The Education of Axel Heyst

[7Wannabe5]

I grok what you are attempting to communicate, but the funny or interesting note would be that although dead common activity in the realm of gardening, growing a tomato plant in the Midwest is kind of like learning to drive a car when you are 16. It's only easy and common, because all the hard work has already been done for you. It's at the level of pre-optimized for gardening, because tomatos are relatively expensive and less tasty if purchased at grocery. There are many other activities, such as berry picking, that actually are so simple and easy a six year old or a bear can do them, but they are increasingly less common.

[sodatrain]

Sorry but I feel like I don't have an answer to my question. And it's possible I don't know enough about gardening nor permaculture to even ask a good question... But I feel like I do.

If one wants to use permaculture to study and design the broader system around ones home/farm... Cool. I get that permaculture is not gardening.

What I'm struggling to understand is... If one wants to have the outputs of a typical home garden (carrots, peppers, herbs, lettuce etc), and "do permaculture" for the garden and beyond... would you design raised beds into your bigger design/site plan? Do you toss seeds randomly on Hugelkultur beds? Does it not get this prescriptive? I feel like normal home garden/raised beds are straight rows and anything that is artistically straight seems un-permaculture. Do you just make the beds in a spiral for some reason? That seems inefficient.

Feeling like we need a Permaculture Support Group thread

[AxelHeyst]

What I'm struggling to understand is... If one wants to have the outputs of a typical home garden (carrots, peppers, herbs, lettuce etc), and "do permaculture" for the garden and beyond... would you design raised beds into your bigger design/site plan? Do you toss seeds randomly on Hugelkultur beds? Does it not get this prescriptive? I feel like normal home garden/raised beds are straight rows and anything that is artistically straight seems un-permaculture. Do you just make the beds in a spiral for some reason? That seems inefficient.

Does an ERE person live in a city or the country? Do they index invest or pick stocks? Do they own a car or only a bicycle? Do they eat hunted meat or are they vegan?

In the same way ERE isn't an instruction manual, it is an instruction manual for how to write your own instruction manual for designing your life, permaculture is an ethic/set of principles/philosophy for how to design your own human life support system in interaction with wider environment beyond (zone5). The spirals aren't just because they're pretty, it's integrating an understanding of the species, the sun, weather patterns, wind, shading, and the interactions between all of the elements.

I think the answer to your question "Does it not get this prescriptive?" is "No, it does not."

[NewBlood]

Is there a simple and practical guide to what permaculture is? Like the principles and the zones and maybe some steps to get started?

What Jacob said, but also Gaia's garden (A guide to home-scale permaculture), by Toby Hemenway (Level 9 on Wheaton's Eco scale) might be a good starting point if you're interested in learning how to use permaculture principles in your garden. Very well written, not super long and not too wonky. Lots of practical advice and examples about the building blocks (soil, water, plants, animals, guilds, design) with lists of useful plants/trees for different uses.

Also not a substitute for learning how to grow a tomato.

[Jin+Guice]

Thanks for the answers everyone!

[sodatrain]

I found this book tonight. RetroSuburbia. It's by David Holmgren and I wonder if it is the closest thing to an answer to my question "how to veg garden in permaculture"? It's written for suburbanites in Australia and it claims to be "part manual and part manifesto". Does anyone know it?

I created a list of permaculture resources tonight on my journal and included this book there. It's a collection of resources/people that I was previously aware of as well as some additional resources collected today. I am not an expert (not even close) and I only know what I know. What I know might be a few years out of date too.

I'll update the post with other resources if people want to contribute, and as I undertake my project to create and implement a permaculture design in Alaska.

Related to my question, "how to veg garden in permaculture" I was listening to a video, and it struck me that permaculture is all about permanent agriculture. One of the founders said "the system needs to produce more energy over time that it takes to build/operate it" (or something close to that). And, he talks about "work" and "pollution" as undesirable things in a system. Home/market gardens are pretty much just annual crops. Not crops that persist easily. Lots of work required to grow them. Permaculture is concerned about permanent/persisting/long lasting/perennial and not annual crops. Maybe that is why I can't find a satisfactory (to me) answer about growing veg in the permaculture systems. I'll stop. hehe.

