Yesterday, i learned about AURORA. She should not be missing here. Check out her magnificent voice and deeply emotional music.

This song, A Different Kind of Human (Youtube) (Invidious) talks about the sense of not belonging on this planet and it’s a dream about being taken home.

About Aurora herself, if she would fit any diversity categoriy is of course solely her business to not care about :-) (Youtube) (Invidious). She performs with plenty of whole-body gesturing which reminds me of Sinéad O’Connor.

In any case, i for sure would love to dance with her, yeah! (Invidious)

I try everything I can, music, animation, art, programming, even Sports yet no one understands me!

Language!
Seriously, what i found out is that (kind of) everyone “speaks a different language”. Unforunately, most people are not aware of this, so the burden is on those who do get aware, to communicate in a language that the other one understands. Autistic people tend to use and understand languages differently, in characteristic ways. More formulaic or more complex, for example – thus a difficulty arises in translating their idea, say into somewhat more culturally-associative or sequetial/one-dimensional language.

In other words, i think that i understand you! 🥲
The list of things you tried to express in, those can all be taken as different languages, all with their own complexity and levels of formulaity, suitable for communicating different things. I mean for example, that music and arts can be good for displaying emotions and impressions, among other things. Even Sports can convey a lot of practical philosophy.

So, for me it gets interesting when someone says that they are “not understood” but their list of languages they considered to convey their idea does not include verbal language. That is not a fault. Many people and by far not only ND ones don’t do well in verbal expression. Some of the most proficient exerts are very good at expressing their ideas in math, but ask them to explain all that in plain language or talk about the philosophical implications and they will fail.

Perhaps you are asking for help with coming toward a “translation”, or perhaps it is about finding a suitable way to express. Or perhaps you are asking for someone who could resonate with your way of expression; someone who is able to communicate in your way.

My first question back to/for you may be, could you explain it in words, in what ways is your use of those means of expression you mentioned different/divergent from the way others use them? – Or is it so that you “failed” in those disciplines at expressing your idea (trying to imitate rather than innovate)? (Did you ever think about it?)
There are ways to going by example also online. One place for such things could indeed be the Matrix chat.

The way in which you use a language or an art differently matters! If only few people understand you then you are doing something out of the ordinary. It might be unfitting in your social environment but it might as well be something novel.

Here is an example from me. When I play my drum then I can tell a story. You bet there is rarely a 4/4 beat in that playing, and it’s not just any drum but it’s melodic. Rarely there is someone who would inquire about the playing but rather about the drum … because the technical seems to be talked about more easily than the dramatic, idk. And rarely there is someone who could follow, as the way is intuitive; I never play the exact same thing twice.

I’d also ask you how old you are. It’s because more lifetime brings more experience and less lifetime brings less expectation. … I’m a fourty-eight year old boy who sometimes has something coming through in an odd rhythm on his very own kind of drum, and who sometimes writes multidimensionally, and who makes a distinction between “I” and “i”. And something that i am actually quite bad at but anyway – i’m coming to a conclusion that it’s better to seek the right people to communicate with, than trying to make everyone understand. Trying to explain all that in words might fill books, so it might be more easy to find someone who can understand and follow the drum.

You are using storytelling to convey a concept of a challenge, with different approaches where neither is suitable for everyone. A few easy to follow paragraphs that i enjoyed reading. You did well. (no ADD here)

One thought: as this is about serialising multi-dimensional information – did you ever think of drawing up such relations, as a mental helper scaffolding?

Someone was just bringing in an example of a situation that is difficult for them and which repeatedly upsets them. Remembering all that might make them present their upsettedness, which may be welcome for a deeper understanding and further processing toward clarity on both sides. No need to mirror that. :-)

edit: Maybe i should tell about this afterthought here; it’s a perspective that might be unknown to many here. I might still be off because of empathetic limits presented by the text-only medium, and I’m only a messenger who will be speaking an unknown language so don’t hit on me … :-)
Through the shamanic lens: This looks like an example of a “self-fulfilling prophecy”, in the way of calling in the presence of a spirit (spiritual entity) by telling the story of having encountered that entity before. So, @CarlsIII@kbin.social in its essence told a story of how they repeatedly meet a spirit which seeks to take their energy by telling them they were doing things not as expected, with the implicate impression that something would be “wrong” with them not having understood some unspoken message, while CarlsIII was just doing things the way CarlsIII would find them fitting. Others probably have read the story and could relate to it or feel with it, thus amplifying the inadvertent call. … Lo and behold, exactly such a spirit shows up. All it takes is someone who is susceptible to it and ready to serve for a demonstration. Invocations like this are common. Maybe this can help build awareness.

