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Still waiting on my transmission fluid, but it’s cleared customs and is in the country at least. I also made cupcakes:
oh, wow - those cupcakes are amazing 😍
Thanks! I was worried the icing wouldn’t hold up. I had to use ermine icing because of a lack of powdered sugar in the house. It doesn’t usually take food colouring very well.
Girl they look fucking incredible!
Thanks!
Those are amazing!
Is there a good community to share cooking photos and recipes, I wonder? I’d like to see more.
Thanks! I have no idea. I don’t bake often (my partner doesn’t want a constant supply of cake in the house for health reasons).
Awesome, I’m so happy for you ☺️
Hold that thought. Give the Norwegian postal service time to fuck it up.
Then I hope for you they don’t!
Me too. But I won’t hold my breath.
Stressful week, really, lots of emotions. Moved back to parents with whom I’m not out yet… I’ve lost like 2.5kg (not in the good way, thank you stress and whirlwind of emotions). But I’m starting to hope and taking care of myself.
Today was better, I’ve appreciated my body a bit in the mirror. I went out today with some make-up and met an ally who was mastering a Roleplaying game (pen and paper) they created (one-shot session). We were playing in a bar (local association event) we ate after together, which is something I’ve never done with a completely new person I’ve met like a few hours ago. It was nice socialising by myself and for myself.
I’ve started therapy too, which is a bonus as I still have much work to do on myself. Lots of things to untangle and for once not only by myself.
Anyway, this week ended on a rather positive note at least.
mostly everything is well - I think I might be struggling with some minor depression / anhedonia - I think life is just a bit too stressful right now and I don’t look forward to anything and can have a hard time finding energy and motivation particularly for recreation.
I’m also hoping to get tested for ADHD & ASD, I have been on a waiting list for 4 months and have my first appt. next week.
update on neo-vaginal microbiome experiment:
I’ve been experimenting with depositing “pre-biotic” gel in my vagina every other day and that mostly works so far.
My attempt to incorporate glucose into my main dilation lube failed to create the microbiome I want, I think mostly because my main dilation lube has higher levels of preservatives. Could also be the aloe gel I use with vegetable glycerin in it (maybe that acts partially as a preservative? or there are preservatives in the aloe that aren’t listed?); the aloe is in the dilation lube but not in my prebiotic gel.
Either way, it’s working mostly fine even if the smells vary and can smell less good all the time (once a day pre-biotic gel deposits definitely results in a better smell overall).
I hope you get what you want out of your neuropsyche assessment. It can feel pathologising sometimes, but it’s good to understand yourself better. Wishing you the best.
Thanks! I really hope I test negative for both, but I also would like some clarity about where my traits & symptoms come from; right now I suspect I might fall within the broad autism phenotype (maybe ASD level 1, but I suspect I’m a border case, if so).
Any advice or suggestions on what I should or shouldn’t do? (Not to pass or fail a test, but generally.)
I haven’t been through the process myself and it’s going to be really different with different clinicians. Several of my close friends have been through it and we’ve talked a lot about it but I wouldn’t know how to advise you.
I’ve taken every test on EmbrancingAutism.com a bunch of times but I’ve never seen a clinician about it so even though I score pretty high so I’m kindof on the dark about interpretation.
If I can give you a joke answer, I’d suggest that you print your top 10 longest comments on this platform and show it to them when they start asking about whether you have deep knowledge about special interests 🫠.
If I can give you a joke answer, I’d suggest that you print your top 10 longest comments on this platform and show it to them when they start asking about whether you have deep knowledge about special interests 🫠.
omg 💀💀💀💀💀💀
EDIT: so, I do score above the threshold on the autism spectrum quotient intake questionnaire that I found linked to by some of the autism-related subreddit wikis, but I think that’s not evidence of much other than it may be worth getting tested.
Do you have any thought to go through testing yourself since you seem to score high on similar tests?
I just did the test you linked again. I always seem to land in the ASD 1 bracket, but also score nearly 100% on the parts that overlap with ADHD (or if i do an ADHD test i usually score as high as possible).
I think that ADHD can mask autism. For example, if you see me in a social situation with other ND, queer, creative and artistic or nerdy people, I tend to do fine beacuse we can have discussions that matter, that both of us care about. When I have to be in a social situation where I might have to mask my personality and talk about stuff I dont care about (small talk) I want to scream and poke my own eyes out to make it stop.
I think I fall into a “low masking” category. I can’t mask well, and if I feel like I need to mask my personality I start immediately building intense anxiety and start to panic. I have meticulously curated my life so that I never have to do anything like that. I do not associate with people that require me to mask, I have crashed out of every job I’ve ever had that requires me to be in the office and do professional small talk. I’m now self-employed and i work from home which works much better for me.
What this means in practice for the assessments, is that if I imagine my life as it is, I can truthfully answer “yes I’m pretty good in social situations and I enjoy socialising”, but that’s only if it’s with my good friends, or people who I can relate to, or people i find fascinating or cool. This masks the fact that I’m absultely useless in other social situations. So I try to answer those questions by first imagining that the social situation is not one of my ideal ones, maybe there’s are many unfamiliar people there and I don’t feel like I have much in common with them. Maybe it’s a wedding or a funeral and random distant family members are trying to make small talk based on nothing.
