We Love Esmeralda Weatherwax

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I'm glad you've found alternative methods.....

The "shock" technique sounds pretty painful. One of those "the cure is worse than the disease" kind of things.

Here's some nice music to celebrate Esme's return [I've got about 25 pages of youtube links in a google document!]

sounds like your retirement is a busy one

Thanks for the "autistic inertia" links and your supportive post, Esme. There was a lot there that was awfully familiar; not just the explanations for the roots of the inertia, but also the remarks in the second article about the ineffectiveness and irrelevance of many conventional depression treatments.

The idea that "work must be done for a purpose" is particularly pertinent, I think. When one makes the effort to be more socially appropriate in terms of communication, dress, personal hygiene and the fatiguing effort of trying to push aside sensory and cognitive differences, and then is still socially rejected (or worse), it is very tempting indeed to feel that none of those things are worth the effort. There is too little understanding of the individually small, yet repeated and persistent, traumas which, thanks to autism being innate and part of our cognitive development, are easily accepted as normal and unavoidable.

I can remember being very perplexed by my first few experiences with therapy for this reason. The idea seemed to be that I would use my experiences of a prior life where anxiety and depression were absent as a touchstone to measure my current state and as a source of positive examples with which to displace negative thinking. I couldn't relate to this idea of "before" at all, nor comprehend that I was measuring my emotional state against a completely different base-line than most other people.

Indeed, and I have fallen into that trap myself when advising people here and elsewhere. I was very fortunate to see a very "autism aware" counsellor for a while, albeit by accident rather than design. Her ability to spot my sadness was uncanny and unnerving at first, but it was crucial to realising that impaired ability to recognise my own emotions was often a big barrier to progress. And the fatigue! - she recognised that too. Not just that masking is incredibly tiring, but also that fatigue impairs our ability to make use of whatever coping strategies we might have and can exaggerate our sensory and cognitive sensitivities. For an autistic person, the fatigue and pain of a medical condition such as yours, or my persistent exhaustion from insomnia, may have personal and social consequences beyond what they might for a typical patient; there are times when just straining harder is not productive at all.

Hi Kraftie, yeah, there is no way I'd undergo lithotripsy. I know a woman who had, oh God, a staghorn stone (huge horrible things) and had to have the old fashioned surgery to remove it, because that's the only thing to do with those. She's running around spry as anything now, bless her.

Kura - I can't see the link because I have my browser protection settings at HyperParanoid, but I'm sure that if I quote your post I'll be able to see it in the quote syntax (weird but at least it gets the job done). So I'll give a listen this evening, I have some cooking plans and will want music - I'm in need of a bit of soothing, actually.
... so thank you!

Yeah, Blabs... it's more like being in the Army. Not interminable boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror, but long periods of downtime due to IBS, kidney stones, whatever, punctuated by brief bursts of frenzied catching-upness. Honest to God, I have no idea how I managed to hold a job... and work full time, for more than 30 years. I look at the way I live now, and it flabbergasts me that I ever managed that.

Hi Trog. I'm really glad that the stuff I posted helped - I wasn't sure it would. It *is* encouraging to know that there are at least a few pros in the therapy world who do genuinely understand autistic adults. And that there seems to be a slowly (hideously slowly) increasing understanding of *why* we are as we are, and how utterly exhausting it can be for us just to get through a routine day. (Important presupposition needed: that we are human, but with permanent differences. Seeing us in that light seems to be difficult, and once mastered makes a tremendous difference, and I am not being snide, and oh how I wish I were.)

I lived in Switzerland for a few years, and did my best to live not only on the economy but in the vernacular, speaking German and French as much as possible although I'd been hired to head a department that wrote scientific and technical English primarily. For the first three months I slept nine and ten hours a night, I was so drained. But then I broke through and started dreaming in the other languages, and that's when I knew I was home and dry. I wish that NT-level functioning was as accessible...

Yes. Work done for a purpose. And the Inertia. My cousin and his wife are mystified by just how difficult it is for me even to go to church - I will try one, get my best self together, be massively disappointed always by the unfriendliness if not actual veiled hostility that I inevitably experience - and by the ruling clique's focus on how much money they can con from the con-gregants (now; church in the US has changed a LOT). Then it's many months, if not a year or more, before I gather myself and try again in some other place. With similar results. During the interim period, even the THOUGHT of making the attempt can send me to my bed in the middle of the day. (There are quite strong parallels to the things Marknis and Sly experience, in their attempts to make other forms of meaningful connection... perhaps that is why I "get" their respective situations, including their senses of hopelessness/despair/futility.)

And meetups? Aiyeee God. In my arm of the galaxy, either there are none, or those that exist are for minor children, or they're for non-Aspies to vent about the Aspies they know and purport to love, or they've been set up to create a cult of personality around one or two people - and it's obvious even in the online description! I know there are folks here who've lucked out with meetups, but I think they must be in an alternate reality (that touches mine only via the Net.)