[Divandan]

Funny enough, I have been going down a similar path, but I approached it slightly differently.

I just finished The Retro Future by JMG and Future Scenarios by David Holmgren. These were to get to the basis of the challenges and the problem statement (Climate change and resource depletion).

I just started Permaculture: Principles and Pathways, which seems to really establish systems-based thinking and a foundational approach.

Then, I may work through something like Retrosuburbia or another similar book that is more tactical. I see a ton of overlap between Permaculture and ERE, but mostly from the lens of let's start with actionable solutions and principles that help us individually or at the home level. I am excited to progress through that book and then start implementing some of the ideas/solutions.

[mathiverse]

RetroSuburbia... Does anyone know it?

white belt and 7Wannabe5 have both read and recommended the book. white belt, in particular, found a lot of insight in the book, iirc. There hasn't been a standalone thread about it, but there have been mentions of it in various threads that touch on permaculture.

[AxelHeyst]

The dive down the rabbit hole of neurodivergence continues. My cat-q score is consistently 151/152, and my RAADS-R score was 104. I've been listening to Divergent Conversations (thanks again @Scott2). Notes so far:

• I'm having a lot of "oh, most people don't do that too?" moments when coming across descriptions of atypical inner experiences (e.g. using the pfc to run every aspect of social interaction). I'm realizing that there are NT inner experiences that I simply don't understand.
• I'm beginning to notice a lot of things I do that are on various lists of atypical traits, that I've just done for so long that I don't notice (e.g. a significant portion of my barely-conscious thoughtstream throughout the day is rehearsing/scripting conversations with particular emphasis on delivery and tone. It's so normal for me that it's like wallpaper inside my head, I don't even notice it.)
• At first take I thought my sensory system didn't match a lot of the descriptions I was reading about for ND people. And then I noticed myself saying "well, except for X, Y, and Z," and also to Scott's (I think?) point, if you look at my daily environment it's just about perfect for someone with atypical sensory wiring. Coincidence? I'm not sure. I share <5% of my meals with other humans partly because the sound of other humans chewing makes me want to rip my skin off. There are no barking dogs within 1.5miles of here. A significant portion of my tshirts don't have tags in them or have the collars entirely cut off, and when I don't need to wear shirts I don't. I eat the same thing every day. I haven't experienced loneliness since my 20's, which is a longer story. I also see signs of what might be hyposensitivity in a couple areas(??), e.g. preferring wall-of-noise metal or edm to drown out 'light' noises in environment.
• The grief/relief experience of this process is real.*
• So far my experience with becoming aware of masking, on top of the expected 'who tf am I even?' is that of a heightened sense of agency. 100% demasking strikes me as a peculiarly terrible idea, but being in conscious control of when, how, and to what degree I mask seems like a great idea. I've started being able to play with this in conversations. Someone will say something, and I'll look up the range of appropriate responses in my internal database as per usual, and then (the new thing) I'll notice myself retrieving those entries, and I'll think, "but am I? do I actually feel that way or think that thing? Is making X facial expression in alignment with how I actually think/feel about what they just said?" and I'll make a decision to either go ahead with the retrieved response or not. Deadpanning or simply not responding to things that I truly have no real response to feels amazing, but also delivering the 'acceptable' response by conscious choice feels fine.
• I was reading about how a lot of autistic people don't leave the house very often, <1/wk, and I went "whoa, really, wtf, I could never.... oh wait. " Again, my chosen environment seems to be designed to suit what apparently are my preferences, which if I lived in a different environment would seem abnormal. Someone in a city or suburbia who leaves the house <1/fortnight is a shut-in. Someone who lives where I do and goes to town for a resupply ~1/mo is just living his best life, #offgrid edition. This whole "environment or wiring?" question is a very entangled chicken-or-egg inquiry with me.
• I'm now questioning how much of my experiences of the world are "fine", and how much of them are just a level of pain I've always assumed is normal.