Such things can also be a domineering strategy.

Like other commenters, I also think that most neurodivergent people understand this very well. Their problem arises where they understand it even much further, like seeing the implications of such normalities. For example, that this must be one of the sources of so many misunderstandings between different cultures (and subcultures!). I can not just assume that everyone I meet speaks the same social language that I grew up in.

And is it not rude to assume that everyone’s mind works in the same way … or that others would camouflage in a die-cut way as someone they are not truely; is it not kind of intellectually flat to assume self-similarity, given that this is so obviously not the case – I mean divergent or not, everyone is just so engraved by their past experience that we have no true idea what mental process is going on inside another person unless we get to know them more closely.

e: or put in different words, what to do if the intangible feelings and emotions communicated by someone just don’t match their verbal message? Or worse, what to do when we cearly see someones cognitive dissonance but we are expected to somehow follow that (it’s an illness and following through would be self-denial)?

May read: The Double Empathy Problem;
more on affective vs. cognitive empathy: Lost in Translation: The Social Language Theory of Neurodivergence (part 1); (part 2)

deleted by creator

I tried to make a TLDR

Thank you!

I like to think of it in this way. They have a mathematical model of a thing which works by supposing the thing is in two states at once as long as its true state has not been determined. That just means that it is actually irrelevant what state a thing is/was in, or if the thing even exists/existed (!), as long as it didn’t interact with anything (or is being observed which implies an interaction).

Does the moon exist when you turn your back at it and close your eyes? --> It might not, and it would not make a difference if it didn’t.

I’m learning. Do you? This implies it takes time. Glad we can end this breathtaking conversation with a win-win.
I truely have no intention to beat anyone in the domineering game. I’m being snarky, tho.

Late reply but for those who read this later: careful when wanting to know what is “the norm”. It’s social ideals, mostly. (And if it were statistics, where would we draw the line and why … homosexual … disorder?) – Yet luckily, “disorder” means illness, while a non-valueing statistical out of the ordinary would rather be called “divergent”.

Relevant quote from the article:

Whilst [neurodivergent] traits were celebrated in the modernist era, they increasingly began to show up as problems in the Britain during the 1980s – meaning that something had changed in British social normativity. Interestingly, according to critical psychiatrist Sam Timimi and colleagues, this largely happened in light of the rise of the neo-liberal market system, and in particular the services economy. In particular, this economic shift began to alter the notion of the ideal male: rather than being fixed in focus and obsessive, men increasingly now had to forever shift into new roles and to constantly sell one’s “self” in order to fit in. Members of the workforce, in other words, now had to become increasingly agile, flexed, narcissistic, and hyper-social in order to succeed and be valued – and this economic drive became reflected in social normativity at all levels of society.

I shall leave my own impression from the articles i read in the past days, in the direction of de-pathologisation.

• It finally got me to know some about the “expert” criteria and method of assessment, and it’s just as i imagined. Luckily, i’m not alone in seeing that not only as clearly failing the clients and professionalism just the same, but in seeing the process of pathologising in itself as potentially harmful. The beliefs we surround ourselves become all too easily our absolute reality. I’ve been in a self-assessment process for years. That being completely disregarded just to get officialy labeled “dysfunctional”, can only be wholeheartedly rejected.
  Quote from the DSM-5 article: “All of the following should be understood as a speculative story from a dominant cultural group about a minority cultural group presented with deep bias and without any attempt to understand how that minority cultural group perceives their differences.” – Thanks.
• I’ll have to make a better distinction between “autism” and “neurodiversity”. That will serve to make peace with all those who take benefit from the dysfunctional label. It will also enable me to be in peace with the paradigm of this forum, that certainty about being autistic would require said pathologising assessment.
• That said, i can identify with how people like Janae Elisabeth describe nerodiversity in such a way that it makes me fairly confident in describing myself as neurodivergent. There may be a great variability in traits and their strenghts from person to person, and i might fall on the lower end. One guy with an “Asperger’s” diagnosis once told me that he’d think i was “more autistic than he is”. Well, who cares.
• … But i care! I’m still not sure what to call my mental states which i formerly called “autistic”. I learned that it might just be something which also appears in autism – an active form of shutdown. I can actually use such a state to shut out all external influence, so that i can concentrate on one thing without my mind getting into useless chatter because of the distractions from whatever spirit enters my field. – It is otoh certainly a trauma avoidance reaction, and it’s difficult to get out of it.

I’d like to see more people acting like belonging to a real community. That is, mutual support/defense when we see a need, or jumping into an argument if we see there might be a misunderstanding we can help to clear. Real bad actors may be rare but the general misunderstanding is a frequent companion. Especially when something is upsetting, the feeling of being left alone with it can potentially draw energy for days to come.

