⛧ First Church of Hypocrisy, Blasphemy, and Self-Righteousness ⛧

About the new Lord of the Rings prequel: I'm almost certain I'm not going to watch it. Maybe it'll be good, maybe not. I don't know and I don't care. I liked the books, read them in the 90's when I was in high school, but I haven't read them again since. I liked the movies, saw them once but haven't seen them again. That's how I am with most things. I watch it once, and even if I like it I don't watch it again. There are a few exceptions like some TV series (Avatar, Legend of Korra, FMA: Brotherhood, Rick and Morty, a few others) but most of the stories I experience I simply experience, like, and move on.

I haven't seen the Hobbit movies. I tried reading the book and hated it so much I couldn't get past the second chapter. It reminded me too much of that Tom Bombadil BS. (That scene nearly made me ragequit the series.) I have no intention of seeing the Hobbit movies because I've long since gotten a summary of the story, and it didn't sound at all impressive. Then too, they stretched a story that should have been a 60 minute movie into three movies, which is never a good sign.

I like LOTR. It's a good story. The movie produces good memes. But it's not so good a story that I want to watch a prequel of it. I will not be contributing to the over-milking of this particular cash cow. No judgment to those who want to watch it, nor to those who watched the Hobbit movies. It's nothing more or less than my opinion: LOTR was good, and I like the memes and the discussions about the series, but I literally do not care at all about the prequel series, just like I had (and continue to have) no interest in the Hobbit movies.

So there was this Boomer meme where they were like "Before GPS, we had to ask directions." This was my response:

Yes, and before lighters, you had to rub two sticks together, or hit a piece of flint against some metal. Asking directions has always been a total PITA. I dunno about the rest of you, but I can never decipher anyone else's directions because I can't even see the road names usually, I have no idea which way is north etc, I have no idea how to measure a mile, blocks are all different sizes in all the cities I've been in, and the things I notice as landmarks and the things other people count as landmarks are very different. I just don't view the world the same way most people do, I guess.

I also suck at GIVING directions, for many of the same reasons. If giving directions to someone like myself, I would measure distance in walking time, point out landmarks like "the tree that looks like it's judging everyone who walks by it," use only right/left/forward/back instead of the compass directions, say things like "turn left onto the street where there's a purple house a couple houses down, walk five minutes, then turn left again at the flower mural on the street." I end up spending so much time trying to convert my system to something they can understand that they usually give up or someone else steps in. And gods forbid I need to give directions to someone in a car.

When someone on my feed is excited about their kid getting some paper 'award' thing, it can be difficult for me to muster any kind of enthusiasm because some of the things schools "reward" kids with are just kind of... meh. Like attendance and citizenship. I was an absolutely wretched student, for reasons that boil down to me being autistic and ADHD, and yet I would always get attendance awards because my parents wouldn't let me avoid school despite it being Hell for me on basically every level, unless I was genuinely too sick to attend. And the worst part was, since I was constantly sick with colds (like seriously, it never let up) I technically was always too sick for school. I was 100% too sick to have gone to work if I'd been that sick as an adult. Yet I was still forced to go anyway. It's a wonder all the other kids didn't get sick from me, too.

And attendance awards were basically just, to me, pieces of paper saying "C o n g r a t s on not being too sick for school this quarter, according to us adults who don't have enough sense to fill a thimble! You're being given this useless award for being forced to go somewhere you're constantly being bullied, somewhere where there are too many people in one place, where it's such a sensory nightmare and nightmare in general that you have to dissociate and live in your own imaginary world cut off from reality just to get through the day! A place that can't even deliver on the promise of being able to teach you!" (Seriously, I learned more from a single week of PBS than I learned in five YEARS of school.)

Citizenship awards were even more pointless than attendance awards, in my experience. On the surface of it, you'd think this would be a good award. Sounds like something you get for helping old ladies cross the street, picking up litter in the neighborhood, or feeding homeless people. But no. At least in the schools I went to, they were code for "you're well behaved." I kept getting them just for being a quiet kid who wasn't a dick to other people and in fact barely socialized with anyone because socializing for me is already exhausting, socializing with people I don't like is even more exhausting and isn't even rewarding to compensate for the exhaustion, and socializing with people I don't like while immersed in the ND equivalent of WW1 trench warfare every weekday was just one more thing chipping away at my energy and sanity.

And what kind of reward is a piece of paper anyway? At least stickers were cool and pretty and could be stuck to fun places.