The meat of this process so far is unlocking a different layer of internalized shame and 'I should/not" responses. I'm realizing how far back the process of learning from my environment that my 'real' responses are not acceptable goes, to the point that learning to navigate the world really just boils down to learning the script/rtfm and follow the instructions. [Side note: I binged the scyfy show Alien a few months ago and it is about the neurodivergent experience of the world, duh. It resonated hard with me.] I'm seeing this in a lot of small subtle ways.

For example I used to vary my meals every day just because I thought I was supposed to, unconsciously. I've been eating the *exact* same breakfast since I got back from my bike trip without a twinge of 'you're breaking script!!' guilt and it's been delightful. (Yes, I have to be careful to get healthy variety and nutrients etc, but I can come up with a system for this that isn't a weird sort of assimilating behavior based on unconscious shame and guilt about my relationship to taste and decision-making around food.) So I'm starting to play with owning preferences as I'm becoming aware of them.

A background question I have is how much of my goals, initiatives, and projects are part of the internalized script vs something I actually care about. Sometimes I look at my dashboard and am struck with a profound sense of hollowness. I may have had this experience before but chalked it up to being tired or burnt out.

*ETA: An example of grief: My experience of learning to navigate the world from a young age is an iterative loop between conscious study/observation/planning and then action/experimentation, with intense scrutiny of the results/feedback. The self-talk during early loops for any given scenario/environment is always some form of "fuck! fuck! fuck! you fucked it up again! get it together! that was an obvious one, look how easy everyone else is doing it, wtf is wrong with you? Say this THEN that, inflect lower on the second pitch, unless X happens in which case go to subroutine D4! Christ it's not that hard! You're getting dangerously close to blowing it irreparably with this group of people, look at their eyes! Their eyes!! You need to stop sucking at this NOW." The grief is going back through my memories and thinking that that level of self-flagellation maybe wasn't necessary, or at least it wasn't necessary for me to be locked away alone in my head with it with no story about why I was having those experiences. (The relief comes from having a story that explains some of my experiences...) That being said, I'm not sure I'd undo it if offered the chance.

[thef0x]

It's humbling to see you do/share deep work here with confidence and excitement, even in the face of the tough moments of looking back / regret. That, to me, is the shape of growth.

Your posts make me want to step up and try as hard as I can to 'just be me'.

Re chicken and egg: if XYZ is part of your natural coding, it's no surprise you'd gravitate toward an environment (offgrid / low stim / routine) that gels with that coding. Some of that work is "origins" work in therapy/self-reflection (causes-focus) but at the end of the day, you are where you are.

So, now, having discovered a bit more about yourself (this is a endless project), the question that strikes me is: how do you want to change (at least initially*)? Where do you want to go? What other ways can you modify your inner world and outer world to gel with who you feel(discovering) you are?

I guess it's also worth reiterating, none of us here are anything but impressed and supportive of you; in fact I bet a lot of folks here are finding relief and solace in following along. My guess is the there's a higher overlap of xNTJ and atypically high functioning ND folks than other personality types**, perhaps disproportionately represented on this forum. <-- the phrase "what feels most personal is often universal" strikes me here.

Excited for you.

* You mentioned releasing resistance around breakfast and, to me, this is actually a bigger deal than just food preferences --> the content of our action is secondary to the relationship we have between our actions and ourselves. Letting go can happen on all levels and, ime, sometimes the most trivial of letting-go's can be the most impactful, e.g. the first snowball.

** Edit: Found this, page 14: https://www.themyersbriggs.com/-/media/ ... ersity.pdf

[Scott 2]

One thing I enjoy about attending autism meetups, is the interplay between hypo-sensitive and hyper-sensitive people. Music too loud? Instead of talking about it, just move the speaker. Even better, put it immediately next to the hypo-sensitive person who setup music!

how much of my goals, initiatives, and projects are part of the internalized script vs something I actually care about.

You are never one to take things slow. This is advanced introspection. Unwinding decades of decisions, the very core of one's identity. I've been down similar chains of thought, ultimately lowering my personal expectations. Which honestly, I could never meet.


As long as you are speed running, I'll call out the only time Megan Neff cries:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GJXY8MCUOo&t=851s

That one unfolds. It completely upended my perspective on socializing.

