wick

neurobiologist ± game & web dev

My only two design tools:
[1] "What is the experience we're trying to create" is the first & constant question
[2] To make something seem more like anything, put it next to the opposite (big guy/lil guy, happy thing/sad thing)


Crescent Loom
crescentloom.com/
Gaaaaaaaay 🌺
wick.itch.io/aesthetic

Just watched ep 3 of Dead End and it sent me BAWLING. The (autistic) main character has so much fear of navigating a normal team building beach day that it literally explodes a fear-eating demon.

I feel like that all the time, there is so much fear held inside this body. I've never heard it talked about like this — usually people just talk about being "overstimulated" but that's only usually the breaking point that they notice.

(Reflections/ramblings on this below the fold)


So much of my life is carefully constructed to mask, manage, and avoid this fear and social anxiety.
I had breakdowns on public transit until I watched enough people to copy how they got on and off the bus.
I have trouble at new supermarkets until I learn the script at the checkout stand.
I've travelled an hour to parties, arrived, and left immediately once it became clear that the vibes were Unfamiliar.
I'm petrified of asking for help unless there are clear social expectations about it.

I'm currently traveling in Berlin alone and it's wild how impossible basic staying alive maintenance becomes when I don't have my routines and scripts. Even though most people here speak English, my monolingual ass canNOT work up the ability to like go to a grocery store with an hour of research and planning beforehand, much less a cafe or any of the activities you're "supposed" to do while on vacation.

I've had friends who have, I feel, judged me for this: "olive, you're letting your fear hold you back." — you don't know the half of it!! I am very powerful for having gotten as much done as I have with this as a constant concern!!!

It's like telling a depressed person to just cheer up. This is just a fact of who I am. I can do the comfort-zone pushing thing to build out tolerance and skills, but the fear is always there, and it's harder for me than it is for you, neurotypical person!

I wish I had a map of my fear. It's not always the shape you'd expect of what social anxiety looks like. Making a Kickstarter video? It's work, but not the Fear, I can do it. Public speaking can be nervous but I usually know what I'm talking about, not a problem.

Asking a question to a panel? Needing to cold-introduce myself to someone at a meet-n-greet? Impossible.

Anyway it was a huge surprise to see this represented in a cartoon I haven't seen anyone talking about. Watch even the first few episodes of Dead End. It's on Netflix and rules.


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in reply to @wick's post:

Have you read Unmasking Autism? It talks about this fear, and how part of conquering it is working through and beyond the desire to capitulate to those schemas we see out there in the world. It's hard to describe, but it let me put away a lot of those schemas I saw as out there and shunt them into a box labeled just "unfamiliar," and somewhere in that process parts of that fear just melted away. There's still some there, but I don't feel like I have to capitulate or know the script pat to be in the world, and when I really feel like I still do, I do the research without guilt. That book helped me a lot, and I recommend it to all my friends, whether they seem Autistic or not.

(A diagnosis is helpful, but if a psychiatrist or psychiatric nurse-practitioner takes more than a session to diagnose you, they're probably looking to run up a bill, not help you.)

I have not read that! I'll check it out, thank you. Getting more tools to handle the fear is always useful. I'm glad parts of it melted for you in your process; that sounds impossibly far away for me but I believe it can happen.

And thanks for the tip. :) I have kaiser which has its own problems besides running up bills, I'll see if I can figure out how to navigate that.