Autism, minmaxing, systems
May. 5th, 2026 09:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormSo they say that one trait of autism is black-or-white thinking. I kinda-sorta think that comes from the way social norms are enforced on us, where we don't bend the rules in the correct social way so instead we're punished as often as possible for bending any rules in an attempt to make us act right. So we don't recieve that grace, and in turn we don't learn to give it, and we're also raised with the idea that rules are the way to do things.
Combine this with pattern/systems thinking and you get the twin "need to follow the rules" and "need the system to be perfect" because if you're following the rules exactly then yeah, there's no flex for an imperfect system, and if the system is "perfect" then there's no need to work outside the rules and those are outside it are wrecking things.
Given a perfect system, stuff like minmaxing isn't rude, it's just working within the system as you're supposed to, but optimizing as someone might normally do. It's super at odds with a more allistic system use where it's a guideline that's negotiated by following other people's actions and reactions and sometimes honoured more in the breach.
Of course a system is just a model, which means it can't map onto the full complexities of actual life. Which is to say there's no perfect system that doesn't have a "some things won't be accounted for by the system and need to be played by ear" part built in.
One of the reasons I like working with "nature" is that it's impossible to fall into the trap of rigidity. It's too complex to fully model, and any working relationship with it requires humility, flexibility, and especially observation and calibrated reaction.
Sometimes I stop thinking of my body as nature and instead think of my illness as a gameable system. It is not. I have a hard limit on total use of my mind-body. Some things draw harder on that and others more gently, but it's still a limit.
So if I do, for instance, a lot of emotional or cognitive stuff I can then think "oh well, I'll switch to using my body a lot, it's a different kind of energy" or "I'm into overdraft enough that I can't think well and keep cutting myself, but maybe I can do a non-dangerous physical activity a bunch"
Then, because I'm working around one set of symptoms, another set shows up. I guess I act gently to the place where the symptoms occur but then the issue comes up at the next weak point.
Right now the weak point is my joints. Particularly my wrists, which would not let me lift a small pot of pasta the other day, and my hips, which are extremely extremely uncomfortable. I'm also cutting myself accidentlly with the level of astonishing frequency that led me to stop using knives over the winter.
That's the cost. What I got in return was the pigs moved to the back finally (on the noisy night they'd bent a steel lightweight u-post in half in their then-current pen and I was sort of improvising them in but they kept getting out) which also means a hose run back there, the wheelbarrow emptied, lived through the loud party, and threw a couple flowerpots (which was a bad idea, it packed clay into the remaining few slices on my hands).
What I did not do was plant anything more (although the wheat is up! and the favas and first korean radishes), do anything to keep the birds from being eaten by foxes (I really, really hate how many are dying), fix my taxes (I just submitted them wrong which will likely come back to haunt me but I cannot go back and forth with their "phone, someone transcribes it into a ticket, the ticket gets sent to HR, they email me about it, I call someone without access to the ticket to do another ticket for follow up" to try and describe what they got wrong (I think they moved some money from the 2024 year to the 2025 year to ease their accounting for my vacation backpay, which means they didn't pay the government CPP or whatever in the 2025 year because I wasn't working in it but it shows up as employment income in that year, so to fix it they'd have to fix both my 2024 and 2025 tax forms and then I'd have to redo taxes, but try describing that on the phone and looking up the exact numbers and then trying to check their work, especially without the payslips which I haven't had access to since I got sick because they couldn't figure out how to get me a password to sign into the system once I was sick. Honestly for a government with 40-something thousand employees you can tell a lot about both systems and its white/colonial/neurotypical organization that this apparently hasn't come up before, folks just live on their monogamous spouse's insurance and income. Anyhow.)
Wow that was a long aside about taxes. I also had to pay a chunk of money because they pay into my pension when I'm on disability (at least for the first two years?) and that's taxable, but of course they weren't taking taxes off a paycheck or anything. Good to remember for next year.
Property taxes come next. I think they've roughly tripled since I moved in?
Okay, still grumpy clearly, which makes sense since my body is absolutely slagged. Walking hurts, typing hurts, sitting hurts, lying down hurts, and I need to go buy some microwaveable freezer meals or something which is expensive and stupid.