[Jean]

I don't know.
I find that the school system and workplace are very quick to paint us in a corner. I don't see the appeal of painting onself in a corner trough self diagnosys.
I know the way i experience this existence is different from what most people do.
I also know millions experienced it in a similar ways before me, and right now, therefore I am completly normal, despite a minority.
Maybe I did this grief earlier because I went to school.

"Hier starb alles, das in die Schule nicht exiestieren dürfte".
Here died everything that wasn't allowed in school.
Some german students laid this on a tombstone in the eighties as an abitur (highschool diploma) memorial.

[horsewoman]

Welcome to the dark side, we have cookies

Since I've travelled this road before I've got plenty of thoughts, but not much time today to write them down. A few quick comments:
- self diagnosis: selfDX is valid and often the the first step to an official diagnosis. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
- labels: most autistic people LOVE labels, it is such a relief to be able stick a label on something (literally and figuratively), so telling a autistic person "not to put a label on oneself" is pretty ironic. (This is in response to earlier posts around the forum and on the internet in general, whenever the topic of neurodiversity crops up).

Looking forward to your journey of delf-discovery. Thank you for taking us along and all the best to you.

[jacob]

• I'm having a lot of "oh, most people don't do that too?" moments when coming across descriptions of atypical inner experiences (e.g. using the pfc to run every aspect of social interaction). I'm realizing that there are NT inner experiences that I simply don't understand.

This blew my mind when I discovered MBTI in my early twenties. Similar reaction: "oh, most people don't actually have a self-consistent logical reason for their choices as derived from fundamental axioms?" My simple theory of mind was that everybody thought in a self-consistent logical way (Ti) and the only difference was that some humans (like me ) were good at it (Te) and most were bad. Expanding my theory of mind, it was astounding to learn that many people make choices based almost exclusively on how they feel (Fi) or as a further complication based on how other people feel (Fe). Another insight was that not everybody was interested in understanding many things (Ne) or creating a mental system of the world (Ni). No, most people were focused on experiencing various sensations like good food or seeing exciting sports games (Se) and then talking about them later (Si) with other people.

It was basically like growing up thinking that religion was just a bunch of weird rituals in church and then realizing that most people sincerely believe in the reality of a divine all powerful being. IOW, there were different cognitive "takes" on the same cultural behavior!

• I'm beginning to notice a lot of things I do that are on various lists of atypical traits, that I've just done for so long that I don't notice (e.g. a significant portion of my barely-conscious thoughtstream throughout the day is rehearsing/scripting conversations with particular emphasis on delivery and tone. It's so normal for me that it's like wallpaper inside my head, I don't even notice it.)

Seeing these different cognitive takes is less obvious if you're not fraternizing on a deep level with other people. (IIRC, we both grew up in the sticks with little diversity in terms of social contact.) For example, small talk doesn't really reveal much about how a person really thinks. So if you're a nerd hanging out with other nerds, you're never really exposed to non-nerd mental patterns; or when you are, they're superficial small-talk/social niceties. This is why these insights [into other humans] can take a long time to manifest. I'd even say that for the majority of people, the insight never happens. As such, humans tend to divide everybody into two categories: "Normal like me/us" and "Weird like them".

• I'm beginning to notice a lot of things I do that are on various lists of atypical traits, that I've just done for so long that I don't notice (e.g. a significant portion of my barely-conscious thoughtstream throughout the day is rehearsing/scripting conversations with particular emphasis on delivery and tone. It's so normal for me that it's like wallpaper inside my head, I don't even notice it.)

FWIW, I strategize and plan out conversations too---just like I plan out everything. You're actually one step ahead of me in that you care about delivery and tone. I suppose I do too, but I've felt rather dirty/manipulative the few times I've played around with it and seen it working on others. A lot of people are oblivious to it though as they do it automatically via mirror-neurons. "Monkey see sad face. Monkey become sad and put on own sad face." Or they've simply been taught the various "games people play" and proceed to repeat them because "that's how you're supposed to behave" (Si). For example, when angry, a stereotypical southern European will raise their voice and act hot-headed, whereas a sterotypical northern European will lower their voice and act icy. That's just what people do. Which is right? Depends on the situation. If an angry northerner meets and angry southerner, the former will think the latter lacks self-control and the latter will think the former is not really angry.

