Mastochism

There’s something poetic in how all of their efforts are apparently blowing up in their faces right now.

If they devoted their energy to pushing Biden left instead or to turning against Biden early on in order to demand a better candidate, this wouldn’t have happened.

Instead they pushed the line that Biden is our only option and I’d guess that a good proportion of reluctant Biden voters who were chastised into backing him a second time are gonna be rapidly losing their already dubious conviction to back Biden, but also it seems like suddenly there’s a rift amongst the diehard Dem camp where one side is still rallying behind Biden while the other has lost their faith in Biden being a viable candidate.

Aside from it being a state of chaos under heaven there’s gotta be some bitter irony in that second camp, having spent so much time scolding other people into voting for Biden who are now the ones that are about to get scolded by the diehard Biden camp for not supporting Biden hard enough.

A part of me hopes this is a major inflection point amongst the US progressive cohort and that we’re gonna see a large splinter group that finally wakes up and realises how toxic their vote-shaming strategy is and how chasing the DNC rather than expecting the DNC to appeal to the voterbase is a fundamentally broken strategy. I know that progressives are terrible at keeping score but surely there’s a golden opportunity for agitation by reminding this newly disaffected cohort that the DNC destroyed their chances at beating Trump the first time around by bringing Bernie to heel and running Hillary instead and now they’re doing the exact same thing by pushing Biden at any cost rather than finding someone who has broader appeal and popular support, or even just someone who can finish a sentence coherently.

Strange to think that the key message that the DNC has been pushing—that we must put up with anything in order to defeat Trump—might be the very thing that turns people away from the democrats because they have lost faith in the DNC and its lame duck nominee.

I don’t really know why they’re starting you on both at the same time.

Thanks for pointing this out especially.

It does seem like an odd choice and I don’t want to preempt things and spoøk anyone but starting both at the same time sounds like a recipe for an unnecessary amount of side effects that might even overlap or amplify eachother so the likelihood of needing to discontinue them both is much higher than if they were staggered out.

It’s also going to be much harder to figure out what’s working, what isn’t, which dose needs to be adjusted, and where certain side effects are coming from.

If someone asked me whether I’d recommend this, I’d give it a hard nope except in unusual circumstances like opting for California rocket fuel or you’re dealing with psychosis and the likelihood of a mood disorder where the need to stabilise supercedes concerns about figuring out what’s working and what isn’t.

especially when it comes to anxiety. i’ve always described and felt anxiety differently than how other people describe it, to me it’s kind of like an inability to do a task, complete freeze at the idea of doing something unfamiliar or without clear instructions.

Yeah, that definitely feels familiar to me.

I really struggle with a lot of creative exercises and tasks that lack structure and clear purpose, where things are too open or too ambiguous.

I hate filling out forms and I get incensed when questionnaires are worded in an imprecise way that can lead to multiple interpretations (this is a sticking point for me personally because I am hyperspecific with my use of language and I get upset that the world doesn’t automatically hold itself to the same arbitrarily high standards that I set for myself lol [but survey methodology matters, okay!?])

If you sit me in front of a blank canvas and tell me to paint or draw something, I freeze up. Whenever I had creative writing exercises in school I’d always bomb the task because I can’t handle that level of open-endedness.

I’ve learned ways to compensate though. If I can figure out a way to create my own objectives to provide myself with a sort of artificially-imposed degree of structure then I manage much better and I’m able to perform. It can be hard for me to engage in that process though.

Autistic people absolutely experience an inordinate amount of difficulty with things that are unfamiliar, unexpected, or unclear.

i do also experience what most of people would describe anxiety to be more like, the panicky fast heart rate inability to stay still kind of deal. but i always though of those as two different reactions to the same emotion. kind of like fight, flight or freeze situation. the first feeling just being the freeze response to anxiety while the second being the flight response to anxiety. i never thought of those as two separate things, so i just lumped them into together, but i guess it does make sense to differentiate

You might be right about this. It’s something I need to explore more in myself so I can observe what my experience is while doing some experimenting with how I respond when I change up the variables to see if it lines up with a freeze response or something else for me.

My hunch about my own experience of this is that it’s different to a freeze response. From memory, I don’t recall feeling the same physiological experience that I have from a genuine freeze response and if I seek clarification or I am able to impose my own structure or outcomes then I find that I’m able to progress whereas with a freeze response I find that there’s a lag between everything being fine and my psychological and physiological response gearing down and returning to the baseline.

