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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."
I like your example so much better than my own.
Pattern recognition is inherent to how the human brain works...
Yeah idk if this is specific to autism
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
It's funny, because this is more often diagnosed the other way around.
Neurotypicals pick up on emotional queues their partners miss, try to warm them that they're committing a faux pau, and are dismissed until things spiral out of hand.
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.
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.
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"
confirmation bias averted ... this time
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 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 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.
It feels anecdotal, but I felt like I had a voodoo doll for my last manager. He was a nice enough guy but just hyper and careless. So he would do stuff all the time without thinking about what came next. I would see him on my commute sometimes following close behind other cars, speeding to red lights and such. Said to my coworker, 'He is going to not be here one day because he got in a car accident.' A few weeks later and he is out because he totalled his car into the back of another car. Another time the company was cheaping out on hiring someone to replace lightbulbs and he was like, I'll just change them myself! I said, "you need insurance to do stuff like that in an office, thousands of people fall off ladders every year" A few weeks later he was out for days, found out he fell off a ladder at his house. I didn't cause these things to happen, but I stopped vocalizing what I was predicting. As the wise Michael Scott once said, "I'm not superstitious, but I am a little stitious."
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 spent so long being part of /r Collapse. It was a bit latter than expected, but it is finally here.
Spent too much useful time going for longshot jobs, and trying to be something I'm not, instead of settling for what little I can get, like other people.
In the short-term, I have co-workers questioning why I'm doing things "wrong" and "correcting" me, then I watch as my back gets strained, and we lose time, making the "mistake" I had seen coming.
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
Pattern recognition with history autism has to be the worst version of this.
Unless you like fascism.
Great news if you do, because all patterns indicate a global speed running to Germany, circa 1939ish.
My least favorite part today: Waiting for someone to read from a mandatory script written for the least common denominator.
Before we let your wife talk to us about the bank account, you'll need to answer some questions to prove your identity, you must wait for all answers to be read before responding.......
We've been doing this so long that the people who invented it have died. Can I just use a fucking YubiKey and a pin?
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?
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.
Yes, though its also the basis for all conspiracy theories