matt1993, posts by tag: autism - LiveJournal

Last month, I posted a couple of friends-only entries. (If you're one of my LJ/DW friends and you saw both of those already, most of this entry won't be new to you so you can probably skip this paragraph or so.)

About what?

Well... for anyone who doesn't know (i.e. anyone who has never read an entry in my journal other than this one): I have autism, had somewhat of a sheltered childhood, and spent a lot of my life not being able to word things very well. As a result, many times I've said things that unintentionally came across as rude or were misunderstood, and this led to me becoming crippled with fear that everything I say is going to eventually turn out to be stupid or offend someone. Since I'm still not much better at writing, here is how my sister describes it: "You are always worried about doing something wrong/being hated, even when it comes to what movies or games or books you can like." (I'd add shows, and characters, and fonts, and art programs, and web browsers, and comics/webcomics, and websites, and numerical constants...) "And you can add that I said it's because you take everything you read in internet comments for truth (if someone says hate you think it means literal real hate, or that they will hate YOU for liking the thing they hate). That's really what it all boils down to. Everything is exactly the same in that it is always that, and always nothing to worry about, but something you worry about anyway."
Here are some examples of how much my anxiety about offending people deeply affects me:
- Sometimes I lose sleep or get onto a very irregular sleep schedule worrying about being hated.
- When I was in college, sometimes I would be so paralyzed with fear about something that made me worry about being hated, that I would be late for class or have trouble focusing on homework because all I can think about is the fact that there's something I might be hated over. To an extent, that still happens today when I'm at work.
- Sometimes all of these worries gets so intense that it becomes depression that I can only overcome by posting to my journal about some of the things I worry about being hated for. (usually in friends-only entries because it's bad enough having to worry what people who DO know me already will think!) Essentially, if it's true what my sister has told me about how I have trouble seeing things the way they are and that it's "obvious" to most people that most of my worries are nothing to worry about, then posting entries such as these is the only way for ME to see things the way they are.

And my two recent friends-only entries were basically that - yet another instance of me being so consumed with worrying about what people will think of me if they know I like X/dislike X/X thing about me that the only way I could feel even a little bit better about it was by posting about it. Despite being TERRIFIED of what the comments I would receive might be.

Well, the result was better than the anxious part of me expected.

So it helped.

A little.

But it wasn't enough now that we live in a world where online discourse about boycotts, separating the art from the artist, and differing opinions about ANYTHING has gotten to the point it's at.

So I'm going to have to up the stakes a little.

Things turned out alright when I posted about some of the things I worry about possibly being hated over in a friends-only entry... now let's see what happens when I post it again (with a few minor tweaks), but in a PUBLIC entry!

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Hey! Turns out there's a TERM for the EXACT type of depression and anxiety that I frequently struggle with!! How long has there been a term for it?

https://www.additudemag.com/reject…
https://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/rej…
https://www.healthline.com/health/…
https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/m…

I recommend reading these articles to get a better idea of what I typically have meant in the past when I say that I have depression, anxiety, social anxiety, or PTSD, or am worried about being hated or disliked. In fact, it's probably what I meant in some cases when I say that my behaviors or reactions or feelings are because of my autism.

Good news: I no longer feel like people might see me as a horrible person or hate me just because of the fact that I've had this userpic since I was 15-16.

Bad news: I now feel like people will DEFINITELY see me as a horrible person and hate me just because of the fact that I've had this userpic since I was 15-16.

https://blog.emojipedia.org/ios-13…
https://twitter.com/jeremyburge/st…
https://intheloopaboutneurodiversi…
https://www.learnfromautistics.com…

(Like most entries when I post a lot of links that make me worry, I wanted to address everything I saw on these pages that worried me, but that would require looking at them for much longer and taking a lot longer to write this entry. Also, the less I write, the less likely I am to unintentionally be offensive? Maybe?)

