Typical

Alright. I'm not used to having a normal experience of something, but I may be having a normal experience of autism, now, as an adult, that many people are more used to having their whole lives.

So a meme went around a bit ago. The text was:

people think taking things literally is just like

-not getting jokes and sarcasm

when in my experience it's more like

-thinking you have to fulfill 100% of the exact requirements for something, when everyone else apparently knows it's actually a bit flexible

-SAYING something with a literal meaning and others interpret it figuratively

-following instructions to a T but not knowing how [you're allowed to] modify them when something goes wrong

-doing EXACTLY what someone asked of you and them getting mad that it wasn't what they meant or actually wanted [this feels very gaslight-y]

-being terrified of people's empty threats or hyperbole without realizing they didn't actually mean it

-[learning] all the connotations of different words so you can use them as precisely as possible, getting frustrated when others are inexact

A lot of this aligns with my experience.

For the longest time my work was pretty unambiguous. I worked hourly or by piecework, I did the thing, I got paid for it. Now I'm in this union environment which is not designed for folks who do either knowledge work or fieldwork, and the way folks deal with it is by being imprecise, by saying there's no flexibility but knowing there is, but knowing there's not too much flexibility. There are a ton of, I don't know if they're empty threats or not, but I suspect they are. And no one can speak plainly about it because when I ask literal questions they're figurative in response.

And none of this is about the actual work product. It's all about "is it ok to start lunch 5 minutes early and end it 5 minutes early" which is such bullshit to be worrying about. I'd rather worry about the fact that wildfire and the biologists have conflicting requirements for how much wood is left on a block and how to reconcile that, but instead I get resentful that I get my teeth into a project and if I take 10 minutes into lunch to complete something I can't just come back after lunch 10 minutes later without using vacation time, but sometimes I can, but we're not supposed to, so don't do it often because we're not supposed to but it's ok to do it a little bit but really we shouldn't do it but sometimes we do. So then PDA kicks in and says that since they don't care whether I'm working well or efficiently, why should I bother? I can sidestep the demand of having to work because my work is useful and often interesting, but having 8 to-the-minute time demands per day is defeating me (start, lunch, two breaks, and end time).

Then I do some spiralling around it because I'm not doing good or prolific work and it feels like a shitty use of my time. So, ok, I'm having poor mental health and I know some things to do about that: some grounding things, journaling, taking time to really root into my life and pay attention. But then more ambiguous rules stuff strikes: if I'm having a truly awful mental health day and can't work, does that count as sick for the purposes of sick leave? When they send out emails a couple times a month telling employees to do all these grounding exercises and whatever to care for their mental health, do they mean on the clock? Probably they mean "don't do it, it's not ok, but it's ok to do sometimes but not very often but it's actually allowed".

Which basically means it's something you're not supposed to talk about, which is isolating.

So, yeah, if autism is a thing where folks don't follow social norms right (among other things) then one of the big ways it presents for me is in interpretation of ambiguity. In a lot of cases I can throw the ambiguity out and society's ok with that: modern gender stuff, for instance, makes less sense to me as an actual thing than older more defined ones, but I can throw out the whole thing and folks are more or less ok with it. Mononormative relationships? Make no sense to me but I just don't do them.

Highly unionized (read: prescribed) work environment where folks socially kind of work around poorly worded rules? Crashing. Burning.

And it's making me think about how autism is supposedly also an issue of emotional regulation. The idea is that autistic folks can't regulate like neurotypical folks and they melt down or shut down a lot. But if you put anyone in a situation where they aren't allowed to know what they're supposed to be doing, what they're supposed to be doing is actually impossible for them, they don't know whether or not there will be punishment in any given second for not doing the thing they don't know what it is and can't do-- and then stop them from doing the mind or body things (stimming) that soothe them. Well. I think you get meltdowns and shutdowns, fight or withdrawal, and all the normal trauma stuff that autistic people evidence to the point where we do not know what autism looks like without comorbid trauma stuff.

So that's my weekend thought. Also some farm stuff but that gets its own post because it's happy.

New Things/The Year Awakens

I have two kinds of hot peppers growing indoors, rescued from my deck at the end of the year: matchbox and black hungarian. As the light has returned and I've increased their water they've started blooming. I did a very impromptu cross-pollination between them yesterday, no anther removal, and will try emasculating some flowers and doing a proper cross next time. If I grow the F1 out this summer, next winter I can have a sea of F2s to play with.

Some of my fancy peppers are coming up, or at least germinating on their paper towels and heat mats and being transferred to pots.

