DillyDaily

Huh? How else would you open the door?

Edit: although this photo is definitely the interior of a front door.

Yeah, seems like an exciting way to kill myself. Better than my current life plans so why not? No one said I had to survive in the past, just visit.

Accessibility.

We will never get rid of the analogue clocks from our school, we're an adult education and alternative model highschool qualifications centre.

We primarily teach adults with no to low English, adults and teens with disabilities, and adults and teens refered via corrections services.

There is a significant level of illiteracy within numeracy, and for some of our students, it's not a failing of the education system, it's just a fact of life given their specific circumstances (eg, acquired brain injuries are common among our students)

Some students can learn to tell time on an analogue clock even if they didn't know before.

But even my students who will never in their life be able to fully and independently remember and recall their numbers can tell the time with an analogue clock.

I tell my students "we will take lunch at 12pm, so if you look at the clock and the arms look like this /imitates a clock/ we will go to lunch"

And now I avoid 40 questions of "when's lunch?" because you don't need to tell time to see time with an analogue clock, they can physically watch the hands move, getting closer to the shape they recognise as lunch time.

And my other students can just read the time, from the clock, and not feel infantalised by having a disability friendly task clock like they've done at other centres I work at - they've had a digital clock for students who can tell time, and a task clock as the accessible clock. But a well designed face on an analogue clock can do both.

I myself have time blindness due to a neurological/CRD issue, so analogue clocks, and analogue timers are an accessibility tool for me as well, as the teacher.

Yeah, boomers will just brute force their way through repeated "wrong password" attempts and inevitably make a new account every time and their take away from the experience is that "new fangled technology is so convoluted and never works"

Meanwhile the millennial experience is to have zero issues actually using the product because we're technologically competent, we're just going to complain the whole time that's it's taking unnecessary data, or find weird ad hoc ways to make burner accounts.

I will lecture my dad for having 14 different email accounts and he will retort with "you also have more than 10!"

Yes old man, and I use all 10 and know exactly how they differ and what each is used for. You think you have one account when you actually have 14, they all share one password which Is probably my name written backwards, and you're sending mail to your old account address then getting mad when you can't find it in the inbox of your new account, and you still refer to all mail platforms as "Windows mail" even though you've exclusively accessed your yahoo mail via the browser for the last 5 years, and have owned a Mac for 10 years... We are not the same.

When I was 8, my 4 year old brother, 40 year old father, and 35 year old uncle whom I lived with all went to get screened for autism after my brother's pre-school recommended it.

3/4 of us walked out with autism diagnoses.

I was given the official psychiatric assessment that I had "learned and developed autistic traits and mannerisms due to growing up in a household with no neurotypical influence" and the advice was that I would grow out of it once I made enough "normal" friends at school.

My brother started occupational therapy and other programs, and at each one, the practitioner would recommend to my dad that I join too to "help her brother feel safe and comfortable" and I would litteraly participate in the Autism therapy programs with my autistic brother.

Over my years at school, I picked up official diagnoses for dyscalculia and dyspraxia and that explained a few of the struggles I was having. The autism OT I was already doing covered support for my learning disabilities so nothing except the paperwork changed.

And sure enough, I made neurotypical friends at school, and a lot of the autistic-like traits I exhibited as a kid were no longer apparent in my behaviour.

I had a lot of mental health issues as a teenager and young adult. But what millennial isn't depressed and anxious? I was growing up with 3 autistic men as a teenage girl, I rationalised that my dysfunctional emotional state was justified by my life circumstances. I was a dramatic teen.

Hearing and visual impairment, and other physical health issues with muscle tone, and struggles to heal due to poor proprioception that got worse in my 30s somehow lead to a re-assesment for autism as an adult.

Big fucking suprise. I'm autistic. Always have been.

Sometimes health professionals don't get the full picture. They're human.

My presentation is drastically different from my male family members, and I was parentified by my fathers autism from a young age - I remember being as young as 10 and my dad saw my ability to blend and socialise, he'd send me into stores or get me to make phone calls for him if he was having anxiety over it. This was not something that was discussed at the time of my first assessment.

My special interest was, and still is, anthropology. I maintain that loving the study of humanity and human culture means I've been able to intellectualise my way through social situations that neurotypicals feel their way through on instinct. I suspect I've done this from a young age, and that this further muddied the waters for that psychiatrist who assessed me when I was 12.

If I'd gotten reassessed in my later teens, or early 20s, I'm certain the result of the assessment would have been different then to, even with the same psychiatrist. You get 4 hours with a perfect stranger,just on some random day, and they're supposed to make an assessment on your entire life?

We trusted their assessment, which is why I fumbled through life for 20+ years under the assumption I could learn my way out of feeling autistic.

Trust your healthcare professionals, but remember that they're human, and second opinions are important, especially if you're struggling with the treatment plan, or lack thereof, from the first doctor.

I completely agree with that perspective.