So yeah, really hard for me to muster even a semblance of enthusiasm for people when they post about these stupid paper awards that schools give to kids. Especially when the award in question isn't one I'm familiar with, and/or has a nebulous description. Even if I want to be supportive, I can't help thinking "So is this something they *should* celebrate, like 'you've made real progress learning math,' or is it something pointless and stupid like attendance or citizenship?"

Oh yeah and even before the pandemic I've always thought it stupid that we basically send our walking petri dishes to spend time around hundreds of other walking petri dishes just so they can try and fail to learn from a bunch of people who suck massively at teaching. Instead of doing that, we should just let neighborhood kids exist together in an environment where they're learning the natural way kids do, with a few adults around to supervise and help the kids find the answers to their questions, rather than trying to program them like robots on an assembly line.

(This is in no way endorsing one method over another. Just an observation of differences. Especially since there are some foods that just should not touch, ever. It all depends on the foods.)

Other autistics: "These foods must not EVER touch each other!"
Me: "These vegetables are bland as heck. Gonna grab a glob of mashed taters and gravy and dunk it on the veggies to pick them up so the bland is overpowered by the taters and gravy. Then I'll do something similar to the Salisbury steak and potatoes, but not because the meat tastes bad. Just because I feel like it."

Other autistics: "I must eat the same thing for every single meal!"
Me: "I can eat the same thing for most meals, and I enjoy doing so; but I have to give them slight variations, and I have to have at least one meal per day that's something else or I'll get tired of the samefood to the point where I can't eat it at all for several months or even years. This is probably also a form of taking control / self defiance, because if I just eat the same exact thing all the time, I get angry at my past self for thinking this was a good idea."

Other autistics: "I must take the ice from the tray in this specific pattern: from the back to the front, left side to right side."
Me: "I must take the ice from the tray in the most arbitrary way possible, because occasionally doing things chaotically is a stim for me, and an act of defiance against my own usual tendency towards persnicketyness, which for some reason I derive a small amount of joy from doing."
Also me: "I must eat this sandwich in a specific pattern: right corner first, making sure part of the bite goes under the point at which the bread's top crust touches the side crust; then left corner, done in the same way; then the right side again, then the left, until there is a point in the middle; then eat the middle. Repeat until there's not enough sandwich to do so, then revert to chaos."
Also also me: "This is a TUNA SALAD (or chicken salad or egg salad) sandwich, and so I must first remove the crusts from the bread. Eat the sandwich from then as above, until all that's left is crust. Then fold crusts, spoon tuna salad onto the crusts, and eat the result. Repeat until all crusts have been devoured."

I live in this weird dichotomy in talks about family. Like, my first 9 years of life were pretty good, apart from being bullied at school for being weird (read: autistic, non-binary trans without knowing it until my teenage years, and bisexual). In those years, home was my one safe space. My parents were great. My only complaint about them during that time was them laughing in the face of the doctor who diagnosed me with ADD. In the 80's. You know how fucked up you had to be to be diagnosed with ADD in the 80's? But no, "ThERe's NotHinG wrOng With thEm, tHEY'rE jUsT cREaTivE!" Gee thanks, mom and dad. I might have been a functional human being if you'd taken that doctor seriously.

And then my sister was born, and everything about her turned our lives upside down and inside out, and then did some M. C. Escher shit to it.

So despite pretty good early years, my present reality concerning my family is this: I don't talk to any of them anymore, and it's so bad I'm not even convinced I love any of them anymore. Seriously. The love I once felt for them... when I go looking for it, I get a 404 error. Despite all my parents' many flaws, they are at least both capable of unconditional love, and still love me and my sister despite everything.

But me? My love is completely conditional. I won't just stop loving someone on a mere whim, though. I tried for a couple decades to maintain a relationship with them despite everything, before I finally gave up. But once I give up on someone, that's it. Any good feelings I had for them turn to ashes and even the positive memories taste the way diarrhea smells.

Anyway, reasons for this: My mom is an anti-masker (despite being a Democrat) whom I had to block entirely since it was the only way to get her to shut up about it, my dad is an anti-LGBT bigot,(1) and my sister is a huge transphobe. But then, my sister was a screaming demon child from Hell, the kind of child you rent out to couples thinking about having kids to make them decide to immediately sterilize themselves to prevent the possibility, whose hours-long screaming tantrums triggered me to have autistic meltdowns and also she’s literally (not figuratively) the reason my parents got divorced, so to Hell with her anyway. She's the main reason I left Iowa. But by then I was having enough issues with my parents that I didn't mind moving hundreds of miles away from them, either.