Sorry, I'm just bursting with cheerfulness today. I had a traumatic experience that involved funerary duties for a wild creature - thank God I didn't create the need for the funerary duties, at least (initially I thought I had). But I had, unexpectedly, to provide a final resting place for an innocent who died untimely, and that always upsets me.

I hate to sign off on a down note... but I am signing off now, because it's very late, all of a sudden, and I still need to do a few things. So I'll post my bunny statue here too - she has gone into one of my flowerbeds in honor of a wonderful cottontail who lived in my yard for years.

one mark of a genius is being able to THINK in multiple languages.

But see, it isn't genius. It's just Asperger's. It happens to affect me that way. It affects other folks other ways.

Here is a hug - and one for Kura, and one for Kraftie, and one for Trog, too - and it really is time for me to sign off or I'd linger and chat a lot more. Have a good, peaceful, restful evening, all.

^^^nighty nighty

Sorry to hear about your funerary duties, Esme. It's strange, I always get those pangs of feeling responsible when it happens in "my territory" too. I sometimes feel a bit silly getting so sentimental about such a perfectly natural event, but I just can't help getting attached to the critters that I sit and watch romping around my yard and my other stomping grounds.

Yes, I find myself awfully torn when I read of people going through those experiences. Part of me knows how impossible it can be for other people's advice to reach me when I'm in that state, but I still feel awful sometimes that, despite my long experience of it, I'm unable to find anything to say which really seems to help.

^^ and throw Asperger's inertia into the mix, and you have... someone who has a painfully clear picture of what is wrong in his/her life, along with a maddening inability to take action to change it, sometimes. So I can't look down on anyone in that situation.

Now, to make things even more fun, have you ever heard of "depressive realism"? It just so happens that *depressed people* generally perceive reality *more accurately* than perky cheery types. Which means, if logic were allowed its say in such things, that what we call depression frequently isn't; it's merely a wide awake recognition that certain things, times, circumstances just plain suck.

I apologize... this is not a cheery topic. But it helps so much to know that sometimes one is down because there is no other sensible response to whatever is going on around one. Even if that doesn't provide a solution, it removes shame, guilt at feeling that way, etc. - and that may allow just enough resilience to be recovered, that thinking about solutions becomes possible.

Woof. Celtic knots of reasoning, anyone?

^^^There is certainly Method to that Madness.

Hugs to Esmeralda, too!

Kraftie, thanks back atcha!

@Trog - I forgot this - yes about the caring about the critters. We were designed to, though. So yeah, it hurts, but I'd rather have that than be indifferent.

I'm not a scriptural literalist, but I do believe that there are truths behind the sacred poetry, and the stories of the Garden - and of the Peaceable Kingdom - really resonate with me.

Oh yes, I know that one. It took me a long time to work out that "I told you so" isn't considered polite after yet another of my pessimistic perceptions about the world turned out to be perfectly correct!


No apology necessary - it's as much my fault for sustaining the topic! And you're quite right, acknowledging and validating the emotional response is often a necessary first step to remove the blinkers so that we're able to see causes and solutions.


Yes please! I absolutely love Celtic and Celtic/Saxon hybrid artistic styles. Besides finding them very beautiful, they produce some interesting synthaesthetic responses for me, and I can lose myself in them for hours. I can well imagine that the artists who produced them had certain autistic traits (e.g. hyper-focus). The tesselations in some Islamic/Moorish art and the like of M.C.Escher are firm favourites too.

Ooh, I like Celtic designs very much.

This is for Kura and Trog, but also for anyone else who enjoys it of course.

A woman working at University of Pennsylvania (I need to check whether she's faculty or student or staff, apologies to her and to you all) has made ANIMATED GIFS OF ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS!

Here's the link, it's wonderful, enjoy enjoy (there are at least two animations featuring cats, prominently)



MANY more where this came from...

https://provenanceonlineproject.wordpre ... nimations/

[Edit in: the creator asks for the following info to be included in references, so, gladly, I comply:

Last edited by Esmerelda Weatherwax on 26 Jun 2018, 9:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

And while sharing things I really enjoy, for a short break, here is one of my favorite online cartoonists: http://www.basicinstructions.net/ - hope others enjoy as well

[Edit in: can't help myself: who knew Aspie Inertia could be made into a two-player game?]


Back to the serious stuff: thank you Trog for the surprise validation. I used to say I had a Cassandra complex - she was cursed by the Gods, given a gift of accurate forecasting and a curse that nobody would ever believe her. In my case it wasn't "I told you so" so much as it was massive, massive frustration at the person or organization that seemed to be totally opposed to learning anything from experience, over and over again, forever and ever amen.

Drs. Dunning and Kruger finally explained this one... https://www.forbes.com/sites/markmurphy ... 88a9155d7c

but they came up with it way too late to do me any good...