this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2025
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Autism
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That was me with flossing. My parents and childhood dentist always TOLD me to floss, and you just stick the floss between your teeth and that's flossing. I thought it was dumb and didn't do anything to help my teeth so I never really did it. Until as an adult my dental hygienist explained in detail you need to scrape the sides of your teeth with the floss and go up/down the tooth as far as you can without hurting yourself. Then demonstrated on herself, and then asked me to do it in front of her so she could see if I was doing it right. Great lady.
So it was entirely process based and not logic based?
Yes but similarly I can only fix something after I fully understand how it works.
Is this a characteristically autistic trait?
This may come as a shock but quite essentially everyone is winging everything with a subset of never complete information.
Now i find autism makes me see the patterns more easily between usefull or counter-efficient steps and the details of actual performance-quality.
Combined with often being told “my intuitive plan” is not the correct “default intuitive way to do things” it sets you up to hyperfocus on getting all steps right with ptsd anxiety about getting them wrong.
So we try real hard and question every step to navigate towards quality/success but it takes a lot of mental energy to do so.
Things get much easier once you obtain “fuller” understanding off the concepts at play. Then you can intuitively tell what components your plan needs and what things aren’t relevant.
The way I believe most neurotypical have it is that by doing things just like everyone else they obtain the same average performance-quality and they are not criticised for the commonly shared inaccuracies.
Because they demonstrated the ability to do the task within expected norms. they perceive this as them understanding the task. And will now proceed to call you insane if they ever see you skipping step 4 and oh god why did you flip it upside down?
It's one of those things that are like shitting. Almost everyone does it, but if you do it way more often than everyone else, or it affects you so much it detracts from your everyday life in ways that it doesn't for the average person, there might be something going on.
Yes
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Truth. People who give some justification for doing things don't understand what I need. I need the actual reason. If that reason doesn't exist then the point of the action doesn't exist.
Difficulty: a sizeable proportion of neurotypical people find it condescending and insulting to have the reason for something explained to them, if it seems like something that an adult should be able to figure out for themselves.
As a consequence of this, they're also not comfortable explaining things that they consider obvious, because they feel like they're being rude themselves, and may even consider requests for such explanations to be confrontational.
Yeah I know, we suck
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I'm in the spectrum myself, I feel this. But I also have to mention that my experience has shown me that when you go down this road, you might need to argue with an asd person who doesn't get it and wants to keep arguing, and sometimes there's just no time for that. Sometimes we need to recognise when someone else is an expert and defer to their opinion instead of forcing them to be an unwilling and unpaid tutor. If they're not an expert otoh and are just an authority (boss, landlord, whatever) then argue away but recognise that unfortunately there can be consequences for arguing with authority, so be prepared and know when to back down for your own well being
It's important to realize that while autistic people might understand things and act in accordance to that more readily, we are still subject to other human biases including ego. One's ego may prevent oneself from gaining an understanding in the first place.
(I want to preface this by saying that I agree with you and am not attempting an argument - I just got on a tangent at one point. Any emotion conveyed in this post isn’t due to/directed toward you or your post, but is a function of how reflecting on the subjects at hand makes me feel.)
As a kid, I wanted to argue even more with authority figures who lacked a clear reason for having authority. An expert on a matter? That makes sense, I’d listen to them. A teacher that actually guides students and respects them? That also makes sense.
But somebody “in charge,” making decisions that seem completely arbitrary or straight-up nonsensical? That didn’t listen or care what others thought, and who demanded respect without ever returning it? We had a mutual hate for each other. The fact they were given authority pissed me off and I saw zero reason to comply with anything they demanded.
… I didn’t get along with most of my school administrators.
Most people shy away from conflict, from what I’ve seen. My fire has been dampened so many times from all different sides and now I’m a tired, 30-something-year-old that wishes she could be as fired-up as she used to be. Because now, we have fascists taking over (or attempting to) all around the world. People here on Lemmy keep insulting Americans for not “fighting back” enough, but they have no idea how bad the compliance conditioning is here.