What I feel like these articles are saying in a nutshell:
- I'm a bad person because I made this userpic, even though I was 15 at the time (16 when I made the current version; both versions have identical text)
- I'm an even WORSE person because I continued to have it even after the first time I saw anyone being offended by the idea of puzzle piece(s) representing autism in general
- I'm even worse still because I continued to have it after the first time anyone specifically told me that they were offended by my userpic specifically, which was about two years ago by now
- I'm even worse because I don't want to remove or replace this userpic. Especially not after so long. And because I still like the autism puzzle piece symbol. And because I like how colorful this userpic is and how I used color palettes from Super Mario World for the non-painted-over pieces. If you like other symbols of autism better, that's fine - I just wish I didn't have to feel like almost everyone with autism will hate me because I prefer the puzzle piece(s).
- I'm a horrible person for supporting Autism Speaks, even though I AM autistic. And for thinking that a lot of things Autism Speaks has done that people have issues with remind me a lot of how *I* used to not understand autism very well, so I feel like I'll be hated because of that and for having worded so many things badly over the years. And since a lot of those things were things Autism Speaks has said *in the past*, when autism wasn't well-understood in general, seeing people talking about that makes me feel like *I* can NEVER be forgiven for ANYTHING I do that is wrong or problematic, no matter how much time is passed. More on that: https://matt1993.livejournal.com/3…
- I'm a horrible person for the fact that I thought I strictly *needed* there to be a cure for autism for so long, and while I now get that not everyone wants there to be one, I still feel like *I'd* be a lot happier in general if I weren't autistic. (Because I feel that if I weren't autistic, I wouldn't word things so poorly so often or make userpics that turn out to offend everyone, for starters...)
- I'm a horrible person if I prefer person-first language, and I'm a horrible person if I DON'T prefer person-first language, and I'm a horrible person if I don't care either way. (FWIW, I'm in the "don't care either way" category. More entries about my thoughts about that: https://matt1993.livejournal.com/3… https://matt1993.livejournal.com/3…)


When I wrote the text on this userpic ten years ago, I was expressing my frustration at how autism isn't very well understood, even by me, and how I wish it was understood better. (It DEFINITELY wasn't well understood for a lot of my lifetime!) In other words, I felt that autism IS a puzzle to those who don't understand it well (including well-meaning people, and I feel that well-meaning people don't need to be yelled at and called jerks just because they don't understand; they just need to be educated on the subject) - sometimes including autistic people themselves such as me. Similarly, I've always felt that I never know what to say or do to not offend people and not unintentionally make everyone hate me - social skills have always been a "puzzle" to me in that regard. And I felt that way even more back when I made the userpic.

Could I have worded the userpic better when I first made it? Well... no. Remember, a) I have autism, which in my case has always made finding the right words difficult for me; b) this was back when I was still fairly new to posting online in general, so I was still naïve enough to think that I could word it however I wanted and people would understand what I meant; c) this was also back before I knew that there was ANYONE who hates Autism Speaks, or ANYONE with autism who wouldn't want there to be a cure for it, etc. because my experience with autism back then was so limited.

Could I have worded the userpic better when I redrew it later that year? Probably not. I could have tried to if I'd known that 8-10 years later I would end up feeling like everyone will hate me for wording it the way I did, but since I didn't know that... I didn't. I just used the same wording again. And *even if* I'd known that I should reword it, there's no guarantee that the new version would actually have been better, for all of the same reasons that the first version turned out as poorly-worded as it did.

Could I make a new version of the userpic that is worded better NOW? Maybe. I've even considered it. But I don't want to.
First off, whenever I try to word things in a way that has no possibility of offending anyone, I always feel like I'm being forced to add dozens of disclaimers that make whatever I'm writing far too long to read, which all turns out to be for naught when I inevitably offend someone anyway.
Secondly, I now feel that this userpic is good at representing my personal struggle with autism because it contains symbols and wording that could be seen as problematic. What could be a better representation of my anxiety about being misunderstood and disliked for things I've made years ago when I was worse at wording than something I made years ago that I have anxiety about being misunderstood and disliked for? How can the rainbow/gold infinity symbol (or any other proposed autism symbol that I've never heard of until just today, and am therefore probably a bad person for not knowing about them) represent MY experience with autism in the same way?


I hope this makes sense - as usual, I had to write it quickly so I can get this posted so I can stop worrying about it sooner. So if I worded something wrong, it's because of that AND my being bad at wording in general.


Well, time to be unable to sleep at all for another week or two thanks to worrying about this. :(

So as you've probably noticed (unless you read my entries on DW only), I changed my LJ style... turns out the glitch where videos wouldn't show up in IE only happens on outdated journal styles, which my Pale Yellows style was, so the glitch won't be fixed.