So I guess if i had some advise based on my experience it would be to remember the test probably defines “party” as something like “your office christmas party where you have to talk with Sheryl from accounts about whatever office drama she’s trying to stir up”. Not a cool party like the ones I go to where half a dozen gender-non-conforming nerds play multiplayer games on a massive projecter in one of their living rooms.
P.S. I hope I wasn’t being shitty with the joke about your long comments. Please know I love your long comments and they help me and many other people and I love you for posting them.
So I guess if i had some advise based on my experience it would be to remember the test probably defines “party” as something like “your office christmas party where you have to talk with Sheryl from accounts about whatever office drama she’s trying to stir up”.
it is difficult to know what they actually want to know, I wish they were better at asking their questions to suss out differences or abnormalities - I am old now and a lot of the things that bothered me extremely as a child when I didn’t have coping strategies are not as much a problem now. For example, texture sensitivity - growing up I hated the texture of most clothes, blankets, bedding, etc. I liked the way old, distressed cotton and like cotton flannel felt - to an almost obsessive degree, and I suffered for many years as a child without control over the clothes I could wear, etc. but once I was a teenager and had some say in what I could wear, I only used cotton flannel sheets and was wearing only cotton flannel clothes. Tags are another thing, I actually forgot that clothing tags really bother me, because I made it a habit to remove tags and to buy clothes without tags. It could easily slip my mind that this is true about me, and it was a source of immense distress as a child, but something I don’t even think about now.
So, it’s hard when I’ve adapted and learned to cope on so many fronts to remember that those were ever challenges in some sense.
But yes, thank you - I will try my best, but I suspect I struggle to read context and that this is the very deficit that makes it hard to ensure I answer the questions right 😅
P.S. I hope I wasn’t being shitty with the joke about your long comments. Please know I love your long comments and they help me and many other people and I love you for posting them.
oh, you weren’t being shitty - it was probably the best thing you could have said; I have no self-awareness and just think my comments are normal, calling it out is both genuinely hilarious but also helpful 😁
Good luck Dandelion! Rooting for you always.
Here’s a comedian doing 10 mins on her autism test experiences, she specifically brings up the tags thing you just talked about. If you have no interest feel free to ignore, but i think she’s very funny.
I would really love to get properly assessed but I live in the UK and the public option is pretty terrible (but hey it could be worse, I could also be trans! 😭).
I think you’re right though, the surveys are supposed to be a starting place for clinical assessment, rather than the ‘test’ that determines your diagnoses. On their own you can only say stuff like “75% of diagnosed autistic people score in this range”. You can’t say “you scored this therefore you are autistic”. I find the tests helpful, but I recognise their limits in the absence of a full assessment.
Can I chime in here? (I got an ADHD diagnosis last year and a “probably” for ASD)
Aside from medication (which helps a lot!) one thing I learned is to accept that I’m going to have difficulty with getting things done and navigating some social situations, and that’s OK: I don’t need to beat myself up about it. Just like hidden gender dysphoria, I didn’t realize how much stress I was putting myself under reflecting on how badly I handled social encounters, or not keeping up with hobbies and recreation I felt I “ought” to be doing. And then I realized that this applies whether or not you are diagnosed with anything in particular! It’s really good just to (try to) chill out.
Oh, and if you’re not familiar with rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD) I can recommend this video (their channel is full of good stuff!)
yes, please chime in!
The main reason I’m pursuing testing is because I don’t know what coping strategies do or don’t make sense - I have a lot of sensitivity to light and noise for example that I just don’t take seriously, and I think if I knew I had ASD I would maybe spend more time actually learning about it and engaging with the tools and coping strategies. Right now, I feel a lot of cognitive dissonance about thinking about myself as autistic without an “official” and objective / expert ruling.
This difficulty with accepting I might be autistic is similar to how I rejected gender dysphoria for so long - it’s a combination of denial because of fear and stigma, but also I’m worried about appropriating the experiences of people who “really” have the condition (whether being trans, or being autistic).
I didn’t think I was trans enough to be trans, and now I don’t think I’m autistic enough to be considered autistic.
Send me any resources or advice you think might be helpful, and thank you for the RSD video!
I also get a lot of value from Jessica McCabe’s How to ADHD – I bought her book a while ago and I promise I’ll start it any day now :3 I think a lot of the strategies may be appropriate for other flavors of neurospicy too.
You know the joke about how everyone who drives faster than me is a dangerous maniac, and everyone who drives slower is incompetent? We really do tend to see the world in relation to ourselves, and I think that it’s because we take ourselves as the “normal” baseline there is this fear of appropriating. ADHDers struggle with focus “more than normal”; I’m normal; therefore they must have it worse than me and I’m not part of that group.
Coming out as trans taught me that it is possible for me to be in a minority group without realizing it, and I’ve been trying to see myself and where I fit in in relation to the whole of society without centering myself. And also not to compare myself to some perceived “normal” baseline, but just play with the hand I was dealt. (I’m not trying to be maudlin there: I have qualities than I’m happy about too!)
Pretty uneventful, although I think my Aloe plant might be dying, which makes me kind of sad. I’ve been very careful with xem to give the right amount of water, and to occasionally give xem one of those fertilizer pellets. I tried re-potting in a new container since I read online it could be root rot.
Yes I use neopronouns for some of my plants, fight me.