One thing that distinguishes humans from all other animals is the human ability to intellectualize. Some humans do this to a greater degree than others and some retain the emotional parts, which we share with all mammals, to a greater degree than others. Mammals on the other hand is just emotions all the way. Mammals other than humans demonstrate no capacity for intellectualizing and symbolic representation. Make an XY diagram of thinking and feeling. What matters here is the strength/use of either one AND the ratio being their preferred use.

• At first take I thought my sensory system didn't match a lot of the descriptions I was reading about for ND people. And then I noticed myself saying "well, except for X, Y, and Z," and also to Scott's (I think?) point, if you look at my daily environment it's just about perfect for someone with atypical sensory wiring. Coincidence? I'm not sure. I share <5% of my meals with other humans partly because the sound of other humans chewing makes me want to rip my skin off. There are no barking dogs within 1.5miles of here. A significant portion of my tshirts don't have tags in them or have the collars entirely cut off, and when I don't need to wear shirts I don't. I eat the same thing every day. I haven't experienced loneliness since my 20's, which is a longer story. I also see signs of what might be hyposensitivity in a couple areas(??), e.g. preferring wall-of-noise metal or edm to drown out 'light' noises in environment.
• At first take I thought my sensory system didn't match a lot of the descriptions I was reading about for ND people. And then I noticed myself saying "well, except for X, Y, and Z," and also to Scott's (I think?) point, if you look at my daily environment it's just about perfect for someone with atypical sensory wiring. Coincidence? I'm not sure. I share <5% of my meals with other humans partly because the sound of other humans chewing makes me want to rip my skin off. There are no barking dogs within 1.5miles of here. A significant portion of my tshirts don't have tags in them or have the collars entirely cut off, and when I don't need to wear shirts I don't. I eat the same thing every day. I haven't experienced loneliness since my 20's, which is a longer story. I also see signs of what might be hyposensitivity in a couple areas(??), e.g. preferring wall-of-noise metal or edm to drown out 'light' noises in environment.

I see sensory-overload as biggest counter-indicator between autism and "galaxy brain" intellectuals. Autists struggle with sensory overload. At any one point we have thousands of inputs coming into the brain---how the fabric feels, how the tag is scratching our neck, the four voices currently audible in the background, the three powertools, the 60Hz hum from the electricity,... Non-autists don't even notice these things. Indeed some people are so out of touch with their sensory inputs (internal and external) that they require "grounding exercises", for example, by concentrating on their breathing. Autistic people are too much in touch so it becomes overwhelming. Coping mechanisms thus include behavior like stimming (tapping a finger to increase focus), shutting out the world with LOUD music, closing the eyes and going lalala to override the sensory input. Also included would be picking very narrow focus, such as memorizing the complete train departure schedule in order to take the train (because once one has started one must finish!). It's not like knowing all the train schedules is super-interesting. Their autistic brain just doesn't know when to stop or sort the information inflow according to relevance.

The "galaxy brain" is the complete opposite. It is actually very good---better than the typical human---at picking through information with the goal of generalizing and abstracting. In some sense, it is almost too good [for normal conversation]. What is an interesting story to a normal human ("That cup game in 2017 when Messi scored that goal after ...") becomes an uninteresting ("some soccer player scored a goal") in the galaxy brain. Since most information offers nothing new in terms of abstraction-potential, the intellectual is on a never ending quest for ever more information that could potentially be turned into ideas. If information-gathering energy is limited (introverts), the intellectual becomes rather sensitive to the signal/noise ratio ("there are no new ideas in this conversation, I'm checking out!"), like is this conversation worth it? Conversely, if the information-gathering energy is unlimited (extroverts), every conversation is worth it.