Grump, grump, grump.
Anyhow, this is what I get for treating my body like a system to be minmaxxed instead of gently and with lots of space around its boundaries.
Combine this with pattern/systems thinking and you get the twin "need to follow the rules" and "need the system to be perfect" because if you're following the rules exactly then yeah, there's no flex for an imperfect system, and if the system is "perfect" then there's no need to work outside the rules and those are outside it are wrecking things.
Given a perfect system, stuff like minmaxing isn't rude, it's just working within the system as you're supposed to, but optimizing as someone might normally do. It's super at odds with a more allistic system use where it's a guideline that's negotiated by following other people's actions and reactions and sometimes honoured more in the breach.
Of course a system is just a model, which means it can't map onto the full complexities of actual life. Which is to say there's no perfect system that doesn't have a "some things won't be accounted for by the system and need to be played by ear" part built in.
One of the reasons I like working with "nature" is that it's impossible to fall into the trap of rigidity. It's too complex to fully model, and any working relationship with it requires humility, flexibility, and especially observation and calibrated reaction.
Sometimes I stop thinking of my body as nature and instead think of my illness as a gameable system. It is not. I have a hard limit on total use of my mind-body. Some things draw harder on that and others more gently, but it's still a limit.
So if I do, for instance, a lot of emotional or cognitive stuff I can then think "oh well, I'll switch to using my body a lot, it's a different kind of energy" or "I'm into overdraft enough that I can't think well and keep cutting myself, but maybe I can do a non-dangerous physical activity a bunch"
Then, because I'm working around one set of symptoms, another set shows up. I guess I act gently to the place where the symptoms occur but then the issue comes up at the next weak point.
Right now the weak point is my joints. Particularly my wrists, which would not let me lift a small pot of pasta the other day, and my hips, which are extremely extremely uncomfortable. I'm also cutting myself accidentlly with the level of astonishing frequency that led me to stop using knives over the winter.
That's the cost. What I got in return was the pigs moved to the back finally (on the noisy night they'd bent a steel lightweight u-post in half in their then-current pen and I was sort of improvising them in but they kept getting out) which also means a hose run back there, the wheelbarrow emptied, lived through the loud party, and threw a couple flowerpots (which was a bad idea, it packed clay into the remaining few slices on my hands).
What I did not do was plant anything more (although the wheat is up! and the favas and first korean radishes), do anything to keep the birds from being eaten by foxes (I really, really hate how many are dying), fix my taxes (I just submitted them wrong which will likely come back to haunt me but I cannot go back and forth with their "phone, someone transcribes it into a ticket, the ticket gets sent to HR, they email me about it, I call someone without access to the ticket to do another ticket for follow up" to try and describe what they got wrong (I think they moved some money from the 2024 year to the 2025 year to ease their accounting for my vacation backpay, which means they didn't pay the government CPP or whatever in the 2025 year because I wasn't working in it but it shows up as employment income in that year, so to fix it they'd have to fix both my 2024 and 2025 tax forms and then I'd have to redo taxes, but try describing that on the phone and looking up the exact numbers and then trying to check their work, especially without the payslips which I haven't had access to since I got sick because they couldn't figure out how to get me a password to sign into the system once I was sick. Honestly for a government with 40-something thousand employees you can tell a lot about both systems and its white/colonial/neurotypical organization that this apparently hasn't come up before, folks just live on their monogamous spouse's insurance and income. Anyhow.)
Wow that was a long aside about taxes. I also had to pay a chunk of money because they pay into my pension when I'm on disability (at least for the first two years?) and that's taxable, but of course they weren't taking taxes off a paycheck or anything. Good to remember for next year.
Property taxes come next. I think they've roughly tripled since I moved in?
Okay, still grumpy clearly, which makes sense since my body is absolutely slagged. Walking hurts, typing hurts, sitting hurts, lying down hurts, and I need to go buy some microwaveable freezer meals or something which is expensive and stupid.
Grump, grump, grump.
Anyhow, this is what I get for treating my body like a system to be minmaxxed instead of gently and with lots of space around its boundaries.
