“And remember: the sky is the limit! You can be anything you want to be!”
“Thank you. I want to be a secretary.”
That stopped them short. “What?”
“A secretary,” she repeated.
“But…” they trailed off, dumbfounded. “Why? You could be a CEO, a scientist, a law–”
“I don’t want to be a CEO,” she said. “I want to be a secretary.”
They scoffed. “You want to answer phones all day?”
She smiled. “Yes.”
“Schedule appointments?”
“I like organizing.”
“Be a second banana?”
An affirmative nod. “I’m skilled at helping.”
“I just don’t understand,” they said. “HOW could you be okay with all of this?!”
“I enjoy the work.”
“BUT YOU CAN BE WHATEVER YOU WANT TO BE!”
“I know.”
“Then WHY?!”
She shrugged.
“Because I want to be a secretary.”
Honestly though, this is very similar to my mom’s experience. She’s always been super bright, but has realized as she’s gotten older that intellectual pursuits just aren’t her jam. She dropped out of her PhD program to have kids, and although she has her master’s and was a pretty good school psychologist, she hated having to make huge decisions. She’s a church secretary now and loves it, and she’s GOOD at it; she’s letting her school psych certification permanently expire this year with zero regrets. If you can be anything you want, that includes the things we don’t tend to value as highly as a society. Not everybody is built for or wants the “respectable” careers.
My grandma did this to me, saying that i didn’t want to get stuck on the outside, making coffee and filing papers. The thing is, that’s exactly what I’ve always enjoyed the most, making and organizing things. That would be enough for me.
Nobody seems to realize that if you tell people they can be anything they want to be they will. And not everyone WANTS to be doctors or lawyers or CEOs or scientists. Sometimes, they just want to be a secretary.
I may have just learned why I struggled in art class so much.
The teacher tried really hard to help me learn how to add a congruent shadow to what I was drawing in an attempt to teach me how to make the item more realistic and identifiable as an object. But every time I added the shadow, the item no longer looked like what I was trying to show, but the teacher would say “see doesn’t this look better now?” And was confused when I said no.
According to this study, autistic people (children in the case of the study, but these things don’t change as you age) found it harder to identify objects if they had a congruent or incongruent shadow, but easily identified the item when shown without cast shadow (“floating in space” as art teachers would describe it). In contrast, control children who were neurotypical and had no history of anything else which could affect this kind of thing struggled to identify the object without the cast shadow, and as expected the one with the incongruent shadow.
It’s absolutely fascinating that finding out that I’m autistic has actually answered soooooo many questions I had about why I experience the world so differently.
And I guess it means that it’s ok for me to draw things without cast shadows if that’s what I am able to then enjoy looking at when finished. It also explains why I prefer colouring books to more traditional artistic pursuits because there is a clearly defined edge to the pictures and no expectation that you should be adding shadows outside of the lines.
Any other autistic people noticed this with themselves?
Oh this is absolutely fascinating… and explains a lot about what I struggle about art and trying to comprehend 3d form. Particularly notable was the idea that cast shadows and second order contrasts added noise, and interfered with and prevailed over processing an object.
This is honestly one of the big reasons I struggle with drawing from life actually, since I have to compete with the shadows in order to comprehend the form I am attempting to draw. Outside of just cast shadows, if you look at my art, you will see that I am only concerned with first-order (luminance-defined) shadows. And tbh, the way I draw them they don’t exactly behave like shadows, and only serve to define the object for me in a way that makes sense to me and nothing else. Even then, I try to keep them as simple as possible because anything more would be too much for what my brain can process. I would never touch the complex second-order (texture-defined) shadows because they actually keep me from recognizing an object. It is interesting stuff. The way they called it “noise” really does help me understand why it becomes so hard for me.
Also interesting is this is probably why I am unable to sleep without bright light directly around my head at least, because everything becomes unrecognizable otherwise and I become unable to identify even my own room.
Fuck, my sleep schedule does naturally fall into the 4am-12 pattern, doesn’t it
What fucking else about ADD/ADHD don’t I know?
Do you sit weird in chairs? Apparently that’s one.
Does criticism really REALLY really upset you, to the point that you get upset and consider walking away from whatever the thing you were criticized for was?
Is your sense of time utterly fucked?