We had myriad other issues before that, my mom and I, like me pointing out that my sister is a lazy parasite living off Mom’s money while refusing to even look for a job or even help around the house, in addition to her being unable to take care of her pets properly. My sister’s guinea pigs smell of piss constantly (or smelled past tense; I doubt they lasted long under her “care”), and she refused to take her stupid dog to the vet despite it having an obvious, disgusting, dripping infection on its dick (like, “its dick is bound to fall off at any moment” level infection.)

The reason she turned out this way? Well once my sister got started crying about something, nothing would stop her short of getting her way. Waiting her out was a pointless waste of time. She's probably autistic as well, but where I was the "unusually quiet autistic child" type, she was the "screaming demonic changeling baby" variety, except they weren't meltdowns she was having, they were actual tantrums. (She had some meltdowns too; I could tell the difference.) If you think cats are stubborn, well, no. Cats are pushovers compared to my sister. Mom would try to get away from it by locking herself in her room until it was over, but she'd always eventually break and give my sister what she wanted. Dad had more patience and stubbornness, and would get angry at Mom for caving in like that, but I totally get it. If I hadn't agreed with Dad on that issue, I might have done the same as Mom. Instead, my own stress and anger would pressure cook inside my brain while I hid in my room, and then it would eventually explode, and I'd storm out of my room and scream and throw stuff around the room, and then it would end when I would hit my sister and turn her tantrum into a meltdown.

Every time that would happen, a switch would flip in my brain. Or rather, one of the others was responsible for the hiding part, and then I - Alex Antonin - would take over for the screaming and breaking things part, and finally the single hit that would flip Fay or Tempest back into control again. They were horrified by my actions. But can you really blame me? Literally nothing would shut her the fuck up apart from giving into her demands. If she'd been my kid, I would have given her up for adoption.

And she would do that shit pretty much every other day. Looking back on it, it's a wonder I never got driven insane enough to drown her in the tub. Looking back on it, with how bad she eventually got, I think I would have been doing my parents a favor if I'd done that. They were too tied down by their unconditional love to give her away, or maybe they considered it and decided it would be too cruel to whoever had to deal with her in their place.

I am not fucking around with how bad she was, how bad she is even now. I even wrote a short story about a changeling baby driving its family so insane that his older sister, at the age of 7, tries to drown him in a tub. Of course, it doesn't work, but only because its actual parent -- a powerful malevolent faery -- shows up to save it, and magically binds any of them from trying to kill it. Inspired partly by the old changeling baby stories, partly by the cuckoos from author Seanan McGuire, partly from (gestures at the rest of the post above), and partly by the stories of black-eyed children.

Seriously, my sister could have been used to torture people at Gitmo. I sometimes fantasize about going back in time and giving Mom a tea made of herbs that cause abortions before my sister could be born, and the much happier life my past self would get as a result as time-traveler me fades away. And about how much better people my parents would be if they hadn't had their own lives ruined by that little shit.

~

Oh, and let's not forget that my half-sister -- who I never even met til I was in my teens (and haven’t seen or spoken with her since) -- is even worse. She's someone so awful that if she caught fire, I’d hand her a full can of gasoline. Even my dad doesn’t like her. Literally the only thing I like about her at all is the fact she's a lesbian. I'll give my dad credit; despite his homophobia, he tried to ignore that about her and tried to establish at least a civil parent/child relationship with her. But her life was even worse than mine. Like, monumentally worse.

Dad was dating her mom when her mom got pregnant, and he wanted to stay and marry her, but her parents hated him for no good reason. She had gotten raped at some point; not sure when, but they were certain Dad was the father of this child, so either years prior to that, or some point during the pregnancy, genuinely have no idea which is worse. Either way, they told Dad to fuck off and forced her to marry her rapist instead. Understandably, stuck married to a rapist who wasn't even the father of her kid, she eventually committed suicide. The rapist either lost custody, died, or fucked off for parts unknown, but my half-sister ended up with her grandparents. Given the fact they forced their daughter to marry a rapist who wasn't even the father of her kid, you can guess what kind of people they were. Except you'd probably be giving them too much credit. I don't know how bad they were, but I'm guessing at least "Flowers in the Attic" but not quite "A Child Called It." I'm pretty sure my half sister developed Stockholm syndrome as a result, and she definetely blamed Dad for "leaving" despite him being so vehemently rejected by her grandparents that I'm surprised they didn't file a restraining order, just because her brain was so fucked up that she thought her abusers were capable of telling the truth about anything.

