Ha! This video is what I needed right now for a few reasons. Thanks. Yes, I am on the spectrum, and so is my brother, and so is my father. I wasn't diagnosed until my late 30s, but 1) I had plenty of other things to blame, and 2) I more or less 'knew' since my teens, but autism was not widely discussed then, and I didn't identify with that label at all. Internally I simply identified as a space alien from another planet sent here to observe humans. It helped me explain to myself my need to study people very carefully to form a theory of their words and actions. I just studied people silently for years, never saying much. After high school I found some friends who appreciated me enough to bring me into situations where I could imitate them and slowly begin to practice masking.
My father was not very involved because my mother didn't want him to be. To this day she is enraged that she was suckered into marrying a defective person because she felt sorry for him. She booted me out the house at 18. I was quasi-homeless for the next few years, sleeping in my car, at friends', sometimes at my grandparents'. Nothing permanent. I'm going to cut this story short because it doesn't really go anywhere. 2006-2012 were pretty good for me, and by conventional measures too.
I've been entangled with the mental health system too many times to list. It's a fraught fucking thing. A real mind-fuck. We didn't have the word 'gaslighting' in those days.
I've had very little interaction in life with people I relate to, other than my brother. That's why this video is ... relieving, or something like that.
If you ever wanna talk, hit me up! Community is important! Kindness is infectious. Check my profile if you feel like you wanna reach out. I've been kind of working on an internet generative pen and paper style role playing chat gizmo (who isn't right?) but also... Yeah man, that family stuff is typical honestly and it sounds like your mother and father had a lot of hurt because they couldn't connect. We have the luxury of doing better because we can know different things because internet.
No matter what, guard your grill with your fam but they did what they could and are flawed like the rest of us. Tigers won't change their stripes. Be who you gotta be and try to share some comfort and kindness where you can. Also give Whooligan a like and follow if you think of it. They don't have a lot of attention and I think they do solid effort and deserve more.
I detect a very familiar kind of traumatic shock in this story here. I currently experience manic terror masked by what looks like jokey beats told rapidly on loop for what I suspect are similar reasons. Who failed you doesn't have to define you though. They will probably still fail you but, probably they don't want to and don't know how to be different and wish they could be. Not your problem to fix. Because you're human and talking to me right now I think I can say with very strong confidence that your chosen family needs you to slow down the tape enough to share your light.
It makes me pretty happy that this video resonated with you. Find your people, be kind, know yourself. Guard your grill because the world is getting weirder. You're a goldmine and ghouls wanna deplete you. Surround yourself with folks that value your modes and can help you with the parts you don't get that well and you can trust to tell you the truth. Rinse, repeat.
I'm sorry if that's preachy sounding, but everything feels like hell to me today. I very much feel for your struggle how you explained it friend.
Just wanted to show my support to @psyc and you (@stuntkite). I come from a mildly dysfunctional family and while everything worked out fine in the end it made me quite sensitive to these issues and I am aware of the struggle. Big hug, guys!
Thanks for sharing @stuntkite @psyc! Sometimes a read (like these posts) come as quite a reality check to someone who comes from family with no big issues and who had it generally quite protected in life. All the best to you and stay strong!
Well thank you for saying so, and yes I tell my story in part to prick the Just World / The System Works bubble that I perceive as predominating around these parts. Like, to me, I might casually mention I started working at age 8, and someone responds “Uh, that is child labor.” To which I reply, no shit it’s child labor. By 12 I was putting in 40 hour weeks during summer, under the table, for a respected professional pillar of the community. And someone will say, “This happened in America? Exploitation!” Well maybe, but to me it was a godsend, and the one and only reason I was able to buy my first computer and learn programming. Of course that isn’t how it would go in an ideal world, but how can anyone mistake this world for an ideal one? You answered that question. And my early life (on second thought, the rest of it too) wasn’t all-ghetto either. It was always very checkered. Every part had aspects of real privilege and real poverty. Maybe the only thing it didn’t have was any consistency :)
On a different note, it just occurred to me that we talk a lot about impostor syndrome, but never about the kind I had. Usually it’s about one’s skills and ability. I never had that, but I had it really, really hard about my class, and that never went away, either.
Thanks, psyc. I'm really glad I was able to ... connect? lol ... how do talk person? I was going to say comfort you, but I dunno... it felt weird to say. I'm glad you can relate and got something out of it. How's that? Am I doing this right?
Relationship with your mom sounds awful... I'm strained with both of my parents for different reasons.
