Work out a lot, enough to be buff

Respectfully, I don’t think you necessarily have to be buff; you just have to be able to handle physical violence if it happens to come your way, and confident in your ability to do so. Because if you know that you “can take 'em” then you will have less reason to care about what they think of you, and less reason to fear that their bullying might ever go that far. Thus, IMHO, something like training in martial arts can be a very effective substitute for “becoming buff”. But “buff” without necessarily looking it can also be good enough, in some cases.

I was never “buff” in school. In fact, from all outward appearances, I looked every bit the scrawny nerd that everyone always assumed I was. And I was a nerd… but I was also strong. I carried a book bag around throughout middle school and high school that contained all of my schoolbooks. I didn’t go to my locker; as I saw it, there was no reason to. I literally tore through bookbag after bookbag over the years. By about my junior year or so, it was a sports bag that held twice as many books as any backpack – because it kind’a had to be, since that’s just how many books the school had issued to me that year – but I was nonetheless easily manhandling that bag like it was paper mâché.

I don’t recall the rest of the context of the conversation, but I remember this one football dude commenting about my sports bag, something along the lines of, “Yeah, whatever… it’s not that heavy.” So I called him out on his comment; I said, “Feel free to pick it up.” Having received the challenge, he certainly wasn’t going to back down – especially not from the scrawny nerd. He puffed himself up, walked down the aisle between the desks until he was towering right over me, and wrapped his big ol’ hand around the handle. He stood up with it by his side and paused in that position for a moment. He then very quietly put it back down on the floor and walked away without another word.

(Morgan Freeman voiceover) It was that heavy.

But you don’t even have to be “strong” necessarily; in some cases, what matters most is confidence. Later that same year, another bully – not another football player, just a rando dude who had decided he didn’t like me for some reason – told me to watch myself, because he was going to follow me home and (oh, so trite, reflecting upon it now) “beat me up.” Well, I knew who I was and I knew what I could do. Without even a hint of fear or hesitance, I responded to him, “Okay. When and where?”

He didn’t show.

Bullies are all talk and no show, especially when they’re alone and especially when you can confidently call them out on their crap. If they’re “just” making fun of you, do your best to ignore it; it’s not worth your time or energy to give them even the slightest bit of attention. But consider making an effort to get to a point where you’re confident in what you can do, if you should ever need to defend yourself… and then, never show them fear. They will usually back down and leave you alone when confidently confronted. And if they don’t back down… well, you’re confident for a reason. Defend yourself if you have to – but only if they start the fight. There’s never any point in picking a fight yourself.

Full disclosure: I have not been officially tested by a doctor, myself, because depending upon your insurance, it can be pretty expensive. So money could certainly be one very valid reason to not get tested. On the other side of that, my wife and I did choose to have our kids tested, so that they can take advantage of options that such a diagnosis opens up within the public school system. You obviously aren’t looking towards that path, yourself, but that doesn’t mean it is entirely without value.

That said, I did take the online test, which is primarily targeted at an adult audience and which (unsurprisingly) showed very strong indicators that I’m also autistic. I would suggest starting there. The way I look at it, knowledge is a tool; you get to decide how (or if) to use that tool. And when the barrier to obtaining that knowledge is low, it’s worth the effort to step forward and see where that knowledge takes you.

The website with online tests is linked under helpful resources in the collection of links in the sidebar, but I’ll also go ahead and link directly to that website right here for your convenience: https://embrace-autism.com/autism-tests/

The ten question test is merely a subset of the fifty question test; if you’re at all distressed about the process, feel free to start at the short test. (I took both, and they both scored me extremely highly.)

Don’t forget to go back a week out and verify that your deleted comments didn’t mysteriously reappear. Seems like that’s been happening a lot lately, according to various reports. (I haven’t really had the heart to go delete all of my own comments. Yet.)

Totally get this. Regardless of the answer, try to think of knowing the answer as another tool in your belt to help you figure out solutions to your daily struggles. Of course, knowing by itself doesn’t necessarily solve anything… but it’ll at least help point you in the right direction.

I absolutely related to several of the elements of this video – but there’s one issue that I don’t deal with quite as much myself, that I know my daughter struggles with: misophonia. I’m going to have to show this video to her, as I think that bit with the bird noises probably conveys a good sense of how she feels about certain sounds.

Depends on the sub: in my experience, some subs were just plain more picky than others, and the reasons didn’t always map to a published rule. I was actually temporarily banned from one sub for posting something fairly innocuous – or so I thought. That was my first and only attempt to post to that sub; I promptly unsubscribed and never went back.

As to whether or not lemmy is “better”… we can hope. But if we assume that the issue is caused by humans who are fallible, (or by code that humans wrote, which is by extension fallible) than I’m afraid the source of the issue isn’t particularly likely to change with the platform.

I kind’a wouldn’t blame him if he did that. The level of vitriol aimed at him in the comment sections of various articles that I’ve read on this topic is positively staggering. People can be really awful sometimes… and people who are seemingly uninformed and/or misinformed, even more so.

You know, if he could find a way to re-hook Apollo over to one or more Lemmy instances, I think Apollo would immediately become the default Lemmy client for a whole lot of people. What’s more, I expect that a fairly large subset of those people still haven’t even heard about Lemmy yet, and would suddenly be creating new accounts. That would also help to incentivize people to grant his request, and turn down the refund.

Just a thought. I know there would by necessity be an awful lot of work involved to make such a thing happen… but it would probably be worth it.

Oh yeah… I got this.

Years ago (before most people even knew the word “autism”), my parents offered to send me to a therapist to work through some things. I was all in – I even had my own ideas about how to go about it, and enthusiastically presented those to the therapist during our first session. He listened with what appeared to be rapt attention, until the end of the fifty minute session, at which point he abruptly stated that we would pick this up the following week. The next week was much the same. And the week after that, I started running out of things to say.

Thing is, he never really offered anything in the way of feedback. He had even stated that this would be the case, as his silently absorbing everything I offered was supposedly part of his therapeutic method, or some such thing. But over the course of time, I started to recognize a few things. First off, it didn’t even matter if I said anything; he would very contentedly sit there the entire time and just wait me out until it was time to leave. And the vast majority of the time, regardless of whether or not I said anything, his gaze was fixed on a point over by the windowsill, just out of my line of vision.

Well, I mean… even as a kid, I was certainly no dummy. I made a point of looking at that windowsill as I passed it one day. Situated up there, where he could easily rest his gaze without his less observant patients ever even suspecting, was a clock. He was quite literally just relaxing as the minutes passed and counting the dollars as they tallied onto his bill. Two dollars a minute. That’s what he charged.

I don’t remember exactly how many months I went to him, but it was easily more than a year. Eventually, my parents informed me that he was moving his practice to a bigger office about an hour away in a much more expensive part of the area, and they asked me if I was interested in continuing to meet with him. I told them very bluntly… no. He very literally did absolutely nothing for me.

I recognize intellectually that this was probably a one-off situation… but nonetheless, I still haven’t been able to fully get over my distrust of any form of therapy nor of any therapists, since.