Sometimes it is nice to simplify the conversation with non-tech management. Oh, you want HA / DR / etc? We click a button and you get it (multi-AZ). Clicking the button doubles your DB costs from x to y. Please choose.
Then you have one less repeating conversation and someone to blame.
Conversely, slowing down an adversarial email conversation can lead to better outcomes. A rapid or delayed response signals your position and priority on the topic.
He passed away ten years ago, the glasses were custom-made in 70's or so. He'd close one eye and use the other (better suited for this). He'd have tremors, including in the eyes. Reading made him very tired, eventually a friend would read complex beta literature before him. To me (as kid) the glasses felt like a huge looking glass.
A friend of my parents also made a custom card deck, with huge symbols and letters. That way, we could work around his disability. We always had to work around his disability, and it regressed but slow variant and he was also too old to get the medicine which effectively stopped the MS from getting worse. However, it meant other people who had the quick version or were younger got more QoL.
I don't think he ever used Calibri. I mean, at that time, he wasn't into computers anymore. He had all kind of health isssues due to MS. It pains me to think people like him now have more difficulty to read letters because of BS decisions like these just cause NIH or whatever the silly reason must be. But there's also good news: if it is digital, they can override the font and such.
Sounds like he had lots of good people around him helping him.
The technical aspects you mention are important. I have diplopia, and also close one eye. It gets worse in the evenings. I love paper books and own many, but all my reading now is on a Kindle, with a huge font. It makes it so much easier.
Not the OP, but after a couple of decades of people pointedly talking about eye contact, small talk, and body language, you learn “coping mechanisms” to deal with neurotypicals and make them more comfortable.
Did your sporting team have success on the weekend? Wonderful, direct eye contact, smile, mirror. Ok, now, to business:
I masked for years but recently (possibly linked to some bereavements in the family, who knows what the actual trigger was if there even was one single trigger) the constant effort required just burned me out. Anxiety spiked, depression symptoms loomed, and I just felt exhausted all of the time.
I've spoken to many people in the past 10 years or so who were in a crisis/burnout/depression or however they personally labelled their situation with varying degrees of bad mood, depressed affect, and reduced energy. Every single one of them had a mask they had been wearing for a very long time, and which was hugely mentally draining on them. Most of them wore the mask especially when interacting with themselves, interestingly.
Some of them self-identified as neuro-atypical (with or without professional diagnosis), others didn't. Some of them identified their situation as a co-morbidity of being atypical, others as a result of it, or as a pure coincidence. It's not clear to me whether the masks themselves and/or the current inability to wear them were a reason, a symptom, or just a coincidence of said situations and/or the subjective or objective atypicalliness. But whenever I hear that masking has such a huge drain on people with ADHD/autism I wonder about the questions of cause and effect, the question of correlation and causation, and the question of (self-)selection bias. It's really a mess and it's very difficult to make sense of any of that. But mostly, I feel that discussing ways how society could reduce the pressure to mask might be more beneficial to everyone than finding the perfect definitions for groups of people who have an accepted reason to be drained by their masking, while others must still endure because their masking is not socially or medically recognized as unnecessary suffering.
Masking is defined by being a maladaptive strategy, so I don't think that it being in general mentally draining is disputed. The issue is that sometimes there is a tendency to call any coping strategy as masking. There are coping strategies that can be successful, and there are reasons to adopt them other than to hide not being neurotypical or to make neurotypicals happy.
> Not the OP, but after a couple of decades of people pointedly talking about eye contact, small talk, and body language, you learn “coping mechanisms” to deal with neurotypicals and make them more comfortable.
It sounds to me like the article author calls that social awkwardness not autism, no?
>The key distinctions are that socially awkward individuals understand what they should do socially but find it difficult or uninteresting (versus genuinely not understanding unwritten rules), show significant improvement with practice and maturity, are more comfortable in specific contexts, lack the sensory sensitivities and restricted/repetitive behaviors required for autism diagnosis, and generally achieve life goals despite awkwardness rather than experiencing clinically significant impairment.