A confounding factor in this would be if you had really demanding caregivers or teachers who weren’t supportive enough when you faced these situations in childhood (e.g. a parent often yelling at you to hurry up and do what you’re told rather than showing kindness and showing a genuine interest in how they might be able to help you get started on the task). If you had a lot of that then it’s absolutely within reason to expect that you’d have a freeze response because you’ve associated those open-ended experiences with being yelled at or humiliated. This also applies if you’ve had awful bosses or abusive partners etc. later in life as well.

if this is the case and i don’t actually have depression and anxiety and it is just autism symptoms, will medication still work?

Honestly, short answer - I struggle to imagine many people being late-diagnosed/late self-identifying autistic to arrive at adulthood without experiencing a good deal of anxiety and depression, so I’d expect that medication will still work.

The thing is though, I would expect most meds to work on a superficial level because your experience of anxiety and depression are responses to deeper things that the meds themselves won’t be able to affect. I guess a good example here might be a person who is experiencing really severe grief and has a sort of secondary depression that has developed from the grief - the right meds will take the edge off the depression in a lot of ways but it’s not reasonable to expect that the meds going to resolve the grief itself and unless the person gives that grief the time and space and kindness necessary to move through it, then there’s going to be a force that is producing those depressive symptoms until the grief has been processed.

In a similar way, if an autistic person doesn’t have enough stability and consistency and certainty in their environment, for example, then there’s naturally going to be a level of anxiety that comes with that, almost certainly. Meds might be able to reduce the degree of anxiety experienced, and it might make that anxiety much easier to manage, but unless those causative factors are addressed then I wouldn’t expect meds to really “fix” things. The same can be said about overstimulation or executive dysfunction or not managing your sensory needs so well etc. and for experiences of depression/depression-like symptoms.

Honestly if you’re going to try some meds then I think it’s a good opportunity to see how you respond to the variables being changed around - you’re bound to get some more understanding of what’s going on for you one way or another.

If they work, that’s fantastic news.

If they kinda work a bit but you find that you’ve tried quite a few and nothing seems to do all that much, that sucks but it’s also really valuable insight because that starts to form a picture that there’s something deeper going on for you and it would be one more indicator of something like autism being likely.

Just as a side note, this comment has kinda been touching on a theme about how I’ve learned to approach my mental health (and neurodevelopmental disorders, since it’s important to distinguish autism from a mental health condition) and medications - I really try to be as objective as possible with understanding what my experience is, without interpretation or extrapolation.

Once I have a good grasp of what I’m experiencing then I compare that against either the clinical description of symptoms for conditions or other people’s internal description of their experiences of things (anxiety, anaemia, ADHD, PTSD, POTS… you get the idea) and I see how closely my experience matches that.

Then I do a pseudo-scientific approach where I make develop a hypothesis and test it against my experience (e.g. paying attention to my heart rate when I’m faced with that “freeze” experience that you have described, or maybe assessing my physiological response entirely).

A freeze response should have noticeable physiological indicators - do mine match up with those or do they fall outside of where I predict they would be based on my hypothesis? If there’s something that I can take that reduces anxiety (e.g. beta-blockers, benzodiazepines, valerian extract) does it change my experience in line with the hypothesis or does my experience fall outside of what I’d anticipate?

I try to control for variables as best I can and I try to repeat the “experiment” a few times over before I arrive at a conclusion, where possible. Then I make develop a new hypothesis with the benefit of the new anecdotal data I’ve gathered and I start the process over again. It’s a big process of figuring out the likelihood of things and then eliminating them one by one until you arrive at an understanding where everything seems to fit in line with what you’re experiencing.

So for me, with regards to the freeze response hypothesis, I would predict that getting more structure or direction would result in a fairly noticeable shift as I become more regulated and less panicked but that it would still take a bit of time before I really shifted from freeze back to my baseline. I would expect to have some nervous energy so that would imply things like being a bit jittery, feeling like I physically need to shake it out, or maybe yawning as my nervous system becomes more regulated. If I were a smoker, I assume that’s the point where I’d really be craving a cigarette.