It may be worthwhile to split out the RAADS-R. Here's mine: Language 3 + Social relatedness 66 + Sensory/motor 3 + Circumscribed interests 9 = 81. The total score is almost as high as yours, but note how almost all the weight happens along one dimension. I'm simply not all that into interacting with the majority of humans (signal/noise). However, from your descriptions, I'm betting that your weights are different.

• The grief/relief experience of this process is real.*

It's nice to be seen.

• So far my experience with becoming aware of masking, on top of the expected 'who tf am I even?' is that of a heightened sense of agency. 100% demasking strikes me as a peculiarly terrible idea, but being in conscious control of when, how, and to what degree I mask seems like a great idea. I've started being able to play with this in conversations. Someone will say something, and I'll look up the range of appropriate responses in my internal database as per usual, and then (the new thing) I'll notice myself retrieving those entries, and I'll think, "but am I? do I actually feel that way or think that thing? Is making X facial expression in alignment with how I actually think/feel about what they just said?" and I'll make a decision to either go ahead with the retrieved response or not. Deadpanning or simply not responding to things that I truly have no real response to feels amazing, but also delivering the 'acceptable' response by conscious choice feels fine.

[edit:moved paragraph]

The meat of this process so far is unlocking a different layer of internalized shame and 'I should/not" responses. I'm realizing how far back the process of learning from my environment that my 'real' responses are not acceptable goes, to the point that learning to navigate the world really just boils down to learning the script/rtfm and follow the instructions. [Side note: I binged the scyfy show Alien a few months ago and it is about the neurodivergent experience of the world, duh. It resonated hard with me.] I'm seeing this in a lot of small subtle ways.

Did you read the Cook-Greuter pdf yet? This very much sounds like the concerns of the individualist/pluralist-stage in which the person begins to question who they really are vis-a-vis to which degree they've just been getting good a/the role according to the expectations or what worked in their environment. The break from optimizing behavior for the external world and bringing it into alignment with a [to the person] previously unconscious internal world is the transition from being really good at conventional thinking and discovering post-conventional thinking, which is more subjective in nature.

• I was reading about how a lot of autistic people don't leave the house very often, <1/wk, and I went "whoa, really, wtf, I could never.... oh wait. " Again, my chosen environment seems to be designed to suit what apparently are my preferences, which if I lived in a different environment would seem abnormal. Someone in a city or suburbia who leaves the house <1/fortnight is a shut-in. Someone who lives where I do and goes to town for a resupply ~1/mo is just living his best life, #offgrid edition. This whole "environment or wiring?" question is a very entangled chicken-or-egg inquiry with me.
• I'm now questioning how much of my experiences of the world are "fine", and how much of them are just a level of pain I've always assumed is normal.

Well, according to the adaptive theory of social psychology, "pain" comes about when the individual doesn't fit into the culture they're placed. The typical response is treat the individual because thinking that the cultural norms are somehow sick is simply inconceivable. (Not much grant money in that). However, there's a Danish idiom that says "I de gales dal er det de gale der er de normale" (it has rhyme and rhythm), that is, "In the valley of the insane, the insane ones are the sane ones" (shite translation). This suggests that one should at least consider the possibility that one is sane but living in an insane environment. IOW, insofar that the mismatch forces either the individual or the culture to be sick, maybe it's the culture!? Note how mental problems in our culture seems to be trending upwards as we get more and more productive and affluent? Why is that? Is our culture, perhaps, insane?

[Mental] pain is obviously not great, but there is a choice between treating the individual or changing the individual environment if not the cultural environment. I chose to change and build my own environment. This is a big part of what freedom-to is about. Remember Plato's Cave. Not everybody is a good fit for being chained and talking about that one time that famous shadow on the wall scored some soccer goal... of it you want to be advanced about it, put on an "excited face", while retelling the story as you're having a socially-approved beer.

[AxelHeyst]

So, now, having discovered a bit more about yourself (this is a endless project), the question that strikes me is: how do you want to change (at least initially*)? Where do you want to go? What other ways can you modify your inner world and outer world to gel with who you feel(discovering) you are?