It seems to me that this sort of definition would preclude any person having general intelligence such that they are able to learn to mask (or feel like they have to mask less in certain safe areas).
Yeah, really good point, and I question my own diagnoses sometimes. However: I did not understand for many years why I needed to mask. I was not being contrary or looking for attention - I really did not get it.
Once you understand that neurotypicals have special needs and you must play-act to smooth things over, then you play the game.
I think your comment is very insightful. It made me think and reflect. I am not socially awkward, however: but I am autistic. I really think so. My ability to appear less so over time is my own achievement.
I think I have some kind of autism because I have been doing this social skill game for decades and still has not "clicked" with me.
It does not mean I am bad at it, it means I don't understand the rules. I can copy others people tactics and sometimes it works, but still don't know why.
One important detail which is missing from it. Masking is far from free. I have at least met several people who are capable of masking but just grow so resentful of it that they outright refuse to do it for the barking-mad neurotypical society any more. The reason for the harsh references to mental health? Because most common doesn't equate to not being deeply irrational and dysfunctional. Keeping up with the Joneses to the point of keeping oneself in debt? 'Normal' behavior but frankly belongs on a diagnostics list for something.
That’s what I’m curious to hear from you and OP…does that make the autistic person less autistic? Or is it a mask?
I—-as a non-autistic person—-have lots of default tendencies which were socially discouraged as a child and which are now no longer part of my self concept. I’m not “repressing” a desire to be awkward, I’ve simply learned to be less awkward.
But my understanding of autism, which is I think backed by the article itself, is that autism exists as a fundamental cognitive process and tends to be pretty stable.
Btw the reason I ask is to learn…as a software dev and manager, several of the people I interact with could probably be diagnosed autistic and I’m always curious to try to understand what that’s like better.
As part of my job, I have to interview and hire people.
When I first started interviewing people, I would have crippling anxiety. On days I had a interview scheduled with a candidate, I would obsess and have anxiety to the point where I wasn't able to focus on anything until the interview was over. It was bad. I'd spend hours rehearsing every line I was going to say. I was an incredibly awkward interviewer.
Fast forward 10 years and hundreds of interviews later, the anxiety is completely gone and an interview doesn't even spike my heart rate anymore.
I absolutely met multiple DSM criteria for anxiety 10 years ago, but not anymore.
I suppose I was cured through "exposure therapy" (or whatever you call doing something repeatedly that gives you massive anxiety).
Interviewing still doesn't come naturally to me. But it's easy now because every interview is basically scripted. I repeat lines that I memorized over the years. I always start interviews with the same ice breaker. I use multiple tactics to put myself and the candidate at ease throughout the call.
Do I still have anxiety even though I've learned how to cope with it? I don't know.
Is someone still autistic if they were able to learn coping tactics that make the symptoms invisible to themselves and others? I don't know.
I think the difference is that if an autistic person learns to mask, that's probably useful as a coping mechanism but doesn't remove the autism in the sense of making the fundamental neurological difference go away. Anxiety (even in anxiety disorders) can be fundamentally reduced by exposure therapy, not only in the sense of finding more effective coping mechanisms but in the sense of the anxiety itself diminishing or ceasing to exist.
For what it's worth, exposure therapy is a real term and it's an actual part of cognitive behavioural therapy.
Interviews are pretty weird in that you meet a new person and then very soon need to have a really serious conversation about important things. It's also a social context which is inherently stressful for the candidate, and where being good at putting them at their ease gives you better results.
I even notice that during the times of my life when I hire a lot, I have a much easier time with being extrovert and social at parties and in everyday interactions.
During times I don't have to meet new people as often, I get worse at it.
Very good questions. Some part of the answer might come down to your identify. Do you identify as an anxious person or a person with anxiety? The question would become even more interesting if you'd be taking a drug: is a person treating their depression successfully with an antidepressant still a depressed person? Or a person with depression? Do you have high blood pressure if you don't have high blood pressure due to meds?
