthy for himself in a relationship with someone on the spectrum? It is hard to know how he would react to hearing this, but he needs to recognise that a relationship with you is not the same as a relationship with a neurotypical and he needs to take care of himself to be safe in that relationship. It is not worse, but it is different. If he doesn’t learn how to manage his needs then they will continue to be unfulfilled and he will have a bad time.

And honestly, the dog situation is just devastating. If my partner lost their companion animal I would expect up to 6 months of very low function. For you to be working in this condition may suggest you are not able to grieve properly and are working to be away from demands, but it could also be it just doesn’t affect you in the same way it would affect my partner, we are all different. Take care of yourself and grieve as you need to, maybe spend some time talking to him about it if you feel safe doing so.

Oh, and consider planning out movie night or similar things, make it explicit what you need and book it in. Those expectations in advance can help.

So yeah, NTA, but also, nobody is fully shitty here, his behaviour seems less ideal, both of you can do things to make life better, I think this is salvageable.

One thing that gets me about AI chat agents is the idea of attack surface. If you have a clearly defined protocol you can curtail most of the possible attacks by narrowing things, only accepting well formed requests, and validating both on the user end and then on the server end before processing anything. An LLM is inherently wide in attack surface given the way it is structured. It can take a prompt which can be any set of characters connected together into tokens. These tokens can’t easily be filtered for intent or goal and yet they can get the LLM to drop other rules or restrictions because they are just other prompts.

A simple coded padlock is not very secure, but a door with no walls is less secure.