I feel like it's too early to have very granular answers to those questions. Broadly, I want the same thing I've always wanted: to understand my innate drives, strengths, and weaknesses to a high degree so that I can make effective decisions wrt how I spend my life, which I think of as an art project. I've got the idea that there are depths of richness of experience waiting to be unlocked in this process, and sources of friction and obstacles to be decommissioned. What exactly that looks like is tbd.

That being said, one very clear goal is to attain conscious mastery and understanding of the masking behaviors, as it's becoming clear that the masking dynamic dominates my experiences. It is necessarily first because otherwise I won't have a firm handle on who the "you" is in "Where do you want to go?"

My guess is the there's a higher overlap of xNTJ and atypically high functioning ND folks than other personality types**, perhaps disproportionately represented on this forum. <-- the phrase "what feels most personal is often universal" strikes me here.

Another bit of semi-conscious social-environment design, methinks. I feel more comfortable around you bunch of weirdos.

As long as you are speed running, I'll call out the only time Megan Neff cries:

Oof.

I find that the school system and workplace are very quick to paint us in a corner. I don't see the appeal of painting onself in a corner trough self diagnosys.
I know the way i experience this existence is different from what most people do.
I also know millions experienced it in a similar ways before me, and right now, therefore I am completly normal, despite a minority.
Maybe I did this grief earlier because I went to school.

Yeah, I didn't really know (/was in denial about?) that I experienced existence differently. Was homeschooled, and then I worked in a hippie engineering office (very low on the 'corporate bs'-o-meter, and also I suspect I wasn't actually much of an neuro-outlier there either) where they mostly left me alone to dive as deep as I could on my niche of expertise. The corner-painting of school and w*rk is something I know about from reading and talking with friends, not experience.

My experience of this process isn't that I'm painting myself in a corner. It is that I've been standing in a corner, but I've just noticed that the paint is dry and I can just walk out of the corner now and go wherever I like. My sense of agency has been growing significantly, in particular in my sense of Freedom-To Be an Odd Duck. I already feel freer, and I see nothing but increasing amounts of freedom ahead of me on this path.

You may be confusing what I'm doing with seeking a medical-model self-diagnosis of pathology/deficit. That is not what I'm doing. I am discovering frameworks, explanations/stories, and shared experiences that are helping me make sense of my experiences and offer hints about methods for reducing my own unconscious self-limiting beliefs and behaviors.

There is a danger in bandwagoning and adopting or exaggerating traits that I don't actually have, just because it's nice to feel like I belong somewhere. e.g. maybe I'd start mentally identifying with a level of sensory overload I don't actually experience, just because I've been listening to other people discuss it so much and I want to be "in". I'm keeping an eye on this.

Thanks @horsewoman. I love cookies.

---

It's worth reiterating that I don't suffer much these days. My life is set up in such a way that my typical worst day is just 'meh' having to do with the normal fluctuation of human energy levels. Not all days can be >7/10, but a lot of my days are! "ugh the world is too much" isn't a sentiment I resonate with due in part (I'm realizing) that I don't go into normie-world much. And when I do, that experience is on my terms: I'm bikepacking across Utah with a compatible friend, workawaying at a permaculture community run by an autistic, at a music fest in the forest as a guest of my more social friends, etc. I am fortunate, privileged, *and* have already spent a lot of time making my life work for me.

[AxelHeyst]

FWIW, I plan out strategize conversations too---just like I plan out everything. You're actually one step ahead of me in that you care about delivery and tone. I suppose I do too, but I've felt rather dirty/manipulative the few times I've played around with it and seen it working on others.

My take on deliver/tone is just another form of communication. "I want this person to understand that I feel X about this, and I've learned that the most effective way to get them to grok my inner experience is to smoosh my face like so and inflect voice thusly" etc. Doesn't feel like manipulation, just feels like another component of language I had to learn and operate consciously (because 'just act natural' did *not* work).

It may be worthwhile to split out the RAADS-R. Here's mine: Language 3 + Social relatedness 66 + Sensory/motor 3 + Circumscribed interests 9 = 81. The total score is almost as high as yours, but note how almost all the weight happens along one dimension. I'm simply not all that into interacting with the majority of humans (signal/noise). However, from your descriptions, I'm betting that your weights are different.