I don't know the neurological mechanisms behind autism, but I know that ADHD is, briefly, defined by a reduction of dopamine receptors across your brain.
The brain is neuroplastic, especially when young, but I doubt you can just influence the growth of significantly more dopamine receptors out of pure willpower and habit-forming; especially given that ADHD disrupts those two facilities.
This is in part why dopaminergic drugs such as Adderall work so well, and why dopamine/reward-center disruption due to childhood trauma can have such a negative impact on one's ADHD symptoms.
Again, I don't know how much this applies back to autism, but it has definitely been a bane of my existence constantly explaining to people why I can't just meditate, habit-form or diet or exercise away my symptoms.
These things help, as does directed research and experimentation with what does and doesn't work for me, and because of my ADHD these things are integral to my ability to function as an adult in this insanely complex and stressful world. And it's definitely made a difference in how I manage my symptoms, especially when I look at how my siblings don't manage theirs and lack basic coping mechanisms.
But I frequently run into people who arrogantly assume I've never even heard of meditation, or that I have a bad diet, etc. and offer them up as panaceas. These people often get defensive and more arrogant whenever I try to explain to them that ADHD is not just some "mental block" or collection of bad habits that can be "fixed".
So yea... I also think we need to do way more clinical studies about the effects of teaching coping mechanisms at a young age, but I don't think autism is something that you can grow out of, there are likely specific underlying genetic and neurological factors that affect how much a specific individual can control or cope with their symptoms.
Society is moving in the right direction at least. At one point, the bell curve had 3 sections: normal, genius, retarded. Now we have more gradients and some of them trigger help or maybe longer exam times.
This causes over-diagnosis and resentment. Coping mechanisms grow over time. It’s definitely better if you can appear neurotypical.
You don't grow out of it as much as learn to manage it, this requires that you develop some form of executive function though. In my case I was forcefully required to be responsible for my younger brother (when I was 7) and so learned out of necessity -- but this led to a lifetime of resentment and so I don't recommend it as a solution.
I was homeless by 16 and had no safety net, had to graduate high school on my own while living out of someone's garage, and generally take care of myself most of my life due to absentee, drug-addict parents, and I can tell you that this trauma only worsened my executive function by the time I had the privilege of being able to sit back and reflect from a place of security and comfort.
I'm sorry you have resentment issues... definitely get that.
I think so. If I had had somebody in my youth who taught me how to interact with people I am pretty sure I would have done much better. The worst for me was to notice that I don’t fit in and had nobody to help. It was extremely lonely and depressing. But I am also a pretty mild case and performed well in school and work. I am not sure how it would have worked with severe autism cases, for example non verbal people. That’s a different ballgame.
A common issue is that autistic children tend to have autistic parents and many autistic parents are sadly bad att helping their kids understanding social interactions.
Last time I flew Ryanair in July, I presented my phone to the agent to check my boarding pass. She took my phone to scan it. I turned my head to talk to my companion.
When I looked back, the agent was in my settings, quietly enabling all the permissions for the app (which I had deliberately disabled).
When I (shocked) told her off, she rolled her eyes and said I would need to change them anyway to scan the bag tags.
The story Stephen Tobolowsky tells (and Byrne confirms) about how Tobolowsky inspired the song Radio Head, which gave the eponymous band their name, is so good and complex that a comment cannot do it justice. Google it and sink in if this is your thing.
The article (which is great) is written from the perspective of "large old established companies innovating". This is something that is fairly elusive even in the different environment of the rest of the western world, I think.
Startups have a different set of constraints in Europe, one of which is the safety net for the people trying to become "ramen profitable".
Sometimes it is nice to simplify the conversation with non-tech management. Oh, you want HA / DR / etc? We click a button and you get it (multi-AZ). Clicking the button doubles your DB costs from x to y. Please choose.
Then you have one less repeating conversation and someone to blame.
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