Personally I would add to this that for individuals who are unable to mask, and who's struggle to mask is so to speak, "visible" to others, while they are still subjected to all of the ableiem that comes with being neurodivergent, it's almost like their inability to mask becomes a punchline for neurotypicals. I think some NTs use the joke as a way of trying to relieve the pressure to mask thinking they're being accommodating, while still addressing the disabled elephant in the room. The end result is that the person's lack of masking capacity is mistakenly correlated to their entire set of abilities - people assume they're incapable of everything. It's pretty dehumanising and infantalizing, and puts so many limitations on the opportunities available for folk who can't mask.

And on the other side of that coin, people who have the ability to mask really well are expected to do it flawlessly 24/7, and failing to do so isn't a sign that having ADHD can be disabling, no, for people who can mask, not masking 24/7 is apparently a moral failing. Which is not the kind of social expectation you want on someone who's condition predisposes them to anxiety inducing perfectionism, and leads to this expectation also being internalised.

Which occurs for both types of people - internalising the expectations. if society treats you as useless, you start to feel useless, until you fall into a pit. if society expects you to always be performing at 110%, you begin to feel like a failure if you output anything less than 109% until you burn out and fall in the same pit.

(because I don't think neurotypical people realise that masking is operating at >100%, it's an additional request on our mind and body, it's an additional labour, it's not sustainable long term. There really is the misconception that we can choose to turn it on and off at no personal cost to us.)

No but you do say "I'm diabetic" which uses diabetes as sort of identity within the sentence structure.

Similarly "I'm a cancer survivor" and "I'm a cancer patient" are ways someone with cancer could structure a sentence to give weight to the way cancer and the experiences of cancer fundamentally change this person's personality and identity.

While "I am ADHD" isn't perfect, it's a very new use of language to try and create an identity form, and it will continue to evolve and sound more natural.

Personally I still find myself saying "I'm autistic and I have ADHD" in most situations, but if I know I won't have to explain the term too much, I do prefer "I'm AuDHD", because it's an identity first phrase, and it feels as natural as "I'm autistic" or "I'm diabetic".

But the difference grammatically between "I'm autistic" and "I'm ADHD" is minimal, yet I agree one sounds fine and the other just sounds stupid. And other than exposure, I can't place my finger on why.

At the end of the day, alcoholism, depression, and obesity, they are unhealthy states of being.

They are not something people choose, and while there are treatments, it's not something everyone can control.

That doesn't mean we should simply accept this state of being. People living with depression deserve better, people living with alcoholism deserve better than for us to say "it's out of their control, they can't help it, so we shouldn't judge, let them be" when what they need is better support and better treatment options.

Likewise, obese people deserve better than "eat less, move more, fatty!" but they also deserve more than "all bodies are beautiful, just let us be"

I say this as someone who was a fat kid, and a fat teen, and a fat adult. I had a BMI of 50 for a most of my life. In my mid 30s, I got it down to 28, and still going.

So I say all of this is as someone else who was fat, obese, and morbidly obese. Obesity should be viewed the same way we view depression and anxiety, though depression and anxiety also need some better PR.

Being obese may not not always be a choice, but the the ultimate end goal of how we view obesity as a state of being is to find ways we can all manage our weight. Because obesity is not healthy, for those who can't easily control their weight, life sucks, they are patients in need of treatment, not morally failing people, but also not "perfect plus sized activists who are healthy at every size"

Because while bodies and sizes vary and we can do healthy things at every size. Obesity is inherently unhealthy. Obviously being bullied won't solve anything, but neither will society politely ignoring how hard it is to live a full life while suffering from obesity.

Being black isn't an inherent health issue. It genuinely is just a different state of being. 99% of problems unique to black people are social issues, not medical issues... So the comparison between obesity and substance abuse issues is more helpful than trying to compare being obese to being BIPOC.

Lonnie is feminine where you live?

It's a typical "dad got me a job in the mailroom in '62, and I've been the mail room manager ever since" sheltered, working class old white guy who thinks he's middle class because he doesn't understand how rich the rich are, but he sure knows the poor aren't trying hard enough and kids these days eat too many avocados, but he doesn't bring it up unless you ask him directly.

He's a bit off with the fairies but he's only a little racist compared to mates his age, that old Lonnie.

That's alright, there will only be a handful of gen alpha even eligible to vote in a 2029 election, since they were born 2010-not even born yet

Yup, thyroid, adrenals, and gonads have been checked, both with blood work and untrasound.

I have dysautonomia due to a brain stem herniation, and temperature regulation is effected by that, but it's just been so weird that the way this symptom effects me was decades of not feeling the cold, then suddenly now I'm not feeling the heat.

I know which one I'd choose if I got to pick.... and it's the one where I don't need to go to a wound nurse for frost nip in February.

I'm pretty sure this is the actual etymology of news.

People asking each other "what new things?" becomes "what news", as well as usage like "that information is new to me" becoming "that is news to me"