Plus I found the pepper seed store Semillas La Palma, which is a lot of fun. A lot of peppers aren't great in my climate, but when I branch into baccatums and high-elevation ones I can find some. I love the idea of hunting down some and trying them here. I also like heat but not super intense heat, and the fact that there are a ton of "seasoning" or "dulce" peppers in their collection, with no heat, is nice too. I need to winnow down through their offerings to find what works.

The sun is completely returning. The sky was light before I got out of bed this morning. It's been warm during the day a lot, my freezers are plugged back in and I moved the frozen food on my deck into the freezers.

Plus, Black Chunk, who I thought miscarried during the cold, gave me six lovely little piglets. They're born in a warm spell! I locked her in her chosen birthing shed with the piglets and they were all fine this morning. They'll need to be castrated but hey.

In concert with this the cooler at the grocery store broke down and I brought home 40 dairy crates of milk and yoghurt for the pigs. I'm feeding it out roughly four crates a day. There were a couple crates of tiny squeeze bottles of yogurt that will go directly in the garbage, but the pigs will get gallons and gallons of it. It's a great supplement for them right now.

Meanwhile I'm doing the standard juggling to try and figure out where to put my plant shelves with lights, where to put my geese for spring pair-off(wading out to the empty greenhouse involves thigh-deep snow and too many things under the snow to snowblow my way over, ditto one of the a-frames). At some point I'll get to what to plant and where it will go, that will be even more juggling! But it's the fun kind.

New Things/The Year Awakens

I have two kinds of hot peppers growing indoors, rescued from my deck at the end of the year: matchbox and black hungarian. As the light has returned and I've increased their water they've started blooming. I did a very impromptu cross-pollination between them yesterday, no anther removal, and will try emasculating some flowers and doing a proper cross next time. If I grow the F1 out this summer, next winter I can have a sea of F2s to play with.

Some of my fancy peppers are coming up, or at least germinating on their paper towels and heat mats and being transferred to pots.

Plus I found the pepper seed store Semillas La Palma, which is a lot of fun. A lot of peppers aren't great in my climate, but when I branch into baccatums and high-elevation ones I can find some. I love the idea of hunting down some and trying them here. I also like heat but not super intense heat, and the fact that there are a ton of "seasoning" or "dulce" peppers in their collection, with no heat, is nice too. I need to winnow down through their offerings to find what works.

The sun is completely returning. The sky was light before I got out of bed this morning. It's been warm during the day a lot, my freezers are plugged back in and I moved the frozen food on my deck into the freezers.

Plus, Black Chunk, who I thought miscarried during the cold, gave me six lovely little piglets. They're born in a warm spell! I locked her in her chosen birthing shed with the piglets and they were all fine this morning. They'll need to be castrated but hey.

In concert with this the cooler at the grocery store broke down and I brought home 40 dairy crates of milk and yoghurt for the pigs. I'm feeding it out roughly four crates a day. There were a couple crates of tiny squeeze bottles of yogurt that will go directly in the garbage, but the pigs will get gallons and gallons of it. It's a great supplement for them right now.

Meanwhile I'm doing the standard juggling to try and figure out where to put my plant shelves with lights, where to put my geese for spring pair-off(wading out to the empty greenhouse involves thigh-deep snow and too many things under the snow to snowblow my way over, ditto one of the a-frames). At some point I'll get to what to plant and where it will go, that will be even more juggling! But it's the fun kind.

The Work Thing

So, um. I've been in this diversity and inclusion workshop at work, I took it because I thought it would be interesting and it has been good but super triggering. It's reminded me of all the things normal folks can freely talk about with each other than I can't at work, etc etc. It's been shutting me down and putting me right out of commission. One of the guys who runs it is really good at what he does, good at listening I guess, and so I spoke up a little bit and after last week's session I stayed behind and was like "hey, all this stuff you're asking us to do around speaking up sounds great but I'm the only one up here and it's way too hard for me to do and figure out where to start right now and my workplace just doesn't feel safe enough to do this".

The one guy scheduled a follow-up call with me, which I just got off, and he asked about what I would want in a perfect world to support me right now. So I said:

Work covers diagnosis and trauma therapy; I have more flexible beginnings/endings of things -- not necessarily fewer hours, just I can move them around; I get more concrete info than "it's not ok to do this but it's ok sometimes" and I don't get weird looks when I ask for stuff around that; maybe bathrooms(?)

...and he added, and folks to talk to who have similar experiences.

He's going to introduce me to someone/maybe some folks who work at different locations of the same employer, and he's going to look into what he can figure out for trauma stuff and come back to me with that. This is the first time I've felt like I can talk about the whole thing with someone who believes me.

Regardless of what comes of this, I am trying. Trying implies hope for something better.

Maybe something can even be better here.