#throwrocksandcuddle

I deliberately avoided it because it felt like it was setting up a super artificial “Totally normal school with kids her own age and people who love her VS academically challenging school of abusive awfulness with people who only want to exploit her for her brains” debate. Which explores none of the issues I’m actually interested in. When I checked it on Wikipedia it seems that it’s not totally normal mainstream school, but still… We’ve had the debate of “Should children be given love, friends, and the freedom to decide their own destinies OR should they be heartlessly exploited for the prestige and benefit of adjacent adults?” debate over and over, and while I’m sure people in the latter category exist, I just don’t know any.

Hm. Even with APD call center work is probably the least physical-labor-intensive work I can think of for an entry-level position, most places want you to be on a headset which tends to help with APD issues.

Most cities are hiring for receptionist and office worker jobs but those can require a surprising amount of on-your-feet time, but if you have a wheelchair or other accomodations that’s where I’d look for ADA-friendly places first.

I don’t know your particulars, but if you have the brain for a crazy schedule, long periods of isolation and the willingness to get the appropriate lisencing but Truck and Taxi drivers don’t spend much time standing.

so i have a condition (Ehlers Danlos syndrome) that causes generalized hyperalgesia/ central sensitization. I use hydrocodone about once a month for my really bad pain days where nothing else will touch it. will that kind of use still lead to a greater hyperalgesia, or is it kind of irrelevant because I already have it? thanks :)

you are my therapist hero and you make it a whole lot easier to stay in my entry level ABA job because I have some hope that someday I can be awesome like you :)

Oh my god, what a trooper. It feels like so many therapists my age have had to work shitty job after shitty job and endure all kinds of poor treatment by management, schools, and licensure boards to do the work--but there are those of us doing the important work, the work we love, in good environments, and we got there by doing the hustle through the shit. It may not be easy, but it will be worth it.

Try to stay as kind as you can be, read up as much as you can about zones of emotional regulation and focus on physiological arousal instead of gross motor movements, and try to be better than someone else doing your job who’s wholly drunk the ABA kool-aid. (And when that fails--read ASAN’s materials on filicide and caregivers gone wrong, because even on days when the milk of human kindness had run sour in me and I lost the energy to empathize, I could still remember those and hit a hard personal bedrock of, “I will not cross that moral event horizon.”)

Where I began was with people I felt very, very safe around. The kinds of friends who tried to ask questions about how I was doing and who actually said they wanted me to be a listener less and show more of myself, but didn’t pressure me. I learned to actually let them know what I was doing, so they knew this was a bad time to cut me off or redirect back to them.

Then I very slowly began to build up tolerance to the feeling of being listened to.

For me, talking about myself felt like stepping off a cliff. The moment I stopped tracking their mood and focused on my own internal experience, I felt an overwhelming sense of panic and dread. It wasn’t safe. I was risking everything. This wasn’t okay. So at the beginning, I could do about one sentence before it was too overwhelming and I clammed up again.

It helped to tell people because then they knew how to help. My friends wanted to encourage me to speak up more, and they didn’t automatically know that some kinds of totally ordinary responses came across to me as, “I hate what you’re saying and want you to shut up, right now.” So I’d ask. “Can we try talking about me for a minute? I don’t feel safe doing it, but I want to practice.”