Greenstorm's Journal

I'm still sitting on my autism screening. This part is a virtual "answer a bunch of questions and do a bunch of questionnaires" and, much like the ADHD screening I posted about recently, I want to answer a lot of the questions with "it depends" and "I need more information" and also "how am I supposed to know that?"

Josh was up last week and he said it's been super helpful for him to know about PDA. He said it gives him a framework for understanding me, my behaviour, and useful behaviours for him to choose. I noticed that this visit felt frictionless (I actually took a second to cry here) in a way that almost never happens for me with other humans. It didn't feel like a tremendous energy drain. It felt energizing and fun. I think that's because he had picked up on some tools to use, like... he'd stand up and say "I'm going to go work on the deck" and I could say "I'll be along in a minute, I'll clean the chimney right next to you" and then he'd go down, and I'd go down a second later and start splitting wood. So he wasn't trying to get me to do anything, just giving me the information (very helpful) and then moving himself to a place where I could choose to do something close by, and in this particular case it didn't matter what. So I announced one thing as a kind of "I'll go down and do something within conversation distance" but then could sidestep my PDA by doing a different ting within conversation distance and it was ok. There were other things we did actively together that also felt pretty smooth. It was really nice. And it was really nice to do things together, to not just talk, to experience Threshold together. It felt like such a connecting visit.

Meanwhile Tucker, who figured out that smoothness early on, has been more open about his feelings and what's going on with him. He brought an interpersonal thing to me that he was proud of the other day, something that involved saying no to someone. I've been watching his ability to make choices evolve over the years, to say yes or no to things, and for him to be actively proud of something and then to tell me about it (and specifically ask me to engage with it on that level) feels kind of world-changing? He couldn't share that stuff with me when everything was self-loathing, but now we can talk a little bit about his decisions and he can let me know what kind of feedback he's looking for. That adds a different kind of smoothness to my interaction with him, one where I'm not guessing what's going on with him all the time because he can tell me. It's lovely.

These are two people who have been working for years to be good communicators with me, and in both cases there are what feel like huge recent breakthroughs.

Meanwhile I have this autism assessment where I'm supposed to communicate something important and central about me, but I can only do it in writing in answer to specific prompts. I've been wanting to feel seen and understood in this assessment, to have it say "these are the ways I'm different" but effectively I'm the person doing the assessment. If I could straight-up answer the questions I wouldn't need an assessment, I'd know, right? The problem is that I don't communicate like other people, that when I use ideas instead of very practical operational data I can't communicate. My abstractions don't translate, and these questions are relatively abstract.

One possible solution is to answer the open-ended questions on here, which is my "communication with humans" mental space. Then maybe if I'm completely wrong in what I think is normal for all the "how do you do x or y different than normal people" someone will catch it.

Hm