An educating excerpt from an article i’m just reading:

There is an important distinction between arguing to “win” and dialogue to learn from each other. For nurturing the mutual trust needed for de-powered collaboration at human scale, it is helpful to distinguish five basic categories of beliefs:

1. Beliefs based on scientific theories backed by empirical evidence that we are intimately familiar with. Only a small minority of our beliefs fall into this category.
2. Beliefs based on scientific theories backed by empirical evidence that we are not intimately familiar with. If we are educated, a sizeable minority of our beliefs fall into this category.
3. Beliefs based on personal experiences and observations. For those who identify as Autistic, a significant number of beliefs held fall into this category.
4. Beliefs that represent explicit social agreements between specific people regarding communication and collaboration. For those who identify as Autistic, a significant number of beliefs held fall into this category, especially agreements with family, friends, and colleagues.
5. Beliefs based on what we have been encouraged to believe by parents, teachers, and friends, … and politicians and advertisers, etc. For those who do not identify as Autistic, the majority of beliefs held fall into this category.

All categories of beliefs are associated with some level of uncertainty regarding the validity and applicability to a specific context at hand. When people argue to “win”, they mostly rely on beliefs in category 5 (opinions). Such arguments are about dominance, they are not open and honest dialogues.

(Healing from Autistic Trauma by Jorn Bettin)
… So, next time someone tells us that all “opinions” ought to be valued the same … ;-)

But why adapt to it in such a way? Isn’t it fucking rude to force someone to lie about their emotional state while remaining ignorant about how they are truely doing? I started to try and find short tacky answers also for the less favourable states, at leaast with people i meet regularly: “… somewhat difficult day”, “Oh, I’m exhausted” … “but I see/hope that you are doing well? / but you look tired, too?” – That might be a surprisingly easy attempt to a little non-smalltalk conversation, if they have the time.

Feels nice 🙂
… one more thought … if there are many who complain about it, the ones who are happy about it should also raise their opinions.

Interesting, what does it mean … do they just turn off the speakers or are people asked to be quiet, too?

I think that heavy moderation (moderators stepping in with warnings, locks, bans) should be a last resort. I wish for more soft moderation in that the regular subscribers could a job to really act as a kind of community they claim to be have been falsely labeled. Most such ill-informed opinions could be countered by pointing to previously made posts which contain some relevant links, for example.

You are correct that downvoting is kind of pointless.
On the other hand, there has been a bunch of accounts attending this forum lately which appear to act in bad faith (e.g. pathologising and not being interested in the ND point of view, stirring up emotions, sealioning). Interacting with such people will likely lead to a fruitless discussion that just draws energy. These people could look up the non-pathologising resources which were posted already if they were interested.

We probably should be aware that there are indeed people who are really scared of any changes to their pathologic-normative competitive model of society. Scared so much that they will get to aggressive efforts to counteract any healing efforts. It probably boils down to the question, “what to do with cognitive dissonance?”

I’m now inclined to not argue/compete but just check someone’s sincerety by asking like, “what is your function in society and what would perhaps be your natural function according to your set of traits, and how can this serve a cure and sustainable future for human civilisation?” (thanks @BackOnMyBS@lemmy.world for originally posting this link)

Re-posting and amending this with my other account, as this is supposed to be the more lucid one.
… And yeah, i am aware that the OP account we are responding to has to date only made this single comment in this forum.

fwiw, here is an essay that speaks about exactly this same thing but it does take some more words and referances to get a message against pathologising across. It’s a whole series of essays.
I agree 100% with it, would just have chosen a somewhat different language.

post in this forum: https://lemmy.world/post/4802441
direct link to the essay: Autistic people – The cultural immune system of human societies
if you like that one, I suggest to continue with this one, as it plays well into the context here (at least that’s what I read next): Autistic people are not for sale

I think I never claimed “I am autistic”. I’m just trying to explain (that’s not an opinion but it’s trying to clarify indisputable things), that i’m obviously my own authority in seeing that my human being here has an above-average share of neurodivergent traits. I make a distinction between ND and autism, btw. If that would be assessed “autistic”, I don’t know (but it would be interesting anyway). The more I’m around in places like this the more relatable stuff pops up, and having it all labeled a disability is devastating. There are traits that rather handicap me within my society (but wouldn’t elsewhere), and there are certainly abilities that have me stand out. Having strangers who know nothing about how i live and about my path in life want me to get labeled a “disorder” is ridiculous at best and offending actually.

The general vibe of this comment section smacks a lot of hexbearian-style brigading, sorry if you’re not part of such a thing.