I have both autism and ADHD, and whilst it’s difficult to draw the line between the two, I do have some instances of inertia that feel more ADHD flavour than autism. I’ve also seen many of my ADHD friends struggling with something like this too, but it seems like it works differently than autistic inertia.
I think that there’s a decent chance that understanding autistic inertia will help us to understand ADHD inertia, even if they’re distinct modes
I really relate to your comment, and one of the most rage inducing experiences I’ve ever had was someone lecturing me on how I shouldn’t call myself disabled, and then they badly explained the social model of disability to me.
However, I also find neurodivergent a useful term because I think that what we understand as disability is limited by our current world view. An example that feels analogous to me is how colonialist empires dismissed the art, culture and knowledge of indigenous peoples because they projected their preconceived values onto them.
I think that there’s a lot we don’t understand about autism, and how heavily normative society is holds us back. There are things that I am great at that feel inextricably linked to my autism. That doesn’t negate all the difficulties I also experience, but the word “neurodivergent” and the conversations that have developed around it feel it carves out space where I can lean into my autistic traits in situations where they’re strengths without having to be “super-autistic”; but also I can struggle in ways that neurotypical people can’t fathom, and it isn’t viewed as “negating” my strengths.
A large part of this is because the first chunk of my adult life, I broke myself by trying to act overly neurotypical, and like many autistics, I found that masking to this degree was unsustainable. Now, I’m much closer to a balance where I can pick my battles and not force myself to be something I’m not - like having tinted glasses for the office instead of expecting myself to somehow cope with my light hypersensitivity. In many ways, it feels like a different mode of being altogether - “wellness” for me looks different to “wellness” to a neurotypical, and I’d wager that “wellness” for you and other people in this thread would look closer to my version than the neurotypical version.
That being said, I agree that the way that people talk about stuff like ADHD and autism feels icky as hell. Personally, I find it more depressing to pretend that I’m not disabled, because actually, ignorance isn’t bliss when I can’t run from my reality. Sometimes things just suck, and they’re hard, and pretending otherwise makes it harder to cope with because it’s implicitly saying “I’m lying to myself because the truth is untenable”.
I feel like it can be over used, but generally I like it, it fills a lexical niche for me. I could use non autistic, but that feels clunky. Sometimes it’s useful to talk about non autistic people’s experiences in relation to autistic people, and sometimes I want to talk about autistic experiences in relation to allistic experiences, so I may prefer a term like allistic.
A thing that feels similar to me is the word allosexual, which means not asexual. I guess I would identify as being on the ace spectrum, but not ace (I’m demisexual), so allosexual is often a useful word
I don’t feel especially well poised to give advice here, because I’m still struggling with this, but maybe that’s the point; increasingly, I think that my idea of what “coping well” means is false and unattainable, and that real progress involves a bit of self acceptance.
On that front, my advice would be that living with ADHD means learning what battles are worth fighting, and only you can figure out.
A friend of mine used to struggle with extended chunks of work of one kind, and she spent a long while trying to force herself to work with timers and stuff, but her actual productivity shot up when she gave herself a bunch of tasks to cycle between. She enjoyed breaking up work with household tasks like washing the pots, because it’s simple, and has a defined end. Amusingly, sometimes she’d work at my place when we were students, and she’d tidy up for me and later say thank you for the opportunity.
One of my issues was I kept expecting myself to remember stuff when my short term memory is trash, even by ADHD standards. I got better at training myself to write stuff down, including sometimes asking for a break in the conversation to give me a chance to write it down so I don’t forget. That was awkward at first, but it got easier, and most people were understanding - most people seemed to respond positively in fact, because it shows that you care about what’s being discussed (certainly more positive than if I’d forgotten and incorrectly given them the impression that I didn’t care)
I spent a long time trying out different apps and systems, because novelty seeking brain wanted a silver bullet to solve all the things. Sometimes I still fall into that trap, but nowadays I know that even the best todolist or calendar app in the world won’t help if I don’t use it. It’s a me problem, and integration problem. Part of what helped me there was actually evaluating where my various systems kept going wrong. Like instead of calling myself lazy for not keeping things tidier, I made actual progress by buying a bunch of bins so that there’s always one at hand. I stopped berating myself so much. Beating yourself up for not being able to do things is internalised ableism.
