march 9 2025 - bottom-up processing and chaotic thinking

ugh i'll deal with formatting this later. i forgor how

content warning: use of slurs (in the context of describing ableism i have experienced/internalized)

I'm struggling to come up with what i'm trying to write because i'm trying to squeeze myself into top-down processing, because that's what I was mainly taught as a student and a worker. And i'm realizing that I often struggle with writing because i'm expecting inspiration to just strike, and i'll just get it and have ideas about what to write about, and the ideas just aren't coming because i'm unmotivated or depressed or whatever.

But i'm never *not* having ideas, either. My brain is so busy all the time and being on ADHD meds at least makes them into coherent thoughts, but they're still fast and fleeting and easily forgotten and I often feel an underlying sense of anxiety trying to sort and keep track of them all.

i think today i want to write a thing about what makes me hesitate to write and then I want to sort all my docs into folders all nice and neatly. and I want to remember the experience of using a computer for the first time and learning all these skills to work with my autistic brain and not against it!!!!

Making decisions is hard right now and I often feel frozen and panicked trying to pick, like, what i'm going to make for dinner. And then I make nothing! Like I think in theory I can do things in a top-down way, but it uses a lot of energy and contortion and extra effort that could be better channeled into the actual content of what i'm doing. So i'm burning myself out trying to do it the neurotypical way, feeling bad that it's coming out as uninspired and low-energy, and I don't know other ways of doing it that would feel more intuitive from brain to page and maybe feel like an actual work flow as opposed to, like, painful work-constipation.

I remember seeing that Temple Grandin movie with Claire Danes in my early teens, and it opens with Danes (as Grandin) looking directly into the camera and saying “My name's Temple Grandin, and I think in pictures.” And I remember having a vague understanding that this was a movie about someone who has autism and that's also what people say I have (my mom & i had had a single conversation when i was about 11, but it was generally Something We Didn't Talk About), and I felt... secondhand embarrassed I guess, or maybe defensive is a better word. Because the way that movie is written and directed is for a neurotypical audience who has little to no frame of reference for what it's like to be autistic, so they really have to simplify the depiction in order for them to understand the story. How all those little moments of being condescended to, of finding out after the fact that everyone thinks you're rude or crazy, all those moments where you're simultaneously denied agency but still left to fend for yourself- those moments accumulate and they shape you just as much as any differences in your mirror neurons or synapse pruning or sensitivity in your amygdala.

They have to make The Autistic Experience ™ more obvious for a neurotypical audience so they can't pull the 'she's not autistic, she's just quirky, REAL autistic people have SEVERE problems' line- and what they ended up with was, like... something that rubbed me the wrong way in a way I'm not sure how to describe, as a preteen with the buds of self-consciousness just starting to bloom. I had the understanding of the words themselves; that I have a diagnosable condition that makes me have trouble with school and crowded places, just starting to understand that those words also connect to the more cruel synonyms I'd heard on the playground. I was just forming the connection between myself – as a person who knew I was a little different, that most kids didn't have the trouble with school that I did, that I had been studied and assessed and punished and intervened upon more than the average child- and those words the other kids were repeating to establish their understanding of Human and Unhuman. They were Human, but to be 'retarded' or 'insane' or 'special' was to be Unhuman, and you're not supposed to say that part out loud anymore, but you can use those words as insults to your fellow Humans to kick them down a notch, at least when the Unhumans presumably aren't there to object to that. So I was realizing that I really was one of those Unhumans, it was a secret identity I was born into, but I'd gotten lucky enough times to pass for Human and it would be a facade that would keep getting harder to keep up, but everything I'd expected out of my life relied on being a fellow Human, so I'd better keep up the appearance and never let on otherwise.

So I think seeing those really obvious demonstrations of autistic traits, as acted and directed by neurotypical people, felt like a way I could separate myself and reassure myself that I was closer to Normal than what I was seeing on screen. I kind of comforted myself by saying “I don't act like that”, “I don't think in pictures, so that means Real autistic people think in pictures and that means I'm not one of them. So I must be close enough to Normal”.

