Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Somewhere along the way, you learned that you were too much. Maybe it was said plainly. Maybe it was communicated through sighs, through eyes that went a little flat when you started talking, through...
Read article →It is 2 AM and you have an idea. Not a half-formed impression or a vague impulse but an actual idea — the kind that arrives with internal architecture already attached, with connections to three other...
Read article →It is 3:17 AM. You have been awake for forty minutes reading about the migratory patterns of Arctic terns, a subject you had no interest in twelve hours ago, and now you know more about it than most o...
Read article →There is a category of person for whom small talk functions as a tax on all human interaction — a toll you must pay before you are allowed to get to anything real. How are you doing, fine thanks, craz...
Read article →When you have ADHD, rejection does not always look like a conflict. Sometimes it looks like a group chat where your messages get fewer responses than everyone else's. A friend group that keeps making...
Read article →In 1993, a psychologist named Damian Milton introduced a concept that has since become one of the most generative — and contested — ideas in autism research. He called it the double empathy problem, a...
Read article →There is a version of social skill development that looks a lot like memorization. You learn the script for greeting someone you have not seen in a while. You practice the rhythm of a job interview. Y...
Read article →If you have a learning disability, you have already spent years being adapted for by the world — or rather, spending enormous energy adapting yourself to a world that was not built for how you process...
Read article →Autistic burnout is not a breakdown. It is not just being very tired. It is what happens when an autistic nervous system, which has been running at a level of output and adaptation that would exhaust...
Read article →Late autism diagnosis has a quality that's distinct from late diagnosis with almost any other condition. With most medical diagnoses, you receive information about something that is wrong. With late a...
Read article →Friendship has rules. Most people learned them so early and so seamlessly that they do not know the rules exist. You mirror the other person's energy. You take turns talking without being told to. You...
Read article →There's a specific kind of whiplash that comes with an adult ADHD diagnosis. The period before the diagnosis is usually, in retrospect, full of evidence — the jobs that started brilliantly and fell ap...
Read article →If you have ADHD and you've spent time in online ADHD communities, you've probably encountered the term looping — usually in the context of something like "I've been looping on this for three hours an...
Read article →There is a concept in disability studies and neurodivergent community discourse called the neurodivergent tax — the idea that navigating a world designed for neurotypical cognition costs extra time, e...
Read article →Starting is the hardest part. This is true for most ADHD-related tasks, but it takes on a particular shape when the thing you need to start is a conversation. Not a task with clear inputs and outputs,...
Read article →There is a clock that most people carry internally, ticking away more or less reliably, giving them a felt sense of how long things take, how far away the future is, how long ago the past occurred. Pe...
Read article →Hyperfocus is one of those words that gets used a lot but rarely understood from the inside. From the outside it looks like obsession, like neglect of other responsibilities, like someone who simply c...
Read article →Rejection sensitive dysphoria is one of those experiences that is genuinely difficult to explain to someone who has not had it, because the words that exist for it are all too small. It is not being s...
Read article →AuDHD is one of those terms that the internet invented before the clinical literature caught up, which is fitting given that a lot of its users have brains that work the same way — moving faster than...
Read article →Masking is the word the neurodivergent community uses for something that doesn't have a precise clinical equivalent yet, which is itself revealing. The clinical literature calls it compensatory strate...
Read article →Social scripts are not a workaround or a crutch. They are how humans communicate — everyone uses them. The script for "how to greet someone you haven't seen in a while" and the script for "how to poli...
Read article →If you've spent any time in autistic community spaces online, you've probably seen some version of this observation: talking to an AI is easier. Not marginally easier. Profoundly easier. The reasons v...
Read article →Conversation has a sensory dimension that almost never gets acknowledged in mainstream discussions of social connection. The pitch, volume, and timbre of a voice. The ambient noise of a cafe or restau...
Read article →There is a particular kind of exhaustion that caregivers carry that doesn't show up on any vital signs chart. It is not exactly physical, though it can feel physical. It is the exhaustion of having no...
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