And a thought experiment about “nonlinear autism”
I’m writing this as I’m working on formatting a novel that I had backlogged from [cough] 2016, YOUR SOUFFLE MUST DIE. I have a number of pain in the ass tasks to accomplish, but if I only focus on those things today, I’ll lose my mind.
I probably won’t even get done today. I resent the lost writing time, but I also resent having to spend time jumping through hoops that SHOULD operate smoothly and seamlessly.
–Formatting books SHOULD be something brainless by now (for humans, if tricky for software developers). I’m fighting with new software; the way it wants things set up is different than I’m used to, but promises to go much more smoothly once things are set up. I’m only mildly annoyed by the widow/orphan management, unlike other “helpful” programs that leave me outright enraged.
The current software wants to draw on more resources than my underpowered computer from [cough] 2018 [update: 2016] wants to provide, particularly given that M$ has apparently done something recent that is tapping WAY more resources than it used to. Trying to get the print formatting set up is taking for-freaking-ever.
–Researching categories and keywords. I might use ChatGPT for part of this! Fun. I actually enjoy this part, but it usually takes me more time than it’s effective.
–Writing the marketing book description. I actually enjoy this part too, and I’d whine if it were taken away from me. I’m pretty quick on this.
–My front ebook cover is done, but not the wrap cover for the print softcover version. This is also a pain in the ass and I can’t start on it until I get the print formatting done (because I don’t know how wide the spine is and I don’t have the desc written yet). Amazon’s publishing side will give you a template, as will other places. Or you can have the wrap cover autogenerated. I hate those ones, though.
–Starting an information sheet for the book that includes all the information I’m likely to need while completing any subsequent tasks. Book desc (including different lengths), copyright info, categories/keywords, cover image, ISBNs and other identifiers, links, bios, sample paragraphs, series information.
–Figure out the freaking pricing, using different calculators at different sites, crossing my fingers, and AUGH.
–Getting everything tied together on the back end so that there aren’t any discrepancies.
–Plugging everything in for publishers, updating information as I go on the info sheet.
–Build links.
–Building website, newsletter, and social media posts for the release.
–Figure out how to get my damn sales pages on my site to work.
–Cross referencing everything all over again, testing links.
–Going live.
–Jumping on opportunities as they arise for promotion.
A friend did an actually-fun marketing campaign for his Kickstarter that I liked, and that made me go, “I could do something WAY scaled back for a book release, that would be a ton of work but I’d actually enjoy so I might even do it.” I’ll probably talk about that when I get that far.
If I had a solid routine set up, I could hire someone to handle the more pain in the ass tasks for me, but I don’t have a routine anymore. I have to be careful of scope creep whenever I do set one up–because it’s easy to avoid the more difficult parts of being a creative person if you invest a lot of your time in spinning your wheels. If I hired a virtual assistant to take care of getting everything posted, coordinated, and tested, that would be a huge weight off my shoulders, I think, and help prevent scope creep, but I’m not ready to train someone to do things I’m not sure I want yet.
…
Dance break while waiting for software to update the PDF for the bajillionth time.
I got new dance shoes! Men’s ballet slippers. Not toe shoes, just slippers; they’re wide enough through the toe box and narrow through the heels. They don’t grip as well as I wanted them to, but I’ve been using them enough now that they actually feel better. The suede patches on the soles interact with the floor differently. It’s more slippery, but also more stable for spins and slides, so I’m able to get more movement out of them even though they do exactly what I didn’t want them to do.
Go figure.
I found out I was trying to get more stretch out of the Rhumba-type back step than was safe or smart. OOPS. Also now I can get down into a Superhero Landing ™, although I struggle to get back out of it smoothly.
…
Ray’s having me play a video game, Edna and Harvey: Harvey’s New Eyes (HNE). It’s a point-and-click adventure game, everything at as slow a pace as you might like, lots of running around through different screens to solve puzzles, a few standalone puzzles. The game type is slow-paced and requires a lot of patience and attention to detail.
I like *some* of these types of games; my ne plus ultra on them are the Araminta Studios games, particularly Machanarium, which is a cute story about robots. Everything in it hangs together, from the art style, to the puzzles, to the story, to the gags, to the music. It’s a playful, mischievous experience, although we did have to look up a few things. Grim Fandango (remastered) is also a favorite; again, everything hangs together, from game mechanics to visuals to music to humor to narrative. Again, there were a few things we had to look up and one particular puzzle that was what Ray called “hunt the pixel” that was quite frustrating.