So I had to pick a different style, and wow... not only do videos show up again, I finally get to see when someone "likes" my entry since I no longer get the email notifications about it, and I finally found out that to fix the glitch where status bars that used to show up correctly now made pages unreadable, I didn't have to edit them manually on LJ - all I had to do was set "Resize images in entry" to "No resize"! Though I checked just now and DW doesn't have a similar option. Another reason for me to still prefer LJ...

When I changed my style, I also had to go through and look at all the customization settings again to make it look more or less like it did before, including entering my blurb again. I figured since I had to do that, I might as well not re-enter the same blurb as before and instead put in, on both my LJ and DW sidebars, the new blurb I wrote recently that I was planning on replacing it with eventually anyway.

For posterity, the old blurb said:

What has ten fingers, autism, synesthesia, a crush on Enya, lots of Mario games, thousands of regrets, a feeling of worry about being judged for almost everything, and a tendency to write blurbs that become outdated quickly?

Me!

...You're not laughing. Have you heard this one already?

Anyway, in my journal, at first almost all of my entries were public, but lately I've been making more and more of my entries friends-only, usually if they're about things I worry (MAYBE too much) about. I never really intended for it to turn out that way, hence why I didn't put up any sort of "this journal is semi-friends-only" notice until just now (July 2015).


And wow... I've been using the Pale Yellows style since 2009. There were a couple of times I changed the colors to custom color schemes, and then in July 2015 I reverted it back to its original colors so it'd feel like a return to the good old days, and in August 2017 I temporarily made it look as much like my pre-Pale Yellows layout as possible (without actually switching to the old layout) to celebrate the tenth anniversary of my journal... but in nine years, I've never replaced the Pale Yellows style entirely until now.


Now I have to look at my first 700 or so LJ entries again just to make sure the new layout didn't also cause any of them to not show up correctly anymore. At least this should be faster than the first time around since I've already fixed them once. :)

Woefully late in posting this, but:

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Go to Wordle and...

1) Paste in all entries you posted in January 2017 and make a Wordle configured any way you like
2) Paste in all entries you posted in February 2017 and make another Wordle configured any way you like
...
12) Paste in all entries you posted in December 2017 and make another Wordle configured any way you like
13) Make a Wordle out of your entries from ALL months of 2017, configured any way you like

Then post all of these Wordles to your LiveJournal and/or DreamWidth and/or whatever other blogging site(s) you're on!


You may do steps 1 - 12 only or step 13 only if you prefer.

It's up to you if you include subject lines, comments, community entries, friends-only entries, music tags, location tags, etc., and it's up to you whether you post your Wordles in a public or friends-only entry. Anything else I didn't think of is probably optional as well.

And if you're on more than one journal site (in this example, LJ and DW), you may do this for your LJ entries only, your DW entries only, your entries on both sites combined, all of the above - whichever. And you may post it to only one site or the other, or to both - whichever you prefer.

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Personally I opted to do this for my LJ and DW entries separately AND combined, and post all three versions of each to both LJ and DW. Which means this took about six times as long to make as it usually does...

Left: LJ only
Center: LJ+DW combined
Right: DW only

You can also tell because I tried to skew the colors of the LJ-only ones towards LJ-blue and away from DW-red/pink, and vice versa for the DW-only ones. Looking at how some of the color schemes turned out, though, I might need to adjust my algorithm before my 2018 Wordle Year in Review...

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Oh, and this year, I thought of a little word search game I could add onto this meme! (you don't have to make a little game like this if you make your own Wordle Year in Review though)

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The tenth anniversary of my LiveJournal is on August 19!!!


To celebrate, August 2017 is Matt1993 Nostalgia Month! (Okay, so that would also be an accurate description of basically any month from October 2015 to July 2017... but for August 2017, it's an even MORE accurate description!)

When I joined LJ nearly ten years ago, I never thought I'd be still on it for this long - especially given how I kept going on hiatuses from it until February 2009. I also never thought so many things would have changed since then, or that I'd be posting about so many new things since then.

I keep wondering what basically everything I've posted to LJ in 2009-2017 would look like to my 14-year-old or 15-year-old self (i.e. from the era when I wasn't that active on LJ and didn't think I ever would be).