It's been too long to go into any more detail than that about her, but let's just say that my gift for reading people's hearts got an immediate Red Alert upon first meeting her. This was at a time when I didn't pay much attention to those alerts, not knowing consciously I had the ability to psychically see someone's character until years after moving to Portland. But the more she talked, the more I started taking that Red Alert seriously. I don't know what all was wrong with her, but given she seemed to believe her abusers about Dad, and didn't seem to understand quite how horrible they were (while knowing enough to know that life with our family would have been much better), I'd say she probably absorbed a lot of her grandparents' personalities.

I didn't figure out how bad she was until after years of back and forth letters between her and dad, finally ending in him getting to the point where he gave up and stopped writing back. I don't, again, remember a lot of details from the letters, but with every one of them my estimation of her sunk more and more until it went to the bottom of the Marianas trench and started tunneling down into the mantle.

Really glad he didn't get to marry her mom, though. Apart from the fact that I likely wouldn't exist if he had, there's the fact that if I did somehow exist anyway from their union, I would have had that for grandparents. That, and if those were her parents, I have to wonder how she got out of her childhood sane enough for Dad to want to marry her (but he was also abused as a kid, so that might have something to do with it.)

But my mom and dad did hear about her mom's suicide and the rapist dude being gone, somehow; they would have taken her into our house if the grandparents had also been dead, or had seen the error of their ways. I could have had an older sister living with us. But that didn't happen. Dad probably could have sued for custody, given it was his child (and I guarantee you, I saw his traits in her face and frame; she is for sure his kid), but we were poor and the grandparents weren't the type of person anyone sane would want to tangle with.

(Sigh) I hate humans.

1 = I do find it hilarious that this man who is such an anti-LGBT dingleberry fathered a lesbian with one woman and a non-binary bisexual with another.

On an autism community on FB, someone was discussing the tendency of autistic people to be more sensitive to rejection. This was my response:

I think the biggest reason is the fact of not knowing what we said or did to warrant being rejected. Could explain why I developed such an abrasive and divisive personality, cussing like a sailor and generally not having much of a filter. At least that way when I get rejected, I know exactly why I got rejected (because people can't handle my awesomeness) and I know the friends I have that do stick around are true blue, because if they can tolerate me when I am the way I am, it means they're vibing with me.

Well, that and the fact that I spent my formative childhood years being tortured by my demon-spawn little sister's hours-long crying jags because she's a little demonic piece of garbage. Kinda hard to turn out normal when you have to deal with bullies at school and a banshee you can't kill or banish at home.

I posted this to Tumblr earlier, in response to one of those posts showing up in my recent activity:

Hey so I just want to say I used to be a massive exclusionist asshole about asexual people (specifically “aro/ace hetero” people) like, a couple years ago on Tumblr. I honestly have no idea what the hell any of that was about, how it got started, or why it was just that subset of aces and no other. No seriously, I don’t know how I got started on that particular bullshit. It went from not being a thing at all, to being A Huge Fucking Thing, and I have no idea why. All I know is once I was on that bullshit, I was like, addicted to it or something. Fuck if I know what was going on. It’s super fucking cringey now to look back on those posts.

I won’t lie and say I’m not still an asshole about some things, because I am. I’ve been just… so angry all my life. Everything sucks, everything hurts me emotionally, and I lash out. I’m trying to improve. One way I’m trying to improve is staying away from Tumblr as much as possible. It’s a toxic place for me, and that just makes this shitty cycle of increasing toxicity.

And part of why I was keeping it up so long, I think, was dealing with a really shitty long-term situation I’ve since gotten out of. Now I’m on my own and I’ve been mellowing out a lot since then. Of course Life still gets to me, still hurts, still causes anger that builds up and comes out in toxic ways.

But I was aiming that rage at entirely undeserved targets, with that whole exclusionism thing I was on. It was hurtful to a lot of people, for absolutely no good reason. If I could undo it all, I would.

So yeah. For whatever it’s worth, there’s my apology, and my promise to be better. Feel free to point exclusionist bigots at me as an example of someone who gave up that bullshit, if you want to. But I totally get it if you don’t want to.

I find it very amusing that you think autistic people are noisy, when I’m autistic and yet offline I am very quiet and I personally find neurotypicals and other allistic (“normal”) people to be irritatingly loud all the blessed time.

