Have you noticed this happen when entering adulthood?

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i still throw tantrums and stamp my feet as an adult.

emilon your a women its not unacceptable. if your a man it is unnaceptable

it's not even acceptable for a woman.
but i still do it.
f**k what's 'acceptable'!

okay maybe not completely acceptable but still more in the norm than a an adult man throwing a hissy fit.

oh definitely. - how dare a man show any weakness!

although once someone told me 'if you're going to be hysterical, go and do it in a cupboard.'
they ended up with a drink thrown over them.

Preach it sister!

such a rebel, right?

Just sensible. I'm sick of all the 'you should be like this' rules. People either like you for who you are or they don't.

Yep. I've found the ones who judge you for being who you are - aren't worth the time.
Judgemental people really piss me off.

Society wants us all to be robots

well it ain't happening.

well it seems the only way to get the best out of life and society is to be a robot and behave like all the 'normies'

i think there's a difference between doing what it takes to get by and being a robot.

Apologize for the length, as usual I couldn't tell what parts to cut back on and what parts to keep long. This is a response to what I think was meant. It took me hours to write. If anything happened in the meantime that renders this unnecessary, I'm sorry. My head is really fuzzy so I'm aware how badly I could have misinterpreted what was said. (And also of how badly I could have communicated this given I kept falling asleep while writing it.)

I think I can give such an instance from my own life.

I don't know about "hold my hand" (except under some circumstances where... well it's different than what you're probably talking about, so never mind for now), but I do know of circumstances where I've been forced to either accept help or die.

My particular form of autism (and that of many others) involves severe difficulties with doing certain things on my own. It's not just a social disorder for me, it affects practically every area of my life including self-care (activities of daily living, etc.). And it interacts with other conditions such as epilepsy, in "interesting" ways.

So here was my life for a long time, "on my own":

I spent much of my time unaware of my body at all. It would either be sitting (and possibly rocking, etc.), or running around, or frozen into any random position possible. I was unaware of hunger or thirst unless I was capable of remembering it mentally. I was often unable to move my body at all whatsoever -- sometimes while my body was still and unmoving, other times when my body was moving all over the place. Those two situations were the same to me because in neither case could I control my body's actions, even though they would look different to another person because one was still and another moving.

My mind was similarly "not there" for me much of the time. I could not handle abstractions at all. Be aware that for someone like me, "cat" is an abstraction. Because the idea of "cat" is different from the reality of someone rubbing up against your leg. Abstractions beyond even that were even more out of reach. My cognition was sensory, not conceptual.

Meanwhile, perceptions were also quite unusual. I perceived things as fairly pure sensory information. i did not easily interpret my surroundings. For instance, visually I could not differentiate most objects from each other. They were just a huge block of color and shape. Nor could I identify what they were. That would require those abstractions I was talking about -- cat, table, and book, things like that were too abstract for me to perceive what they were. I could only feel the texture, knock against it and hear the sound, see the color and the shape, sniff or lick it, etc. It ranged from hard to impossible for me to actually identify whatever object I was dealing with, or to tell it was separate from what was around it. I also have synesthesia, which causes my senses to mix together. And the information itself that I get through my senses, can be jumbled up as well. These effects all increase in unfamiliar locations or under overload or stress.

For any kind of action (thought, memory, movement, complex combinations of movements, etc.) I found it difficult or impossible to start, stop, execute, continue, combine, or change them. (See http://www.iidc.indiana.edu/?pageId=468 for more information on that sort of issue.) I often would need someone from outside to help me through such things. Or I would have to get up a lot of internal momentum and energy and expend it all at once on such an action.

Meanwhile, there was the issue of what happened when I tried to throw energy into becoming better able to connect to my body, move, think, or perceive the world in a more functional way. (In order to do this, btw, I had to have a level of awareness I didn't always have.) It was like basically I had a very limited amount of energy. And if that energy was used up in any given area, I would hit some kind of shutdown. (This happened many, many times a day.)

Shutdown could look different in different areas. If I was trying to use physical movement at the time, then shutdown would look like total distancing from my body. I already perceive my body as external, input from it feels the same as
input from the rest of the world. When this kind of shutdown happens, I can't even find it amid all the other sensations out there. And my actual body will be completely still, or else moving in ways that I have no control over.

If I was dealing with thought at the time of shutdown, then the shutdown would affect my thoughts rather than movements. Conceptual thought would go from very difficult to impossible. Even sensory 'thought' would become difficult. My mind would more and more approach a state where no thought existed, ever had, or ever would.

And if I was dealing with perception at the time... then everything would essentially go blank. No perception of anything.

Those are the most extreme versions of shutdown. Less extreme versions are just an intensifying of the traits that I already described as existing. But it's also possible to experience all of these forms of shutdown quite intensely at the same time. When that happens... The world as you know it might as well never have existed. You can't remember anything being different from how it is now. At all. The only experience that you are really having is awareness. You don't know (and can't think about, at the time) where that awareness is coming from, or what you are aware of. But you'r'e aware of... something. And that's all. And your memory is recording at the time (or you wouldn't remember it later) but not working. You can't think, there's not even any sensory input that you can decipher at all either.

The way I described all this is far more "clean" than it is when it happens though. When all this is going on, your abilities are shifting constantly, all over the place. The level of shutdown in one ability will be changing in one direction, and in another ability will be going in another. Plus I was having complex-partial seizures affecting my perceptions, thoughts, and actions (not as serious of pensieve's seizures but plenty good at messing with my abilities on their own), and the physiological facts of hunger was messing with the way my mind and body functioned.

And the most basic problem for me was "simply" juggling certain things, each one of which was a miniature juggling act in itself:

1. Knowing. (What I needed -- food, water, toilet. Where such things were located. How to get these places. How long to spend there. What to do when I got there. Etc.)