Well, now that question will be sort of answered, because:

1. I'm changing my journal style back to Blue Gray (which is what I think I was using at first and had left as for... I'm not even sure how long; probably until early 2009 but MAYBE earlier) for a month, then will change it to Pale Yellows again at the end of the month. Though I'm leaving the journal title and subtitle as is because I don't remember what those were back in 2007 - and I decided that if I'm keeping those as is, I'll also leave in other anachronistic references such as the comment text being "# Doom 2 bad guys will come out of my ears"/"Rob Morrow to you!" :)

2. As those of you who've known me since 2009 know, five of my oldest userpics used to look different until I updated them late that year (and I don't think I had any userpics at all before 2009). Well, I'm temporarily changing those five userpics back to what they looked like in 2009!

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3. And why stop there? If my newer userpics had also existed prior to November 2009 or so, some of them likely would've looked different back then, too - so I've taken what I call the "Super Mario Maker approach" because I'm a dork and retroactively created "older" versions of eleven more userpics, and am temporarily changing them "back" to these versions for the month!

What would my journal and some of my comments have looked like if...
- that brief era when I played D&D had been at least a few months earlier
- I'd started watching The X-Files before 2010
- I'd had my first /crazymegavideo/ dream before 2010
- the Forbidden Comment Threads had happened at least a couple of years earlier, resulting in 2009 being during the four years or so of depression and angst they caused me
- and so on
...and therefore some of my userpics about these had been made when I was 15 instead of 16-22?

Let's find out!!

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It was fun using my 2008-2009 drawing/spriting styles once again in 2016-2017! Even if the old-style versions of the 7:97 and /crazymegavideo/ userpics don't sync up as well with the regular versions as I thought they would. :)

4. And, as if making ancient in-jokes look even more ancient wasn't anachronistic enough already, I'm even applying the same temporary changes to my DreamWidth account! This includes the same userpic changes, and... okay, not the SAME layout changes, because LJ and DW have different default layouts. Still, I figure if DreamWidth had existed in 2007 and I'd had an account on it back then, I probably would've used its default layout for nearly two years like I did on LJ, so I'm temporarily using that layout (Neutral Good) for a month. :)


(Before I actually make any of these changes, though, I'm going to make sure both the LJ and DW versions of this entry look okay - so my journals may or may not still be yellow when you see this.)


I've got some more ideas for celebratory posts as well, so stay tuned! :D

This has been kind of a disappointing April Fools' Day because:

1) Homestar Runner didn't update at all today, even though they did for April Fools' Day 2014, 2015, and 2016, and April Fools and Halloween are almost the only times they ever update nowadays.
2) I don't think many people noticed my April Fools prank at all.

For reference, my April Fools prank was this entry; however, when I first posted it (on March 31 in my time zone, but late enough that it was April 1 already for some of you), it was an exact copy of my first entry. Then I waited a few minutes or so and changed it to a copy of a different past entry in the same way... then changed it to another after a few more minutes, and so on - basically, if I was at my computer, I'd change the entry anywhere from once an hour to once every few minutes. (At first. I gradually updated it less and less often because it seemed like no one was noticing...)

By "exact copy", that means including the subject line, repost button, userpic, tags, mood, music, location... basically, everything except the timestamp, the comments, and friends-only status [though, of course, the only friends-only entries I used were ones that probably would've been fine being public]. And anything that I intended to change each time but accidentally forgot sometimes. Though if I used an entry I'd posted in _dreams_, autism, or asperger, I added a notice saying that it was cross-posted (even though I don't think copying a community entry to my own journal years later for April Fools' Day actually counts as cross-posting).

I chose the entries semi-randomly, sometimes by going to my Calendar for random years and months and picking a random entry I'd feel comfortable posting again, and sometimes by just putting in notable entries that I remember and wanted to include in this prank at some point. Some entries were used more than once.

And just to mess with your heads even more, I thought it might be fun to come up with a hypothetical FUTURE entry and add it into the mix! That's what the 2023 year in review is for. It ended up being my favorite thing about this prank, so I left that one up significantly longer than any other single entry.


Now that April Fools' Day is over, all the entries I ended up using are listed below for posterity. (Don't expect the repost buttons to work correctly, though...)


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As I've mentioned a while back, I plan on replacing some of my userpics with more legible versions. (even though I've procrastinated that for probably at least a year now...)