Seriously, neurotypicals/allistics:

1. Apparently love pointless conversations. Seem to be so much in need of hearing their own voice or the voices of others that they will engage literally anyone in pointless “small talk” when there’s been silence for more than about a minute, regardless of how obvious it is that the person they’re trying to talk to doesn’t want to socialize.

Aside from my bafflement at why anyone would want to socialize with a complete stranger in the first place, the fact is this “small talk” has no redeeming qualities whatsoever and is just so much noise pollution in my opinion. (“What’s the weather like?” Why don’t you look out a window? “How bout them Broncos?” Sports are some of the most pointless human activities on the planet, utter wastes of time, money, resources, and effort; talk about something interesting why don’t you?)

And the fact that I can be reading a book with headphones and dark sunglasses on and still get accosted by NTs with their incessant need to pollute the air with small talk just makes me wonder why you think it’s us being noisy.

2. Apparently love music to fill every single moment when they’re out in public place like grocery stores. This has always bothered me. Ideally, I would go grocery shopping in complete silence, it would be perfect. Maybe the occasional understandable announcement over the loudspeakers, but it drives me mad how there’s almost nowhere you can go in public these days without the incessant noise of music or TVs or talk radio everywhere. What is with NTs and their love of noise?

3. Apparently love noisy cars. Pretty sure if autistic people were the norm, that cars would either all be quiet electric cars by now, or there’d be soundproofing put around car engines because honestly the number of autistic people I’ve met who, like myself, cannot tolerate traffic noise, is quite high.

And I know for a fact that nobody autistic would ever have invented noisy motorcycles. Honestly, I don’t understand how anyone can tolerate riding such horrible noisy things, I can barely stand to be 10 blocks away from the blessed things. Even at that distance I have to cover my ears!

4. Apparently love talking on the phone all the time. The best thing to be invented, IMHO, is electronic text-based communication. Me and my friends do talk with one another on occasion, but usually we communicate via texts, emails, or instant messaging, even when we’re in the same room, and I adore it! I get so angry and frustrated whenever I’m forced outside, all the people on the bus talking so loudly I have to put sound-blocking headsets on to hear myself think.

Or worse, talking on the bloody phone in public! If it wasn’t for the fact that the voice part of the phone is sometimes necessary, I would just get a text-messaging-only phone. Fully 99% of my cell phone communication is text messages. More often than not, people’s voices just grate on my nerves.

5. Apparently love talking so much they’ll engage fellow employees in pointless conversations at work. It has always been so extremely frustrating for me trying to tolerate NT/allistic-designed workplaces in the first place, without having to also tolerate forced conversations with people I neither know nor care to know prattling on filling the air with conversational noise pollution. It always made working so much harder to do because it messes with my concentration and the sheer level of irritation it fills me with is emotionally draining. An 8 hour shift on my own in a job that didn’t have any required social aspect to it (like manufacturing jobs) would fly by, but put other people in the area with me and they would insist on talking just to talk, which would make an 8 hour shift feel more like a 16 hour shift.

6. Apparently love to talk with their neighbors for some reason. Something else I’ve never understood. I have never gotten to know my neighbors, and neither have my parents. I’ve lived in this apartment building for several years now, and I know the names of exactly two people out of the dozen or so people who live here (not counting my roommate), and both of those were already friends with me before I lived here. I don’t know the names of anyone else in this place, I don’t even remember most of their faces, and yet so many of them seem to think I ought to know their names and faces by now. I actually even had a conversation the other day where one of the people whose faces I know asked me if I knew her name, and I had to admit that I didn’t.

I cannot stand to socialize with someone just because they’re close at hand. Most NTs/allistics I’ve met in my life are so supremely boring that having any conversation with them that is longer than 30 seconds makes me want to scream. Honestly, I completely ignore most allistics, especially neighbors, and in my mind I designate them NPCs (Non-Player Characters), except that they’re nowhere near that interesting or important in my opinion.

The two people whose names and faces I know in this place? Yeah, one of them is autistic and I’m pretty sure the other one isn’t NT either, but she and I have been friends for over a decade now, so I know she’s interesting.

7. Apparently love forcing children to socialize with people they hate in school. Two words: group projects. UGH! It was bad enough when they assigned me to people who were just your standard Boring Normal, but on several occasions they put me in groups with people who were bullying me, and were thus The Enemy. Kids should not have to be subjected to that kind of torture, and neither should adults in the workplace.