Mostly, though, I find these games frustrating and pointless. They don’t scratch any itches on an ADHD level; they’re too slow. So the second the game play isn’t aligned with the narrative and presentation, I’m fucking done with them. I don’t have a clue why people play the mediocre ones; they feel like torture to me. You can’t wander. The problem solving is whatever the game dev decided was appropriate, and NO OTHER SOLUTION APPLIES. You can get some achievements…by doing exactly what the game dev wants you to do. There’s no wiggle room, no creativity, only getting nakedly dumped into the brain of a game developer who may or may not have any clue about your experience as a player.
Games shouldn’t, in my opinion, feel like trying to navigate buggy software. They shouldn’t feel like you’re being forced to color inside the lines, even when you’re being nudged to do so. They should make you feel clever and inventive and energized.–I’ll grant you that different genres of games exist for a reason and that not every player will love a game. But a player’s reaction to a game that isn’t right for them should be “WOW IS THIS NOT FOR ME,” and not “[Internal screaming] WHY DOESN’T THIS WORK?”
Ray and I have been gaming together since she was a bebe. I read books to her when she was an infant and toddler, but I also gamed with her. So did the ex; it was the one thing that we could all connect on (except when he decided it wasn’t and disrupted things so Ray or I wouldn’t “bother” him anymore). After the split, Ray and I gamed together more, learned how to play well together, how to communicate, how to fail together. She’s better than I am just in general (yay!), but there are things that I can still brain better. Not perfectly, just better.
We try to trade some things back and forth as creative types. I am *way* more open to novelty across media than she is. She is *way* more patient and meticulous than I am. She has a more relentless sense of humor; I’m more able to withstand social embarrassment.
What I want is to be able to see things from her perspective. As a mom, as someone who loves her and cares for her, as a creative person who finds her view on the world endlessly fascinating. When creative types work well together, it’s amazing. Bouncing ideas back and forth is one of my favorite things ever: both people going, “You know what? How about this?” and the other person going, “HAHAHAH, of course this, and also that!”
To oversimplify, when Ray talks about gaming, I am listening in writing. I look forward to gaming with her. It’s not about the game. And yet the better the game is, the more we get out of each other.
I don’t necessarily expect a game she loves to be something I love. But I do expect it to elucidate what’s going on in her head.
The beginning of Harvey’s New Eyes (HNE) made sense, was fun to play, everything aligned, I didn’t need any assistance from Ray. It’s bratty. You play an orphan at a convent orphanage who’s a serial killer, but who doesn’t really know it. All the blood is bright pink, painted over by potato-shaped gnomes. Death makes the world prettier.
Then you leave the orphanage and go searching for your friend, and things stop being fun.
You’re not doing *bratty* things, you’re jumping through story hoops.
Example orphanage quest: “Hahahaha what’s the worst thing she could do here? Set the guy hiding in the furnace on fire? WHY NOT?–Oops, that solved a quest, didn’t it?”
Example town quest:
“Solve this [broken] logic puzzle in exactly the right way so you can get rid of a behavioral block about logic.”
It’s hoop-jumping. It’s gameplay that doesn’t align with the narrative: *Logically,* a broken logic puzzle should be aligned with narrative about flawed logic. But what it feels like in practice is being punished for not doing things the “right” way, instead of being rewarded for doing things the “wrong” way. A story about subverting logic should reward you for breaking rules, not lock you into following the [broken] rules the game dev uses to replace the “logical” ones.
The one place I found to subvert the rules (a move that was common in the first part of the game) actually *broke* the game. It was a known flaw documented on Steam that required you to completely replay the game OR reload a generic saved game at a certain point.–But nobody noted how to load the generic game. (Fortunately Ray knew how and handled that part.)
If a game punishes you for doing exactly what it made you do in the first section, AND nobody bothers to fix it?
It felt like I was getting fucked with. Punished. Told to do one thing, then told it was the wrong thing to do.
Standard technique for the ex.
I got so pissed that I had to get out of the house so I didn’t lash out at Ray. I talked to her about it, told her that I was so frustrated that I had to leave for a while, reassured her that it wasn’t her fault and that she had done nothing wrong. And then left to go talk to Most Favored Tree about it.