2. Doing. (The actions of getting me from place to place. The actions necessary to, for instance, get food out of a wrapper, use the sink, use a toilet, etc.)

3. Perceiving. (Understanding my surroundings well enough to find my way around, and recognize the specific things I needed.)

The problem was, it was like I was juggling three jugglers, each of which were juggling three small balls, and I could only handle one ball (or sometimes one and a half) at a time. So a lot of what I did had to rely on the hope that I was in the right place in the right time.

And as I said, none of this was clean. It was spending all day with my perceptions, ability to act, and my thoughts switching on and off and on and off in various ways, many of them more like sliding up and down a scale rather than switching neatly on and off. Finding myself in various parts of the apartment. Being literally unable to understand that this weird woodgrain-patterned thing (a.k.a. "a cupboard") was hiding food behind it, because object permanence was kind of impermanent at the time. And therefore sometimes literally starving while two feet away from food on the other side of a cupboard I didn't know I could open. Having gravity seem to tilt sideways at times, and crashing to the floor when that happened. Trying to use the toilet only to find I'd messed up the order of the steps and used the living room rug instead. All sorts of fun stuff.

And mind you, this already wasn't totally without help. Without any help whatsoever I'd have just died. I had one person who would attempt to do her best to walk me through the steps to get food, and she's the only reason at all that I ate. She would sit there (over the phone) and help me find my body parts and then tell me which ones to move, in what order. This wasn't like "Move your arm to pick up the rice cakes". It was more like "Can you move your neck? Good. Do you have a shoulder? Can you find your shoulder?" Except, that often I'd lose track and we'd literally have to start all over again. And this of course only worked when I could understand language, which wasn't all the time, not even most of the time. Nor was she around or available most of the time, which is why I consider that period "without help" more than "with help". It's not like I had anyone doing those things for me, I just had someone helping me do them enough of the time to get sort of barely enough food to survive. Mostly I was on my own.

I was determined to be on my own, too, for a lot of this. That's one of many reasons I didn't give up. I thought the alternative to being on my own was institutionalization, and most of the time that idea kept me highly motivated. Of course, much of the time even the concept of "on my own" was too difficult for my brain to hold onto, but when I could hold onto it that's how I felt about it pretty much.

So I held on. Despite my best efforts here, I have not been able to describe the experience as well as I sometimes have in the past. Basically, it was a mess. I was not able to hold onto any ability long enough to do 'the basics' often enough for even the most basic levels of eating, hygiene, and drinking water and such. I had free food once a week if I worked doing really "basic" tasks at a place, but could not organize my mind and body well enough to work there more than a handful of times.

The reason that I'm able to do all that I'm capable of doing now, despite the fact that my abilities have gotten much worse, is that I get a lot of assistance. I don't mean they give me emotional support, I mean they do all the physical actions for me that I cannot do for myself. At this point I need varying amounts of assistance with all activities of daily living. And this makes me capable of the things that I really can do. (I've noticed that for autistic people who truly need physical assistance from others for daily living skills -- the more support we get, the more capable we become of doing other things for ourselves.)

Anyway, I was assessed by people other than myself, who were capable of fairly objective measurements of my abilities to do daily living tasks. I scored very close to the bottom range for the test they used. This is because not all of autism is about social skills. For many autistic people, autism is also (or even mostly) about some combination of difficulty connecting to and controlling our bodies; difficulty interpreting sensory information, difficulty with overload (which can be cognitive, sensory, etc., and can become far worse than most people expect); difficulty forming thoughts and ideas; intense shutdowns that happen when we overtax ourselves; language problems; etc.

Not everyone has all of those problems at once, but autistic people who do have serious issues with functioning without assistance, often have one or more of these problems. And the idea that we could somehow just try really hard and become capable of doing all these things is mind-boggling to any of us who actually have these problems to such a large degree. I already try really hard -- this is why I am able to do many of the things that I can do, including write things like this. But if I exert myself too far, I hit a wall called "shutdown", and shutdown is absolute.

I should also note that the kind of support I am describing myself as needing isn't really emotional support. It's actual physical support with physical tasks that I am not capable of doing (or not capable of doing consistently or well enough to sustain myself). I don't actually require a lot of emotional support. Additionally, the support I get is not "hand-holding", it's the same kind of support I would get if it were a purely physical impairment I was dealing with. (And I do have physical impairments, but autism alone is enough to need most of the support that I get.)

Anyway, I do agree with you that some people can try harder and no longer need support from other people. But it's not true for all of us, and what seemed harsh about how you responded to pensieve, is that you don't even know her, she expressed the realities of her limitations (including shutdowns) to you, and you just assumed that she could do without support if she tried. I can tell you from experience that if you're dealing with shutdowns and seizures, those are generally very hard limits, not soft walls that you can just push through and get over.



It sounded as if you didn't understand that some people have actual limitations that do in fact make it impossible to be independent of everyone else (even in the sense of "independent" that most people mean despite the extreme dependence of everyone living that way). If that's not what you meant, then I apologize for misunderstanding. But if it is what you meant, then what I've written previously is an answer to it.

I'm not bothered at all by the fact of differing viewpoints, but I will still argue against viewpoints that I suspect are potentially harmful. And I know that if for instance I or pensieve were expected to simply do everything for ourselves, the result would be a disaster and possible death if it carried on long enough. Since I consider that an obviously harmful result, then I'm going to say something about why it's not the best plan for a lot of us. I totally believe you have the right to state your opinion, though, and would never argue against that. At the same time, I totally understand why someone confronted by an opinion that could mean the death of them if implemented in reality, might be a little touchy about the matter.