If I don’t notice any significant changes in my physiological or psychological state and there’s no indicators of my body attempting to manage the energy from being in a heightened state, if I find that as soon as I have the necessary structure or direction I can just immediately jump into the task without any noticeable transition, then that would count as evidence against the freeze hypothesis (for me) and that I might need to observe this a few more times or that I might need to consider a different hypothesis.

Apologies for going on such a lengthy tangent about this, but I think it might be helpful. When it comes to the more complex stuff and co-occuring conditions that can overlap or interact or resemble eachother, I genuinely think that this is the best way of figuring out what’s really going on. It can take a long time and it requires a good amount of effort but I believe that it’s worth it because of the results you can get. Also keep in mind that you’re not working at this alone - you have people around you who can help you with their own observations (be very cautious about taking their conclusions on board though, try to focus on their observations), there are professionals that can help guide you and provide you with an outside perspective as well as their own professional experience, and there’s space like this one where you can bounce ideas off of people and you can share what you’ve observed in your own experience to get other people’s input.

There’s a reason why nobody will let Elizabeth Warren cook. Here’s the result from the last time people let her:

I remember when Biden campaigned on the promise of addressing COVID by following the science.

Instead he got rid of mask mandates and there is serious discussions about banning masking in US states, biobot is no longer recording COVID data, and COVID is surging in the US.

But we all just need to trust that he’s going to tell the truth this time around. There’s an old saying in Tennessee…

Do I smell another recall?
Somebody reset the timer!

What they’re selling:
Dark Brandon

What you’re getting:
Dim Biden

In the earliest iteration of this press release, they referred to him as Baiden or Baidan. I can’t remember which exactly. They later edited these mentions to being spelled Biden.

Idk if it was just a mistranslation from the Korean version or whether it was intended as a slight against Biden. My headcanon is that it was the latter though.

Typical tankie lies.

Biden wouldn’t be able to climb the stairs to get into the cockpit in the first place so your terrible analogy is completely deboonked. I am very smart and very liberal.

“Would you rather eat the dish that is 100% platter of shit with broken glass in it or the dish that is 99% platter of shit with broken glass in it and 1% chicken?”

“Um, no thank you.”

“See? This is exactly what’s wrong with this country!! 😡😡”

The peak of liberal political analysis is just analogy.

Trump is Voldemort and Hillary is Hermione Granger.
Trump is Jojo Siwa and Biden is Billie Eilish.

Fucken, whatever it is all it amounts to is this aesthetic “I don’t like the bad thing because the bad thing is tacky and lowbrow/threatens to destroy the world but I like the good thing because it’s nice and refined and clever/is the thing that’s going to save the world”.

That’s all they can ever do.

"Biden is like liquid medicine: not something that is your preference to drink, it’s bitter and uncomfortable but ultimately you know that what is more important is your own health–the health of the nation and of the world–than drinking coke instead.

Meanwhile Trump is like ipecac. People drink it because they think it will get rid of the problem and it might just do that but you’re going to make yourself very sick in the process, you’re going to create a huge mess, and you will feel weakened and full of regret for your choice by the end of it. Then you are going to need someone to come along and start cleaning up the mess that your poor decision-making has wrought."

It’s so incredibly smug and self-congratulatory. Usually it’s really wordy and the analogy becomes more tortured as the whole thing progresses.

Um yikes, sweaty!

What’s so hard to understand about the fact that by not eating the rancid chicken fried in stale piss you’re implicitly endorsing the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?

Not even seemingly. They were literally workshopping a PR strategy to manage the fallout of the folder leak in r/VaushV directly after it happened. I’ll try and find the thread.

Here’s one example. I’m sure there were plenty of other places where these discussions were taking place as well.

Autistic people often report that SSRIs don’t work well for them and that they get more severe side effects.

This is not always the case so don’t set the expectation that it’s not going to work for you. Also keep in mind that there’s a sampling bias here - you don’t see autistic people constantly telling everyone “I took SSRIs and it was pretty okay, nothing much to report on really” but the autistic people who have had bad experiences with SSRIs are going to be more vocal about it because that’s just how things work.

As general advice for a person who is autistic or who suspects that they are I’d say that a low dose might well be the sweet spot for you where you get the benefits without so much of the side effects and, if you do increase your dose to do so gradually because if you happen to be unusually sensitive to the side effects like a lot of autistic people report then the typical way that you are directed to increase your dose might be too rapid for you.