I didn’t figure out that I was triggered until I was about halfway out to the tree. It felt like I was being forced to do something I hated, for someone else’s sake. Like I was back inside a shitty relationship. “Don’t like what you like. Like what someone else likes. Be what someone else wants you to be. Don’t be yourself, right down to the spontaneous neurological level. Or at least flatten so that you don’t clash with what the other person wants, even if you desperately need something different.”
I stopped at a playground and wrote for a while, sorting out the trigger, why it had kicked in, how to separate it from Ray’s actions, and what to do about it so I could get something good out of it, instead of just making the anger disappear.
Once I got to Most Favored Tree, I chatted with him about what was going on, more to drag things into the light than anything else. I mentioned a friend of mine who wished to be mentioned to him, and got a response of “Tell him to keep up the good work; he’s giving off good dad vibes for nerds.”
This made me cry. I think this particular Most Favored Tree is male because I needed a dad figure; my own father exists, is living, is my Most Favored Parent, and doesn’t actually see me as a person independent of my mother. A lot of that is my mom’s fault, but it also involves choices he’s made and refuses to back away from. Until he (well, and my mom) can act like I’m a person separate from them, separate from their values, and able to make independent choices, I can’t be around them. I’m just not strong enough to withstand the bombardment of all that dehumanization without getting fucked in the head, then shutting down from the overwhelm. Flattening.
I know that Most Favored Tree is dad-ish, but it doesn’t always hit me. Last night it did, and I had to stop and grieve all over again.
Then Most Favored Tree told me that I was being a good parent for Ray, too, which made me cry all over again.
The last thing I got out of the chat was that a friend of mine who’s tossing ideas back and forth with me lately has said something three times (on separate occasions, in different contexts) that I’d blown off, which is that it’s not just Ray and a few other members of my extended family who have autistic-type traits, but me, too. I’d joked that ADHD was just non-linear autism, but I didn’t take it seriously.
Most Favored Tree was like, “Three times, De. THREE TIMES. That means it’s important.”
(I have a rule of thumb that when someone tells me something three times, it’s important, either for me or for that person. So when someone tells you that they’re an X person three times, that means that if you want to understand that person, you have to consider them through the lens of X. Or if Ray tells me about a game three times, then I know that she finds that game important to her on a deep level. Stuff like that.)
Usually, when people describe being autistic, I’m like, “Wow that is NOT me,” but when people describe ADHD, I’m like, “HAHAHAHA I’m so sorry that we’re both like this.” Dyslexia tends to fall somewhere in the middle.
BUT: the language around autistic masking felt just gutting last night. I’ve had to wear masks, and masks, and masks, and masks, and masks.
Obviously it was time to listen and ask better questions.
I went home and talked to Ray for a solid half hour about the game, why she liked it, what she didn’t like about it, what I didn’t like about it, and more. We’re gonna talk about it more later, too, as she has time to sort her thoughts out about it.
She didn’t care that I loathed this center section. She told me repeatedly that we could quit or that she could finish playing this section for me. She said she had no idea how hard it would be for me to tolerate how clunky it was, and that it was kind of eye-opening. She talked about how the section after this made her feel, that it gave her a sense of belonging-among-misfits. Family.
I told her that I didn’t give a damn about the game itself; I only cared about how she saw it, what she liked and what she didn’t, what it meant to her, what she’d fix, what she wanted to steal for her own games. She made that “my heart is melting” face that she sometimes makes. It was good. I think we have that part of things repaired and even strengthened.
Go us.
…
This morning I dug around the idea of autism and took a bunch of screening tests. On the main one I ended up with the same type of score that I always do: not autistic, not the opposite of autistic but not solidly autistic either. Meh.
I took some others, though, and a lot of them came back with more solid results, commenting (in addition) that people with ADHD, people who are somewhat extroverted, and people who are inventive tend to have lower scores.
If I answer the questions strictly honestly, I do get a lower score. But if I answer the questions with an eye to “I don’t do THIS exactly but I do some form of it, only it’s not repeated or regular,” then I’d probably max out most of the questions.
Nonlinear autism:
–Do I organize things in patterns? I don’t line up things by height or color or things like that, but I 100% put things next to each other so they can “talk” to each other, combining ideas pleasantly or setting them up for visual gags.
–Do I struggle with social interactions? I don’t around people that I know well; I’m a fucking chatterbox. People I don’t know well? I’m a wallflower, I behave cheerfully but semi-professionally, OR I run into another person like me and we click instantly, and I’m a fucking chatterbox as we yell over each other we’re bouncing ideas off each other so fast.