Medication helps a lot, but I found that there were a bunch of maladaptive coping measures I’d built up over the years that I had to unlearn once I had medication. And then when I had a period without medication, I found myself struggling more than ever. It’s a combo approach, is what I’m saying. Don’t expect yourself to function at the same level as you would if you were medicated.
What you describe reminds me a lot of 
about how untreated ADHD traps you on depression.
I don’t have time to elaborate much now, but I want to add my voice to the conversation.
I’m someone who often rants and rambles about the limitations of CBT. I think it’s overused, is part of why. I’ve had 3 or 4 different courses of CBT, largely because I haven’t been able to access any other kind of therapy. The last few years have been spent trying to get access to literally any other therapy and it’s frustrating to be told time and time again that I’m “too complex”. For me, it’s about “right tool for the job” and there definitely are jobs where CBT is an ineffectual tool.
In this analogy, “jobs” aren’t people, but particular situations and points in their life. Right now, I need basically any tool but CBT, because where I am now, I think more CBT would be actively harmful. I do feel that CBT was helpful for me, but that it has reached its limit in what it can offer me. I think the second course of CBT was probably useful, but anymore beyond that was pointless, for me. The second course was helpful because I wasn’t in a place where I could effectively engage with the stuff the first time round, it feels like rereading what was once a difficult book.
It can very much depend on the therapist you get, but I think that’s true for neurotypicals doing CBT too (which isn’t to say that it affects equally, I think a therapist who you can’t connect to is way harder to cope with as an autistic person, and probably more likely). But what I mean to say is that I think that CBT, when done well, has a lot of potential, especially as a front line treatment (it’s very accessible to people who haven’t done therapy before). There also branches such as trauma informed CBT, or eating disorder informed CBT, or indeed, neurodivergence informed CBT. I don’t know anyone who has done CBT aimed at autistic adults, but I’m not the only autistic I know who felt CBT had helped them.
I think one of the tricky parts about CBT is how accessible it is. It is, in its base form, quite versatile, and can be tailored in more structured ways, as discussed above. It’s probably useful to bring back my tool analogy here, because something that feels important is that when I talk about different tools, one valid way of looking at that is the therapy program by itself as the tool, existing separately from the therapist. In this framework, the therapist is someone who uses a particular tool to do a job, where the job is something that you’re struggling with in life. This framing is useful because it allows us to think about bad therapists as people who are using a tool incorrectly.
I imagine most trained therapists have some knowledge or experience on how to use CBT as a tool, because it’s so accessible. Some people become experts in one particular tool, and some people learn it and never use it again, but find their knowledge of that tool useful in understanding the overall landscape of what’s available.
My point is trailing away a bit, so I’ll try to sum up where I’m going with this. Some people say that CBT is an inherently harmful tool, even when used skillfully by a Good Therapist ™. I disagree with that, but I sympathise. I see the harms they point out and in my opinion, that could be improved by having therapy in general be more accessible, especially more specialised therapy yours - I think CBT works as a first step, but only if it’s not the last and only step. Some people believe that CBT is inherently harmful to autistics specifically. I think I disagree with this one, but I’m a lot more split.
Here are a couple of autism/disability specific limitations that I found: 1.) I am physically disabled in a way that makes it hard to budget energy. Sometimes I have to deal with situations where I need to do more than what my body is capable of, and if I push myself too far, I will make things much worse. I didn’t find CBT techniques very useful for situations where I would be paralysed by anxiety because I’d be having to choose between wetting the bed and attempting to get to the bathroom and hoping I don’t fall (it’s easier to change a bedsheet than to come back from the acute injuries of a fall). No-one should have to make decisions like that, but I regularly have to and it sucks. My anxiety is pretty reasonable in those situations, I can’t logic my way out of it with CBT methods. Once you get the bad brain stuff out of the way, what can remain is the fact that sometimes things just suck and have to be weathered. Excessive use of CBT thinking in these situations often led to internalised ableism, where I put too much onus on myself to do or think about things differently, when my disabilities do put some practical limitations on me.
