The unsupported use case of Bix Frankonis’ disordered, surplus, mediocre midlife in St. Johns, Oregon.
No fear, no hate, no thoughtless bullshit, and no nazis.
Out of the 4257 posts across 16 sources in the 25 years since March 2000, these 40 posts were published on medium.com.
Someone on Twitter asked fellow autistics whether or not they feel they overreact. It got me thinking about that word, and who or what decides what kind of reactions allegedly are “too much”.
I’d meant only to come back to Medium to talk about one way in which I think we end up with late-diagnosed actually autistic adults, but while browsing the autism tag (which they seem finally to have purged of all the t-shirt and pirated ebook spam) ended up learning something new.
Recently, I had to go for a new psychodiagnostic evaluation by an Oregon Department of Human Services contractor as part of the state’s disability determination services for Social Security benefits purposes. I’d mostly been avoiding thinking too much about being autistic because there are too many other things that need to be done right now.
I’m not suicidal (I have my days where if the world ended I might not do more than shrug, but I’ve no interest in hastening the event), but buried in the Discussion section of a new study on suicide among autistic adults is a look at camouflaging that concerns me.
There are two ways to get Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits, more or less.
When you are actually-autistic but late-diagnosed, you think a lot about whether or not you’ve been stimming for all those decades, or were suppressing your stimming because it didn’t match (as I’ve discussed before) society’s background radiation of conformity.
Completed and submitted my combined Social Security Disability Insurance/Supplemental Security Income application online, although I still have to go into a Social Security office to submit additional material, because heaven forbid they let you upload PDFs to your actual application.
It was a bad sign. Immediately upon leaving my apartment to go host visiting hours at The Belmont Goats, the brightness and heat of the afternoon sun of the ongoing heatwave was like suddenly being slapped across the face. I’d already announced we would be open. There was no turning back.
In addition to this Medium experiment (from which I’d been somewhat absent until the last couple of weeks), awhile back I tried a related one on Tumblr, where there’s an entirely different autistic community. It didn’t last long, and I wiped the few things I had posted or reblogged.
One continuing obstacle for me is the question of trying to look back over four decades to see if I can find signs of being autistic, or signs of how no one ever noticed that I was. It didn’t help when exactly the wrong person bluntly questioned my contention that I never knew there were diagnosable reasons behind difficulties I’ve had.
There’s not really any form of communication that I enjoy, per se. I suppose that I’m most comfortable with the sort of mass, meandering aimlessness of my Twitter feed, but that doesn’t exactly translate into utilitarian conversations such as those in the workplace, or, really, those involved in finding work to begin with.
I’ve been getting down in the dumps a bit lately, wondering why so many autistic people seem to think that being autistic comes with some set of “superpowers” when I feel like no one ever provided me with that particular handbook. I even bailed on a brief experiment in following autistic people on Tumblr because of it. It probably also partly explains my general absence here on Medium.
My weekly roundup of responses I have posted to other people’s posts here on Medium, for those who don’t feel like scrolling through the Responses tab on my profile.
Today was not a good day. Today was the third time in a little less than a year that someone I’d turned to for help waved dismissively at some past or present part of my diagnostic story.
My weekly roundup of responses I have posted to other people’s posts here on Medium, for those who don’t feel like scrolling through the Responses tab on my profile.
I’ve been thinking a bit lately about that whole thing where autistic people are said to be lacking in empathy. It’s not something I’ve spent much time on, but here on Medium, at least, there’s a fair amount of pushback against this idea from actually-autistic people. I’ve pushed back against it myself.
I received the following Montessori evaluation in June 1974. I received my autism diagnosis in October 2016. How do they relate? I don’t know, really, but I wanted to share it here.
My weekly roundup of responses I have posted to other people’s posts here on Medium, for those who don’t feel like scrolling through the Responses tab on my profile.
Last month, I posted a comparison of how my daily average moods were working out between March, the final month at my six-month job placement which I left due to the psychological damage it was doing, and April, my first post-job month. Today I add the full month of May to the mix.