Of course, the entire school system is a nightmare for people like me to begin with. Forced socialization, nothing is ever done about bullying, rampant ableism, and there’s boring and stupid teachers who don’t even properly know their subjects to the point that it was a regular occurrence for me as early as about fourth or fifth grade for me to know more about some subjects than the teachers did. And how the heck does anyone manage to learn anything when you’re too busy being bored to tears?

Honestly, there’s a reason play is how animals including humans learn things. Sitting in neat little rows facing the front, being quiet, and listening to a lecture is something that is universally boring even into adulthood, and is anathema to learning. That kind of thing is why I frequently tell people that school is where learning goes to die. Seriously. A friend of mine goes to an elementary school during the school year to read to the kids there, and I told her I thought I knew why she went there. What I said was “You go there and read to them because for those kids, it’s the one bright spot in a day full of boredom and soul-crushing authoritarianism.” She did not disagree. But I digress.

But yes, forcing kids to socialize with people they don’t want to socialize with is idiotic cruelty. Especially when some of those people may be bullies.

Meanwhile, I haven’t yet met a single autistic person who was noisy like NTs/allistics are. Sure, Lily laughs loudly at times, but I’m usually laughing with her when she does. My fellow autistic friends and I, our social get-togethers are basically just hanging out in the same room doing our own thing, often all of us on our computers, occasionally sending each other interesting links or pictures. Even my roommate, who is an extroverted autistic girl who talks entirely too much for my liking, still knows how to do the “hanging out silently, sending each other interesting stuff” thing and manages it most of the time.
So yeah, when you ask why autistic people are noisy, I have no blessed idea what you’re talking about, because I’ve never in 34 years of life met a noisy autistic person before. Whereas at least 80% of NTs/allistics are noisy all the blessed time!

~ ~ ~

The above was part of my attempt to make my Quora answers more in line with that obnoxious "be nice, be a sniveling dick-weasel respectful" policy of theirs. Whadda ya think? Original question can be found here (link).

I want to talk about rules that make perfect sense until someone starts putting in weird exceptions. Specifically, the rule that says you use "A" before a consonant (like "A witch" or "A donkey") and "An" before a vowel, like "an afternoon" or "an obstacle."

That rule makes perfect sense as it is, and is why I always get so angry at stuff like "an historical document." H is a consonant in that word, so it should be "A historical document." Having “An” before “Hour” makes sense because the H in Hour is silent, but if the word has a consonant H, it should be "A" not "An." It always fills me with rage when people do it the wrong way.

And yes, I know "an historic" is the official "correct" way to say it, but it's a bloody stupid exception to an otherwise sensible rule and so it may be correct but it's still Wrong.

When I was a kid, my parents knew something was different about me, so they had me tested. AFAIK, the doctor only suggested ADD, and not autism/asperger's, probably because even back in the 80's it wasn't a well known diagnosis. My parents rejected the ADD diagnosis because of my ability to hyper-focus on things that interested me, and for a long time I agreed with their assessment once I was old enough to be told about this. I eventually figured that the doc hadn't a clue what he was doing, and worked out for myself that I was an aspie. And I know I am, I did get an official diagnosis for that eventually.

However, I recently found out from someone with ADHD that people with ADHD are capable, sometimes, of hyper-focus. And I figure if people with ADHD can hyper-focus, so can people with ADD, and it's possible I have both ADD and autism, and the two can thus comorbid with one another.

Further evidence: I know I'm somewhere on that spectrum. For a while I thought I might have Sluggish Cognitive Tempo (SCT), which could theoretically also be called Attention Deficit Hypo-activity Disorder, if that weren't the same letters as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I thought it because, among other things, I react to stimulants much like ADD/ADHD people do, in that stimulants often act as depressants for me. Well, caffeine does at least, up to a point. Past that point, I get jittery, a bit like a mild to moderate panic attack. I figured that out when I drank some Starbuck's coffee a couple times. So I usually drink decaf or herbal tea, now.

And that's still possible that I have SCT. But now I know ADD might be a possibility, too. And I don't offhand recall the details of SCT beyond the fact that my reflexes tend to be slow most of the time. (When I'm in the right frame of mind, they get faster.)

Possibly further complicating things, I also have anxiety.

I guess the reason I'm posting this here is I'm wondering if others have ADD in addition to autism, especially if you also have anxiety. And I'd also like to hear from anyone who has autism mixed with Sluggish Cognitive Tempoo. It would be helpful to compare myself to others if I can, to help sort out which of these things I'm most likely to have.