–Do I struggle with eye contact? Not anymore. People I’m not close to or who haven’t settled into their right “space” yet, I handle eye contact sparingly; people I’m close to, I’ll stare at them unreservedly. I’ll make it 100% weird. I don’t care.
–Do I take things literally? No, I literally do not take things literally; however, I’m constantly aware of the literal meanings of words versus how they’re used socially, and will screw around with double entendres, subtext, puns, movie references, hand gestures, and “said the actress to the bishop” constantly. One of the examples was, “Does the phrase ‘getting under your skin’ bother you?” and I had to answer that it didn’t; I also went, “Well, it depends on WHO under one’s skin now, innit?” and giggled evilly.
–Do I have repetitive movement behaviors? I have dancing, which can get repetitive, but I also like to push it so that I’m constantly changing movements, no two songs or repetitions of the song the same. If I can’t dance, I’ll chew my nails, pick at skin, tap feet, doodle.
–Do I get upset if you mess with my routine? I get upset if you mess with my routine for something BORING. If it’s new or interesting or if someone needs me, I’m all for it.
–Do I have special interests or things I collect? Cooking. Books. Writing. Teapots (no two the same, and all of them awkward or annoying to use for one reason or another). Christmas ornaments that are something that shouldn’t be Christmas ornaments (no spheres, please). Art. Music. Revolutionary-Napoleonic-Victorian Colonial Era history. AI. Crime. Dance. Games. It doesn’t LOOK like a row of salt shakers or a basement full of trains, that’s all.
–Did I have to study how other people acted in order to feel comfortable around them? I don’t copy other people unless I want to put them at ease (which is how these questions are usually phrased), but this is literally true; I took acting classes in college and learned how to act on a basic level. How to control my limbs and weight so I wasn’t “clumsy,” how to communicate through movement, how to read physical and verbal subtext and how to communicate it. How to speak loudly enough to be heard (if I can remember to do so). How to speak clearly. How to use timbre and pitch as communication tools. I really just went because I liked the acting teachers, who were better at teaching story than my English ones. But still: if you see me in person, watch me tell a story about someone else. My whole movement and vocal pattern changes to suggest how the other person expresses themselves, whether I intend it or not.
A lot of the social things that came up in the tests were things that I had issues with as a teen and young adult; because I grew up being extremely tightly controlled, I didn’t have a chance to explore the world in a healthy way until I hit later high school and college, at which point I “blossomed” and met people who were able to treat me as “weird but good” instead of “weird and a threat to the rigid social structure we’re all embedded in.” I also had a couple of cousins who were a breath of fresh air, a lifeline, as a kid. Very lucky there. And books. Books kept me from feeling like there was NOBODY like me; even so, I felt and still feel isolated around most people. I *like* people. Humanity is one of my special interests, you could say. But I often feel like I’ve been invited to interact as an outsider, accepted because I’m different enough to be safe–uninvolved.
All in all, I don’t think I’d get diagnosed with autism. Neurodivergent, definitely. I don’t have the same issues as most people who are diagnosed with autism, which is kind of a circular argument but there it is. I identify far more with ADHD; I find the tools more useful in general.
But I also kind of have my ADHD tools under control, so I have more room to learn other things and integrate them. I’m pretty sure I can find some useful stuff about masking and unmasking as an autistic person to help with what I’m going through right now, which is how to know and be myself, now that “traumatized” isn’t a big part of what I think of as my personality.
More tools.
Speaking of which, I now have to fight with yet another software program I don’t know well, because the color picker isn’t working intuitively. THE FUCK. This image which is solid white, I want it to be solid black. How is this not something a user can do in their sleep? Why isn’t the answer to click on the thing, click on the color, voila? Or to click on the thing, click on some tool that will clearly change the color, click on the color?
What fresh bullshit is this?
I fucking hate most software developers. PEOPLE USE THIS SHIT, I DON’T CARE HOW CLEVER YOU ARE, I WILL END YOU IF I NEED TO USE A TUTORIAL TO FIND OUT HOW TO DO BASIC SHIT. IMAGINE IF I WERE DISABLED, YOU FUCKERS, DO YOU EVEN CARE ABOUT YOUR USERS?
Grrr.
Midjourney’s idea of demonically possessed dancing slippers. We can’t see the slippers, but OH WELL.
Selfie from the hurricane that passed through on August 30th. It missed us by a fair margin but some wind and rain was involved.