2.) An autism related example involves how coping with change is rough. I have a particular cereal that I have had for years, it’s my old reliable and is one of my safe foods. One day, I see that it’s packaging has changed a little: nothing too major, just the shape of the box and one of the logos. This makes me anxious and I do not like it for reasons I can’t explain. My CBT trained instincts might ask about why I’m anxious - do I fear that the formula has changed? Is the new box size likely to cause issues with storage? Realistically, none of these capture the issue (the formula change thing is a valid fear, but I checked online and got confirmation that the product itself was the same). I don’t know why this makes me feel uncomfy and none of the therapists I’ve worked with have either. We hit a wall on this problem, which makes sense to me - like, as helpful as CBT has the potential to be, it can’t realistically (and doesn’t aim to) make me into a neurotypical. Maybe CBT tailored for autistics might be better, but I don’t know.
So to cap off those examples, the question was “when used by a Good Therapist ™ who understands autistic people, is CBT inherently harmful to autistics?” and my answer to that is that I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think it’s probably limited in some ways, but I don’t know if that’s unique to CBT. Most if not all therapies are likely to share the same problem, because in my eyes, the harm here stems from a normative way of looking at things.
Brief vocab lesson, “normative” roughly means “things that are considered normal and acceptable at a systemic/societal level to the extent that they’re built into the unspoken assumptions we make when perceiving the world”. The unspoken assumptions are tricky. Like when I say I want garlic bread, I mean garlic bread with cheese, because that’s the only way I have ever, or would ever have it. A friend inadvertently broke my heart by ordering the wrong thing (because I’d told them I wanted garlic bread). I was devastated, but it was an important lesson in how your unspoken assumptions can sneak up on you when you meet people who don’t share them. Normativity is how those assumptions interact on a societal level. Like if I say “imagine a couple, in love”, you probably imagine a man and a woman, which is an example of heteronormativity, the implicit belief that being straight is the default. This doesn’t mean that imagining a straight couple in this scenario is bad, it’s just a way of saying that we should be mindful of the consequences of normative thinking, especially when with responses that are automatic, or when we build stuff on top of our assumptions
In theory, being aware of this stuff could mitigate a lot of the autism related issues with CBT. I’d argue that the reason why ABA is so harmful is because normativity is baked into it. That’s part of why I believe that ABA is always harmful, no matter the therapist. In my view, “Good Therapist” and “Good at doing BA” are mutually exclusive, and I wouldn’t be comfortable getting therapy of any sort with someone who endorsed ABA.
In terms of other therapies, there’s been some research on Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) for autistics, I believe. That’s the one that’s most been recommended to me (if I could get a bloody referral, angry sounds).
This got longer than planned because apparently I’m using this comment as an excuse to procrastinate, my apologies for rambling. I can’t tell from your post whether your interest is academic in nature, or whether you’re asking this because it’s a possibility you’re considering for yourself. If the latter is the case, my answer is squarely “worth a try”. Bad therapists happen across the spectrum of different therapists, and much more common than that are therapists who aren’t a good fit for a particular patient. It can take time to find someone you click with and even then, I remember spending most of my sessions thinking “ugh, I don’t know what the point of this is, it doesn’t make a difference”. It did though, it just snuck up on me.
There’s not a shortage in stores, to my knowledge, but I directly know a large number of people struggling to make ends meet. Multiple people being made homeless due to gas and electric bills, or building their life schedules around opportunities to get a free or cheap meal because even people with jobs are feeling the pinch.
So mostly what many others elsewhere in the world are experiencing, it just feels extra grim because much of the problems can be directly attributed to the Tory government who are currently in power. They’re almost certainly going to be voted out next year, but I wonder whether it’ll be possible to repair the damage that’s been done since 2010.
Oof. A friend of a friend who was studying in Israel cried when Netanyahu was elected and I feel like I increasingly understand why
I work in science and at university, I was noticing that increasingly often, the kinds of computational work I was doing worked better on Linux. Often, there’d be software that would ostensibly run in Linux and Windows, but the Windows documentation and community would be pretty sparse.