Anyway, I don't think I think in pictures or words or any mutually exclusive way of conveying information. It's multimedia and it can vary between being very logic and process-based or very emotional and memory-based and... I would describe my inner monologue as being more like a wikipedia page. Lots of words that hyperlink to other words and concepts- so you could start on the topic of early silent film, which hyperlinks to sound recording and the gramophone, which links to modern sound recording technology and how we started out thinking digital media would preserve everything in pristine condition, that those sounds and images were no longer subject to the physical form that would biodegrade and rot the way organic matter does. But then physical storage still matters and servers and drives can be corrupted and destroyed and information can still die even if it only exists in a digital format.

Isn't that wild? How we thought we'd achieved immortality with, like, CDs? I've been playing around with a bunch of emulators of older versions of Windows and games that were developed for them – kinda within the timeframe of later DOS-based stuff, into software that was optimized for the first big consumer-based operating systems like Windows 95 and XP, the stuff I grew up with. Everyone feels nostalgic for the technology and stories and worldviews they grew up with and everyone thinks they were born in an extraordinary time and I think everyone is right about that to some extent. But like... sometimes I just can't wrap my head around how I came into the world around the time we'd really started integrating computers and digital information into everyday life – like we'd gotten the hang of it and started to really switch over to it, we started to assume everyone had a computer at home or an easily-accessible one at the library, then when I was a teenager we slowly started to assume everyone had a phone with a camera or an instant messenger of some sort.

And meanwhile... I'm only two generations away from, like, my nana growing up with 12 siblings in a tiny farmhouse in 1930's rural Alberta. Something existentially poetic about how we thought we achieved some degree of immortal preservation of ideas and information, but I guess there's no true way of knowing if that's an accurate statement if human consciousness is still restricted to the memory and the body and the perception of information. I think a lot about how one time i read that John Lennon is one of the highest-selling artists in CD sales alone, even though he didn't live to see the mainstream adoption of CDs as a music format ....i'm trying to remember where i heard that Factoid. i thought it was somewhere on wikipedia but i'm coming up blank. maybe i'm making it up! but like.. i'm not wrong..

Anyway we were talking about Wikipedia and here we are – I stayed vaguely on topic and within the realm of things I'm often focusing on and interested in, but it was still nonlinear and all over the place.I think this was as stream-of-consciousness as I can accurately depict with text alone on a white page. It's usually this plus images and feelings and sounds and memories and interactions between myself and objects. Sometimes I'm not sure how much of my connection to objects (and human connections primarily transferred via objects and tools) is the autism and how much is just being A Child of the Digital Age; I suppose I'd just be pathologized more for it if my actions didn't closely resemble what everybody else is doing. That doesn't change my neurology or my actions on the ground, just how they're perceived by people who can't relate to how I think or communicate. Or at least they say they can't relate, that they're Normal and Human and i'm Different unless they're pointing out how well I can mimic being Normal and why can't I just get better at that mimicry?

Idk man i'm also just dipping in and out of formal language vs made-up grammar for Emphasis and conversational tones that are conveyed by text abbreviations and emoticons, even though those haven't really been a Necessity of the form of communication since I got the hang of typing quickly and got my first laptop with a webcam so there's not a lot of on-the-ground necessity in saying 'idk' when 'I don't know' is barely 2 seconds more of effort, but typing like im texting and not worrying about punctuation or capitalization unless it gets the Point Across makes me feel more like i'm speaking or communicating my thoughts as they come when i'm speaking to someone i'm comfortable with. It's conversational and it's meant to mimic how I would talk to a friend and any punctuation I add is more for conveying tone. Writing it like a script, almost (sips coffee). OR a roleplaying forum lmaoooooo is this all it is? Is my writing style just developed for the specific ecosystem of a 2009 roleplay forum? Do I just start off by writing like that (gestures to my keyboard) and then editing it into a more contextually-appropriate writing style later?

IDFK, man!!!!