Animals die.
My weekly roundup of responses I have posted to other people’s posts here on Medium, for those who don’t feel like scrolling through the Responses tab on my profile.
I find fascinating the suggestion that introversion might have some relation to autism because before my diagnosis the elements of introversion resonated with me, and I found it a useful tool to manage certain social stresses, both in terms of how I dealt with them internally and how I justified my reactions to the world and to other people. Introversion was my only toolkit.
My weekly roundup of responses I have posted to other people’s posts here on Medium, for those who don’t feel like scrolling through the Responses tab on my profile.
I was thinking today about a couple things I’ve posted as responses to other people, and how they actually might connect in such a way as my response to the one actually ends up explaining my somewhat intense reaction to the other.
More accurately, I learned of autistic burnout last week, but set it aside for this week as something to read up on. It turns out to be useful new knowledge as lately I’ve been thinking a lot about life post-diagnosis as compared to life pre-diagnosis.
Now that I’m a month into my experiment in using Medium as part of my mental health regimen, I thought I’d take a moment to explain, among other things, why I’m not following you.
This week began in stress. It began with difficulty. “Today,” I wrote on Twitter on Monday while linking something I’d posted here, “is hard.” This post is long. You won’t read it. That doesn’t matter; I needed to write it.
My weekly roundup of responses I have posted to other people’s posts here on Medium, for those who don’t feel like scrolling through the Responses tab on my profile.
Not more than a few minutes after waking up this morning, there were messages from a local talk radio station wanting me to come on before 9:00am to talk about relocating The Belmont Goats. I ignored them, and only responded later on when I was actually up and about.
I’m completely drained by this weekend, which has not been my typical weekend.
My weekly roundup of responses I have posted to other people’s posts here on Medium, for those who don’t feel like scrolling through the Responses tab on my profile.
Back in 2016, when Instagram announced it was Facebooking itself by abandoning the simple chronological feed and instituting an algorithm, they proclaimed that the move would “show the moments we believe you will care about the most”.
Mid-month, I posted an early comparison of how my daily average moods were working out between March, the final month at my six-month job placement which I left due to the psychological damage it was doing, and April, my first post-job month.
Coming out of a Sunday afternoon crash, I suddenly for the first time wondered if there were any links between autism and fatigue. I think that I mostly had just assumed that if my diagnosis had any bearing at all on my routine fatigue it would be as an aspect of my anxiety. But then, I finally asked myself, why does it hit even on days when my anxiety levels are not particularly high?
For a week and a half now, since not long after beginning to use Medium as a place to learn about and express my own thoughts about my autism diagnosis, I’ve been plagued by a technical issue that seemingly manages to poke just about every button I have that in any way relates to rigidity or a lack of control: the Highlights tab keeps disappearing from my profile.
My weekly roundup of responses I have posted to other people’s posts here on Medium, for those who don’t feel like scrolling through the Responses tab on my profile.
I don’t seem to have the same degree of sensory issues as do other people writing about their autism, but I felt the need to mention that this bathroom pushed nearly every wrongful sensory button. The curved floor, the tiny and perpetually-repeated tiles, the lighting, and the infinitely-regressing smoky mirrors all combined to make me feel like the room was constantly in motion. Leaving this bathroom was like walking off a ferry (I seriously cannot ride ferries) and needing to get one’s legs back. It’s quite possibly the single most nightmarish room I have ever been in.
My weekly roundup of responses I have posted to other people’s posts here on Medium, for those who don’t feel like scrolling through the Responses tab on my profile.
Toward the end of February, five months into a job placement via Vocational Rehabilitation that had so degraded my mental state that for the first time in my life I was suffering what my psychotherapist deemed “depressive episodes” (excepting two minor incidents more than twenty years ago), I started tracking my mood several times a day in an app called Daylio.
My weekly roundup of responses I have posted to other people’s posts here on Medium, for those who don’t feel like scrolling through the Responses tab on my profile.