Let me know if I can help with anything. I'm datafaucet on twitter http://twitter.com/datafaucet http://twitter.com/datafaucet
Hey, it’s you! I watched all 2.5 hours of your vid last night and it was fantastic for too many reasons. Let’s just say I’m going through some things, and I am underinformed about some other things. So thank you and thanks stuntkite.
Welcome to hacker news! I learned a lot from the video (watched it all, not something I expected when I saw the length :))
The idea of being in the care of malicious caregivers is horrific. I can imagine it skews your worldview in a pessimistic direction. I’m sorry to hear that life was unfair to you. I’m glad to hear that you’re able to approach it with some humor now.
> There is a massive contingent of people that HATE autistic people and feel like it's something to be "fixed". A lot of them frame that hate as helping.
I suspect this has something to do with the fact that many of these have grown up in environments where you are good at technical stuff or you are less than those who are (i.e. the US). They know that many autists will straight smoke their ass in all things STEM and they deeply resent being dealt a losing hand to those "weirdos". Others are just straight up sadists/abusers. The more I hear stories like this, the more I believe the courts practically seek out these sick fucks to be "caregivers" and such. Something is pathologically wrong with this entire area of society.
> the more I believe the courts practically seek out these sick fucks to be "caregivers" and such
I suspect its worse than that. I suspect courts don't care if the caregiver is a sick fuck, because the sick fuck is offering to fix the problem of a disabled person existing with needs.
"autist" is generally regarded as derogatory, BTW.
Thanks for your trigger warning. I did not read your message. I am replying notwithstanding. I actually had to write this in a different application because when I tried replying to your comment, I couldn't actually hide it from view, and I saw the words 'special interests' and others, couldn't resize the window right, so opened another app to write.
Dude so in Chile, most of the world, a guardian can pay a shrink (a malpracticing psychiatrist, that's what that means) $400.000 (like $500) and he or she will 100% accuse him of any condition desired. Will. In United States the price is higher, depends on the state, basically on the chance of getting caught, and good psychs will just refuse. But they won't turn the guardian in, the good psychs are not in charge, the shrinks are in charge (like the Sacklers, being a shrink can make you a billionaire[1]). But a shrink can diagnose bipolar, schizophrenia, cannot take care of himself, retardation[2], what are the others...autism...paranoia...early-onset dementia...um...I read so many books about these things, why am I having a hard time rattling them all off...but at any rate, these are not diagnoses. They are also accusations. If false and public, they are slander. They justify harm, you can justify brain surgery, like a lobotomy but with better marketing. Same as an accusation can justify harm, putting someone in prison. And turns out, they all make the pretense of being scientific, but none of them are falsifiable (you have no way of proving them false), so why bother calling psychs who use them doctors if they're not even scientists? (Psychs is a more neutral term than shrink, psychiatrist is too big a word, takes too long to say, and means 'attendant of the soul' which is innacurate.)
And there are some great psychs. Just a minority by design.
[1] If you actually do the math, the three Sackler brothers are each a trillionaire debtor because that's the poverty value of the suffering they inflicted. Thousands of 13th amendment violations, making people addicts means making them slaves, they made hundreds of thousands of Americans slaves. Just through psychiatric malpractice, by definition being a shrink.
[2] This one is dangerous because if you diagnose retardation and the retard gets the best score in the country on the SAT, you might not look so smart yourself.
So my mother did this to me once. She didn't pay him - he was a friend from her church. He committed me as a favor to her. I was actually in a pretty good place at that time mood-wise. 100% not a danger to self / others. But she thought it a clever way to get me gone without the guilt of putting me on the street. Neither said a word beforehand. Surprise! The feeling of betrayal was indescribable.
They held me for a miserable month. The justification given by the hospital doc was I "Didn't have a plan." That last bit can be good or bad depending on their assessment of your plans.
yes, I'm fortunate to have a very good doc now. I've had a few decent ones. Most could be replaced by a kiosk - take a quiz, dispense Big Pharma pills.
Thanks, Stuntkite! That's really kind of you...
I ... my childhood was fucking weird... I thankfully never dealt with malicious caregivers, but I know now that both of my parents were autistic and undiagnosed. My care was mostly severe neglect... I say it was bizarre, because I went to an expensive summer camp like $6k/yr if I remember correctly, but that was the only time I knew support and community as a child. Back at home, while my parents were millionaires (not anymore), I lived alone with my mom in a hoarding house with multiple holes in the roof and infested with both racoons and rats. So yeah... a distinct lack of socializing experience didn't help me.