Anxiety and depression are really common for autistic people but autism often brings experiences of executive dysfunction, burnout, and catatonia which can resemble depression very closely. My hunch is that there’s a good percentage of autistic people who experience these things but they are under the impression that they are symptoms of depression and so they find antidepressants don’t work for them.

In a similar way, symptoms of anxiety can closely resemble experiences like overstimulation and being exposed to noxious stimuli, masking, suppressing stims, and not meeting your need for stability and predicability in your environment.

If you think that you’re likely autistic I’d encourage you to look into these things at your own pace and to approach symptoms with curiousity and a sort of scientific approach, without any preconceptions, to see if there’s a possibility that your experience might be, say, burnout rather than depression. Or that some symptoms that you experience might be better understood as burnout instead of depression. This is me speaking from hard earned experience - I was far too quick to lump all of my symptoms into common categories like anxiety or depression without really putting in the time to consider whether or not this was accurate and so I wasted a lot of time and effort trying to find the “right” treatment for my depression when half of my symptoms weren’t even depression at all.

idk about ADHD though

ADHD occurs somewhere around the 40% mark in autistic people. (The reverse is not true however - there’s no data indicating that 40% of ADHDers are also autistic.)

There’s a real gap in understanding what auDHD is like and this goes all the way to research. I’m diagnosed auDHD and treated for it (so the chances of this being a misdiagnosis are extremely unlikely) and my experience of it is that the traits of both conditions sometimes mellow out the extremes but sometimes they can aggravate them or amplify them too, so it isn’t something like anxiety and depression where the anxiety tends to override the depression or vice versa, and it’s not a matter of an additional thing like having insomnia plus depression, where your mood is low and you have serious difficulties with sleep. Instead auDHD often feels like a weird blend of symptoms and traits that are often conflicting.

I’m gonna do some shameless self-promotion and link to a post I made about my own internal experience of auDHD here. This is just my own experience, it’s not diagnostic and it’s not intended to be but you might find it interesting. If a lot of it happens to resonate with you then that’s a good indication to consider if you might be auDHD yourself.

Obviously all of this is just stuff to consider, I’m not telling you how things are for you or trying to steer you in any particular direction; you know yourself better than some unqualified internet stranger ever could.

I think it’s a really common experience to approach an unfamiliar platform and to view it as a monolith. In some respects they genuinely are.

I dip in and out of tiktok but I’ve cultivated a feed that is mostly radical politics (and of that, mostly communist), along with a few other areas of interest like autism.

Where tiktok really shines is in its capacity for shorter form vlog style videos from people who wouldn’t otherwise have a platform. Likewise, response videos can be really good too.

You know when you get into a deep conversation with someone and they spend a few minutes talking about something that they’re deeply interested in or concerned about? My tiktok feed often feels a lot like that. Some communist will find an interesting excerpt from a book they’re reading and they’ll connect it to a current phenomenon or situation, or they’ll start talking about how certain things parallel or how it fits into a broader historical context.

If you refuse to participate in yet-another social media platform or you are abhorred by the dopamine slot machine design of tiktok, I fully support you in your position. But if you are interested in it, the tiktok algorithm is really quite good and if you spend maybe an hour or two training it then it will start to cough up lots of really good stuff that is rare to find elsewhere.

It’s a bit weird. It’s its own cultural bubble. Mainstream tiktok is irredeemable garbage, just like mainstream subreddits or Facebook groups or whatever else. But there’s some pretty great little niches that exist in there as well.

Hmm you might have a pdf that is intended for a clinician to use with patients.

Give this one a try - I’ve checked and it calculates your answers and gives you an interpretation of your score:

https://psychology-tools.com/test/adult-adhd-self-report-scale

That’s odd, it renders fine on my mobile browser:

Maybe try using a different browser or switching to displaying the desktop version of the site, that might fix it.

Failing that, this is just the ASRS (Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale) and it’s widely available online from lots of websites. I like the embrace autism one because it provides useful information and criticism of the ASRS so I tend to link to that site in particular but it’s going to be the same questions wherever you look.

“Alright, it’s probably not gonna be a small dosage.”

Why they always gotta roast us in the assessment like that tho? 😭