The more I learned, the clearer it became that switching over properly to Linux was the way to go. It just provides better infrastructure. As an example, an area of science I feel passionately about is FAIR data principles, a list of guidelines on how we can make scientific data more Findable, Accessible, Interactible and Reusable. In practice, for me, this means I’ve gotten very good at using containers, which I found much easier on Linux
Regarding your first point, I think that the toxic culture around start-ups and such even incentivises people to be bad at gauging risk. Each funding round means making more outlandish promises, as investors keep expecting you to grow how fast you’re growing; do more, with less.
I have a few disabilities that mean that I’m often unable to do all the basic things a person needs. I’ve got very good at gauging risk and balancing my resources accordingly, but there have been times where things are just too stacked up against me and there’s little chance of a win outcome, but also no space for losing. I’m talking situations like being miserable from being bed bound for a day or so and needing to make it over to my computer to hang out with friends, somehow obtaining food and water en route. In a weird way, I sympathise with the CEO, because I know how desperation distorts perspective.
The worst decisions are made when I have decided to try to do the big difficult thing (food, then computer), but I realise part way through that I don’t have the capacity to do it all. The smart thing would be to adjust my goals and get food and medication, and retreat to bed. However, that outcome doesn’t feel worth the painful ordeal of leaving bed in the first place. Had I known it would’ve ended like this, I wouldn’t have attempted it, but I was rolling the dice.
Usually, my original decision to leave bed is good; I understand relative risk levels and I’m aware of the chance of failure and how to mitigate the fallout. The point of failure isn’t actually the point where the submarine explodes, or the sad cripple who pushed herself too far has to sleep on the floor because she can’t make it to her computer or her desk. The failure point is when you know that unless you alter your goal, you’re fucked.
If this CEO had made the right choices, his company probably would’ve died. He made negligent choices in building the submarine because he couldn’t afford to do it properly (and thus shouldn’t have even attempted this silly ordeal), but he had already spent millions of other people’s money, trying to fulfill impossible promises. I wonder at what point he realised his stated goals were impossible, and that he was just desperately stringing along investors hoping for a hail Mary stunt that could buy him more time. I wonder if it was always the plan for him to go on the sub, or whether his presence there was an attempt to assuage anxious ticketholders. I wonder if he had any sense to fear for his life or if his only fears were for his company.
Absolutely fuck this guy. His pointless folly has killed people. The people who bought tickets were perhaps fools too, just in a different way, but I also believe they were at least partly scammed by the CEO guy making impossible promises. Fucking rich people and their vanity projects. And yet, I feel like he was also a victim of the toxic system that made him, in a way. Ugh, I have a lot of complex feelings about this whole thing.
It’s a bit absurd.
Let’s imagine OP was trying to scam the company. The sheer gall of asking for approval on a scam would be so audacious that honestly, it wouldn’t be safe to have an employee like that working on anything of value. The level of “fuck you, I don’t care” that it would show would mean that the safest thing to do with an employee like that would be to fire them.
The guy didn’t ask the basic question of “has OP given us any reason not to trust them?” If the answer to that was “yes”, then maybe flying them out to the UK to act on the company’s behalf isn’t a great idea. And if that doesn’t seem likely, then it’s probably an employee trying to help and they should be encouraged
A few years ago, I read about how Mary Molony was an Irish Suffragette who disrupted a speech Winston Churchill was giving in Dundee by ringing a bell every time he tried to speak. She wanted him to apologise for remarks he had made about the women’s suffrage movement.
I remember when I read this, it reeked of something awesome that you find online that’s actually false (the story was shared on social media via a captioned photo with no sources), so I went digging for a proper source to check. I found some newspaper articles from 1908 and I learned that this event did happen, but also that people fucking hated Molony for this. There was a lot of “see, this is why everyone hates the Suffragettes”. (Sorry for saying this and then not sourcing)
It makes sense that people would be salty - Churchill was an asshole, but also a great orator, so I can see why one might be disappointed in missing the chance to see him speak, but I was shocked at the level of vitriol aimed at Molony and other Suffragettes from the time. Until this I hadn’t realised just how unpopular they were at the time. It’s drastically changed my perspective on protests and public perception.