Let me know if I can help with anything. I'm datafaucet on twitter http://twitter.com/datafaucet http://twitter.com/datafaucet
You responded to my youtube comment with that "let me know if I can help with anything" when I first watched your video and gushed a bit. I gather that you decided to do that because you're an internet professional and because of the things you talked about in that video. It was shocking, and where I can determine it's context appropriate I've been applying it.
I'm going to take you up on that. I want to get you to look at my sort of janky WebRTC+XMPP+Unity3D remote D&D... not game... more like puppet show... thing. heh. It is NOT my day job.
I've got a contingent of computer professionals and people I've played D&D with not working on it but playing along while I sort it out. I've got a really pretty OK chat bot foundation for it that is like the old BBS game Legend of the Red Dragon with forrest fights and stuff... but it's backed by a well groomed and totally NOT distributable database a friend made of the Pathfinder SRD and a pretty cool magic item and name generator I made. It's a containerized django project originally running an IRC bot that I have now ported to Discord... which I dislike but am ... whatever. Anyway.
Come look at my chat bot and meet my nerd friends (it's like six of us on a good day) and look at the 3D broken puppet show I put on top of it please. I would really like that.
I will ping you on twitter. I don't want to cross this account with the one I'm going to send you contact from on twitter... I guess since you asked if you could help, check my profile and shoot me a hello via email so I can confirm my identity easily. Please. If you don't get to doing that, we can do that later. I don't wanna be a chore.
Cheers. I really, really appreciate your work. It's effervescent. I've sent it to a dozen people personally and a few of them that are NT actually watched it and they enjoyed it but really, more importantly, you put things into place for them that I'm talking about but they don't get when it's just coming from me and it's made my life a lot easier in some places.
Also, can I buy you a new microphone? I would like to do that. I don't think it needs to be anything extravagant, but I'm an audio professional and your audio quality muddles the message and can be over stimulating at times even though I know what you said at source was great. Your video editing is tops. Let me buy you a mic. We can chat about what works for you in your setup and I'll find the perfect one.
EDIT: This is kind of the forum for I'd guess a lot of people on the spectrum or however we say it. I did not expect this to blow up but I really can't express how happy it makes me that so many the people discussing things here are talking about how much your video connected with them. That was a hard video to make. I think what you put together is going to help so many people and I really see it here. To type this gets my face all twisted and crylike which isn't my thing. Really. Thank you.
I'm a few more shades more conservative (Read: self-hating) than the guy in that video but I can't stop laughing.
I'm at the point where he's talking about how he suspected he should get diagnosis's from two doctors to get on disability and he was right and he was told to go to a third doctor anyways. It might be hard for people to relate to how I've had to have a hard talk with people that they will likely have to fight for years to get on disability assistance regardless of if they're legitimately disabled and that you can be too disabled and lacking in support to get through the system to get disability support. I know why things are like that but it doesn't make it any less cruelly ironic.
This video is so fucking real it's unreal.
It's pretty wild isn't it? I learned how to mask pretty dang well at puberty and I didn't really start being totally drained by it until my mid 20s. I got diagnosed around 30 and I also "live with" ADHD and some other comorbid brain worms and because of the nature of my job move states a lot and need a new GP. It's crazy how many will decide to totally re-evaluate me. Like seriously bro, I've been on these meds for eight years. If you fuck with my timing while I'm trying to unpack and start a new job literally everything could be very fucked. It's cool that you hate me and this state hates me too.
The magic words just about anywhere I've found are "this is effecting my job" and you just get whatever treatment you asked for. But if I overly autistically explain anything they wanna run me through the shredder and set new appointments. "You just don't seem autistic." Yeah... do you know how these tests work also I'm hyper-vigialant masking right now because it's 7:30AM on a monday and I just met you.
Is this a time where I could have used the word Kafkaesque and it actually applies? I'm half drunk and don't know where that would fit in. I've got little tiny bug feet. I don't really know what bugs eat.
> you can be too disabled and lacking in support to get through the system to get disability support
This 1000 times. I’d be on the street if not for the wherewithal to complete a grueling application, and an address to stay at where they could send the rejection and appeal letters 18 months later. Because of that, I am comfortable, while the homeless are homeless even though they may equally qualify. Safety net has too large holes.
This is a tangent, but electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) can be very effective for treatment-resistant depression and bipolar.
As far as I know it's not effective for autism, but ECT often gets namedropped for shock value by people who don't like psychiatry, and when it's used appropriately and consensually for disorders it can treat, it doesn't deserve such a bad reputation. The end result is that people tend to be very scared of ECT even when it could probably help them.