Oh fuck. I was recently diagnosed but all of these things have been true my whole life lol
Imagine my surprise when I had this plus all the standard symptoms and got diagnosed at 31! *Fingerguns*
More Adult ADHD symptoms that people don’t know:
“Hyperactivity” can include chattiness, or an obsessive focus on one topic that you’ll happily go on about for hours in a conversation with *anyone* at the slightest provocation (last week someone brought up pockets in women’s clothing near the end of a small-group workout session and I may have spent the rest of the session giving an impromptu lecture about pockets while doing hammer curls)
Zoning out and staring off into space because you’re thinking really hard about something and then not noticing that people are talking to you
Hyperfocus is a symptom of ADHD. There’s this pervasive myth that folks with ADHD can’t pay attention but sometimes the problem is you can’t leave something alone.
Random impulsive shopping sprees that leave you wracked with guilt can be part of ADHD
Interrupting or talking over other people
P R O C R A S T I N A T I O N (because you can’t feel bad about failing a project that never gets started)
Worrying that you’re going to get fired every time your boss wants to speak to you privately (this is a sign of rejection sensitive dysphoria and emotional hyperarousal)
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got the attention to look up for now so ttyl, if you think you may have ADHD check out some of the blogs dedicated to it, read up on symptoms, and talk to your doctor, bye.
Everybody raise your hand if you developed a mnemonic as a kid where you flexed your right arm to remember which was right and which was left and kept that into adulthood because I’ve now spoken to three people who have a half-second “right-flex-okay-it’s-this-one” “left-flex-okay-it’s-the-other-one” process for figuring out which is right and which is left.
Oh my god. When I was being taught right-left as a kid my dad bought me a ring to put on my left hand to help me remember. To this day when I think right-or-left I run my left thumb against my ring-finger to confirm that it’s left even though i haven’t worn that ring for over 35 years (!!!).
I have so few of the popularized symptoms of ADHD and so many of all the less-known ones associated with it that l have no idea if I qualify for a diagnosis, but I’ve got to say it’s a bit of a relief to know how many other people have these issues at all. Like…it’s not just me??
Oh thank ghu there is someone else out there who reads these symptom lists and goes “well, that all sounds familiar, but I don’t have the Important Signs, so I can’t diagnose.” B/c I don’t want to claim something I don’t have, but at the same time some of the pieces fit…
Same. I never know if these things are unique to a particular issue, or universal but people wont fess up, or just me.
And I reflexively have to put my hand on my heart to know right from left..but….your left hand makes an L when you look at your index finger and thumb. My son taught me that one.
This is part of why get a diagnosis was a relief. I had an explanation for all the odd behaviors, and i wasn’t just lazy or stupid.
ADHD tends to have a genetic component and while I don’t think my paternal side has it, I do know my maternal grandfather couldn’t tell left from right, so I wonder if it maybe it came from that side.
Yep, another person who has difficulty with left and right over here. I’m better at it, at age 32, but sometimes I still double-check by turning my left hand into an L.
Also weirdly, when I was in the Navy, Port and Starboard was easy. I think it’s because port and starboard are not arbitrary nor do they change based on which way you’re facing. On a plane or a ship, the nose is the front, port is on the left, and starboard is on the right. Always. Doesn’t matter if you’re looking at the tail of the plane, the port wing is still in the same place it was when you were looking at the nose of the jet.
Thats a good point about port and starboard and I found the same thing to be true.
Also I totally do the L thing too. If i have to give directions in a car from the passenger seat i tend to point left and tap the window for right because if i try to verbally tell you left or right I will probably get it wrong.
For my grandpa it was ‘papa’s side (driver’s side, so left) or B’s side (since grandma sat in the passenger seat)”
I feel so accomplished.
Today I got all my exams for one class (of three) set up with disability services for the rest of the semester, got extensions on homework that could have absolutely murdered me because I was having technical issues and actually communicated with the teachers this time, and then DID THE HOMEWORK. ON TIME.
Still not balanced as well as I’d like because I have other assignments I’m putting off rn so I can decompress from the day, but hey. I got things accomplished, I got them accomplished well, and this…this is what I was missing the last time. I failed two of the classes I’m taking now–one of them twice–but now I have a much better handle on my personal life and scheduling, and I’m mentally and physically in a much better place.
There will be bad years. There will be backsliding. I still dissociate and have problems, but I am finally getting some real traction again.
Now to add “preparing my own meals again” to the list…just in time for New Year’s!
first few OCs: hmm, i want their character to be balanced, like some perks are good but really should even that out with some negatives to the character. don’t wanna make them OP or anything, and absolutely shouldn’t be too close to any in game plot lines. god the last thing I want is an OC that’s mary sue
veteren OCs: you will get every fucking power and you will also have only the best outfits, YOU, will get recognized by MANY canon characters, your negative character traits only make you sexier, and you’re immortal and you get to be apart of both factions and you get rare or non existent things and
DarkestElemental616 