Language: 9. Social relatedness: 55. Sensory/motor: 17. Circumscribed interests: 23. Sum 104.

Did you read the Cook-Greuter pdf yet?

Alright alright, I'm re-reading it now.

[Mental] pain is obviously not great, but there is a choice between treating the individual or changing the individual environment if not the cultural environment. I chose to change and build my own environment. This is a big part of what freedom-to is about. Remember Plato's Cave. Not everybody is a good fit for being chained and talking about that one time that famous shadow on the wall scored some soccer goal... of it you want to be advanced about it, put on an "excited face", while retelling the story as you're having a socially-approved beer.

It's been a long, long time since I spent any more than a hot second in social circumstances like this, and I'm guessing since I've never in my life felt trapped in that world, this doesn't get much of an aversive rise out of me. Every once in a while I find myself in a place like that and it feels like an interesting anthropological field trip.

It's worth noting that "the culture is sick, so we're going to do our own thing" was an explicit story in my family from early childhood. That's why we were homeschooled, that's why we moved to the sticks: the culture is insane so #nope. I have to remind myself sometimes that not everyone grew up with this origin story and had to go through a realization process. For me it was an axiom I was handed at birth, and then accrued supporting evidence for as I went along. Making explicit choices about environment design and how and to what degree to interact with the dominant culture is just what we Heyst's do.

[Scott 2]

To the external observer, exploration of these ideas might look like skills regression. Other's grief at losing your masked self, further confuses teasing apart the layers.

Formal diagnosis impacts medical admissibility for residency, in some countries. It can also affect priority in triage situations. I don't think you are headed in that direction, but worth understanding before seeking documentation.

It's common to discover a parent or sibling is neurodivergent. One book I read, put the incidence of multiplex families at 9/10.

In my own case, that lense was very helpful. It explained parts of my childhood. It also relieved the "how did they miss this?" train of thought. My weird behavior was normal to my weird parents. Familial norms offered scaffolding by default.

[7Wannabe5]

I remember when my son told me that he always formed complete sentences in his head before he spoke them. My instance heart-felt response was "Oh, you poor thing!", even though I fully recognize the downside of tending towards the opposite Semi-related note from perhaps nearing the other end of some spectrum would be that recently on a few occasions, I have found myself typing whole paragraphs without even verbalizing as I go in my head. I mean, I am accustomed to having the ability to carry on a conversation while my mind is elsewhere, or I am too tired to focus, but my verbal center keeps chirping away, but it's weird to find myself typing/composing mindlessly, like my fingers just know what sort of word ought to come next without consulting my mind. Like maybe I learned how to do this from ChatGPT!!!

[Frita]

Yo, fellow ENTpster, what are your RAADS-R scores? Mine are 0 (Language) + 4 (Social Relatedless) + 6 (Sensory/Motor) + 9 (Circumscribed Interests) = 19 (Total)
Ya, some people have a meta language experience. I think in more pictures and sensations than words. Like you, I can automatically generate language.

Based on this thread, I wonder if I am on the opposite end of Autism, still not in the normal range. Going-along-to-get-along, I get it and don’t care to play (retired that crap as a young teen).

It's worth noting that "the culture is sick, so we're going to do our own thing" was an explicit story in my family from early childhood.

I got this too but am weird in my own way. The message was more, “We’ll not corrupt you through TV, processed foods, consumerism, and the mainstream world. Figure the rest out by yourself.” My family was more of a band of individuals than a collective “we.”

[7Wannabe5]

@Frita: My RAADS-R was 16: language 0, social 9, sensory 4, circumscribed interests 3. I would say my automatic writing experience was more dissociative than meta. I was writing a paper on an extremely boring topic, and it was like my eNTP brain couldn't handle the pain of being that bored anymore, so my fingers kept typing while my thoughts went elsewhere. I think it is kind of opposite of autism in terms of stimulation, because not being stimulated, being bored, is so painful for an eNTP. However, generally, when I am interested in what I am saying or typing, language just comes to me on bubbling little streams of inner aural delight. Words make me happy.