Since I knew that doing that will cause me to lose track of what order I added my userpics, I kept a list of my userpics in my profile in order added - but I'm starting to run out of room on my profile now, so I moved it here and reformatted it into a table that hopefully looks better than the old layout.

Note that this excludes the following:
- Old versions of these userpics
- Alternate versions of some of these that I made to protest SOPA/PIPA/ACTA/etc. a few years ago

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I just looked at the interests in my profile for the first time in a while and...

WHOA. It's WAY outdated.


Homestar Runner?!

Garfield??!

MARIO?!?!

When was the last time I liked those?!



Unfortunately I can't fix it just yet either because I've been busy lately. I had enough time to come up with a new interests list:

/b/, 15, 16, 23, 300, 4, 4-8-15-16-23-42, 4chan, 42, 4815162342, 5 nights at freddy's, 69, 8, all your base, angry video game nerd, arguing, arguing about gender, arguing about politics, arguing about sports, arguments, arrow to the knee, assuming bad faith, assuming everything is homophobic, assuming everything is racist, assuming everything is sexist, assuming neurotypicals are jerks, assuming nts are jerks, atheism, avgn, ayb, ban comic sans, being a jerk, being mean, bell peppers, cake is a lie, call of duty, captain falcon, cars, chili, chuck norris, cinema sins, cinemasins, controversy, creative writing, cussing, cuss words, debates, dirty jokes, do a barrel roll, do not want, dorkly, double standards, dragonball z, dubstep, encyclopedia dramatica, essays, estj, extroverts, feminism, feminist frequency, final destination, five nights at freddy's, flame wars, flashgitz, fnaf, football, for glory, fox only, foxadhd, game of thrones, game theory, gaming sins, gamingsins, geno, grand theft auto, grudges, gta, guns, halo, hating everything, holding grudges, hoo-hah, hot-button topics, hunting, i lost the game, impromptu speeches, indexed, innuendo, innuendos, insults, internet memes, it's over 9000, it's over nine thousand, jersey shore, judging people, lettuce, little mac, lucario, malleo, matpat, matthew patrick, memes, metal gear, moral dilemmas, mr. z, mustard, no items, no wai!, o rly?, onions, overanalyzing cartoons, overanalyzing comics, overanalyzing everything, overanalyzing movies, overanalyzing video games, paint.net, photoshop, pickles, political arguments, political debates, politics, potato salad, profanity, psychcentral, public speaking, rap, research papers, rickroll, rickrolling, salad, shoop da woop, sonty mick, sports, sqrt(-garfield) memes, sromg memes, starting arguments, swearing, taking offense to everything, team fortress, team fortress 2, that's what she said, the game, the game theorists, the office, the walking dead, this is sparta, tl;dr, uncyclopedia, walking dead, weegee, weegee stare, writing essays, writing papers, ya rly, yolo, your mom, your mom jokes, yu-gi-oh, zero wing, zombies

But that's over 150 interests, and I don't have time right now to narrow it down to just 150. Hopefully I will this weekend. At least this gives you a chance to marvel at just how NOT ME my old interests list is, I guess.

And I still need to come up with a new default userpic... and like 40 or 50 new non-default userpics, and a new profile, and a new profile name...

You've probably noticed that I haven't worked on making my userpics more legible in a while and still haven't uploaded the ones that I've managed to make legible enough as userpics. Or posted anything else in a while.

And not only has my self-imposed requirement of "check my friends page at least once every 3 days unless there's a legitimate reason to wait longer than that" resulted in me usually only checking it exactly once every 3 days, there was one time that I accidentally waited 4 days before checking it again because throughout the third day, I only remembered that it was the third day while I happened to not be at my dorm or have something else to do first. (And you probably thought I've done that more than once, because on most entries that I read, I'm not sure if there's anything I can say in a comment that will add to the discussion...)


Indeed, the past week or so was kind of like much of last semester - I've had so much to do half the time that I sometimes ended up preferring to play video games instead of working on any of these things the rest of the time.

I've managed to work on them some of the time, though - I've been reading my autism books and working on the list of things I'm worried about (since a couple of times this semester, I was once again as depressed as I was when the Forbidden Comment Threads were actually taking place), and a few times, I worked on the program to make vague versions of my userpics that I said I'd like to use if I start a dream journal.


I'm not sure what the point of this entry was, but regardless, here it is.