I refuse to teach blind obedience. I’d rather see kids that question everything and get in trouble for it than ones that will just accept whatever authority tells them. It’s not the kids’ fault the world doesn’t make sense, but teaching them to just accept it as “the way it is” (as the adults in my life always said) does nothing but perpetuate this cycle.
We need more skeptics. We need more action-takers. Those that believe they just “deserve” to have authority need to be challenged, now more than ever (I picked this username for a reason.) To be clear - I say this as an autistic teacher of autistic kids. I understand the risks from both sides, and I know raising autistic kids isn’t easy. But the world doesn’t need more people who give up the good fight just because it’s hard; the world needs more people who point out hypocrisy and injustice, including children who will blithely point out that the emperor has no clothes.
My son got a really bad gum infection when he was twelve. From that moment on he brushes his teeth twice a day. We found a video online that detailed how you should brush your teeth from the 70's and he watched it often. I haven't asked but he probably still does.
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Woke up today thinking I have all the skills to make and fix e-bikes and that is likely a good leverage point to start to escape my isolation and push myself incrementally.
I was feeling really good after like 3 weeks of being able to push myself hard with new meds. Then the ideas of wtf I am going to do with myself were overwhelming. Like a person can't bottle helpless isolation for 11+ years and then just flip that switch like I'm fine now.
So yeah, a few dark days hit me. Waking up to the idea of messing with e-bikes was a win. I just need to finish my hot air rework station and set up my bedroom electronics lab properly again.
I don't really lock in though. All my best ideas and epiphanies happen at random when I'm doing other stuff. If feels like a dozen unrelated threads are always running in the back of my head and one or two might be closer to the front. When I try to force the timeline or creativity, I usually run in circles and get nowhere. Give me a few days to mull something over and I will distil the issues unlike anyone else. I think I'm just really dumb because I don't understand things like most people. Like I do see the logic and can go through the motions, but all most people appear to do is memorize bits and pieces of information. I want to fundamentally understand the subject at a useful and flexible level. I don't value theory like I do applications. I can still do theory, but only when I ground it in a useful application. I place no value on memorization independent of application. I cannot keep those things in long term memory for very long. Six months later, I forget it all. My lock is that I mull over stuff in the background for weeks at a time like I'm always working on them in bits and pieces of thought. Still to this day I question even saying that out loud. Like it seems so basal that everyone should be doing the same. It is fundamental to me. The older I get the more I question that assumption.
I'm similar. The other day, I described myself as "a creature of momentum" to explain how I work best when I have lots of different tasks or projects to cycle between — because of the background-ideas thing that you describe.
Hey, autistic people!
You pour water over your toothpaste in order to soften it so it'll turn into a liquid easier. If your toothpaste is always too solid and goopy it's because you aren't wetting it.
You're supposed to wet the toothbrush before you put the toothpaste on it. That way the toothpaste doesn't fall off.
I think toothpaste sticks better to a dry brush. If i try to squeeze the tube onto a wet brush it wet noodles to one side.
I don't wet either and brush my teeth just fine. Just to make this conversation more confusing.
Do people not have spit....?
Unless you're not the best at getting it to stick to the brush before you put it under the water, and the majority of it gets knocked into the sink when you try. If that constantly happens to you, you can wet the brush first and THEN add the toothpaste. It'll take a few seconds to mix when brushing, but you'll get the same results with less wasted toothpaste.
Too complex. I just squirt the toothpaste into my mouth.
(not really)
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This post makes me wonder if it's more than just ADHD and Bipolar depression... I can't do a job properly without knowing why I'm doing it the way they want me to do it, for example. But once I understand the inner workings of a process, I can find ways to optimize it, and thus become good at it.
What does locking in mean?
Focused, not having any trouble doing the thing or remembering to do it that way
Oh gotcha. I figured it was something like that, but didn't just want to assume. Thanks for the help
Hell yes. I've discovered this on my own last year (while having behaved like that for my entire life, but never formulated it that way until then) and it explains so much. The constant childlike "butwhys" just never stopped, in a way.
I should probably get diagnosed…
Kinda. I understand the logic behind some stuff, but I still laze around and don't feel like doing them, like exercise.
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