My special interests are very special to me (ugh, what a terrible pun. Defo not intended!) and I reserve sharing them for people I trust. That alone is a reason for me to mask.

It’s actually harder for me not to mask than it is to mask a lot of the time, even though my mask is far from perfect. But I’m “out” at work and it’s fine if people realize I’m masking.

I think for me donning the mask is like donning armor to protect things I care about from a majorly uncaring world, and if I unmask around you it’s a sign of trust.

Still relatively new to Lemmy and can’t figure out RN how to dm you, but I am not in the US, so most likely we are not in the same country.

I can tell you broad strokes though - I got super lucky with my therapist at that time. Sadly he’s retired now :( I was super exhausted, had gotten out of hospital and then diagnosis and at the same time (since in paper I looked like an easy candidate to find work for) the unemployment agency was hounding me. I told my therapist as an off-comment “I wish I didn’t have to do shit for the rest of the year.”

He said that can be arranged and I thought he was joking - it was October or something. Nope, he stalled and his practice became unreachable. All I could tell the unemployment agency was that I didn’t hear back and I don’t know what’s going on until they got frustrated and backed off. Come new year, everything went back to normal and it went fast-ish. Took maybe a year in total? I think less, maybe roughly 9 months?

I didn’t realize what happened until after the fact, but he bought me the time I needed to process things at that time.

Better - but not through age.

Since I got diagnosed late, my before-diagnosis time was a mess and I had no idea why. Since my diagnosis and me subsequently understanding what’s happening I have become less likely to compromise on things that will cause meltdowns.

I also have disabled status so I can request accommodations at work, and lucky enough my team and workplace are lovely about that.

I can’t tell if time made a difference for me, but I feel like I’ve lost patience for people telling me “don’t be like that”, but that’s probably also due to knowing what’s going on now. I keep asking them if they’d tell a quadriplegic to not be like that and just real quick get them something from the high shelf. Surprisingly efficient, although there’s always people claiming you’re just being dramatic. Thankfully they are a minority around me.

That smug face.

“Hey, it’s me, Amazon. I noticed you recently bought a fridge! Here’s five more fridges for you to look at, on case you need to complete your fridge selection!”

Like. Why?!

Maybe start with what you like, as I found it easier to determine. A lot of time, it just meant following my impulses.

The more stressed I felt, the more I wanted to be in bed. And when I was in bed, I realized I preferred the softest blanket on my skin. So I looked for soft textures to touch when I’m stressed and found it helped me regulate a lot.

Maybe this will help you a) be less stressed and b) if soft textures soothe you, rough ones probably stress you. So it can also be a way to discover your stressors in a roundabout way.

I think Chinese and Korean culture share this concept, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more Asian languages who did. Since a daughter joins her husband’s family upon marriage, their children are considered belonging to the other family. I recently learner that apparently there’s a saying in Korean that daughters always leave things at their mother’s house when they get married so they have a reason to come back despite having left the family.

Just because it is here as a meme doesn’t make it a symptom. People’s crusade against self-diagnosis is really getting ridiculous.

I’m autistic and I do this. My SO who is not (but most likely ADHD - sadly, diagnosis is impossible) does it too. It’s just a fun thing that lots of people seem to relate to. Let’s have some fun here, alright?

You didn’t do anything wrong, both is fine. Me and most of my autistic friends actually prefer to call ourselves autistic. Figure out what you prefer first and foremost :)

Speak for yourself only, please. It’s s fine if you prefer autistic person, but I and many autistics I know don’t. The bottom line is not to teach someone what’ s best but to inform them that there may be preferences and to listen to the reason there talking to, not to make blanket statements about what’s the right thing.

Not culturally dense, but absolutely unwilling to consider cultures outside their bubble other than as mere curiosities for entertainment. I stand by that.

Not unable to learn a new layout, but unwilling, because I don’t see the point. Why would I waste time and energy on something that will at most bring me one more shortcut to use? Programming is not about typing speed. If the bottleneck for you is typing speed, your job is very different than anything I’ve seen or heard of.

I have never seen anyone but my computer-illiterate mom use two fingers for ctrl-z, hence I was expressing my bewilderment about that. I’ll probably be able to do that move blind with one hand, and so are all of the people I know who use the computer in a professional setting. The only explanation I had for that was that they have exceptionally small hands so it’s a necessity. If you want to take that as an insult of your hands, be my guest, but I’m done here.

Wtf, who needs two hands for that? Do they have children’s hands?

It’s all a matter of habit - for me all layouts but my native sucks for anything to do on a keyboard. The only thing that sucks is if keybinds are set to shift-/ because / is already shift-7. I haven’t found a replacement for that yet. Forgot which program used that and for what, but I remember it was a bummer. Still wouldn’t spend all that time and energy and slowdown learning a different layout.

There’s lots of programmers on languages that need more keys readily than us keyboard has. Äöüß, just to give an example.

I don’t know, every time I read a post like this I’m kinda speechless. I know lots of Americans and many of them are brillant and open-minded, but then there are posts like this which are completely oblivious that there are reasons for other keyboard layouts.

The reason OP can’t fathom programming on those is that they aren’t used to it. If you grew up with non-us layouts you similarly couldn’t fathom programming on the us layout.

Sometimes I feel like people refuse to even think about acknowledging that there are other experiences than their own. Go out, try out new things, exercise your brain and callenge yourself.