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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 12th, 2024

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  • She was an hour and a half late. I only waited for her because she was responding to my messages, apologized for her tardiness, and said a couple times she’d be there within 20-30 minutes which led to a 90-minute wait). Once she got there, she told me that she was late because she was having some anxiety that day and went to a friend’s to smoke a bowl first. She chainsmoked on the patio, and I sat away from her because I don’t want to smell that while I’m eating. She told me about a terrible book she was writing, with the sort of stupid plot you’d get from r/writingprompts. And then she said she needed to get high again and asked me if I wanted to come to her car with her while she did. I declined and said I was gonna head home. Proceeded to promply never see her again.





  • I cut my full brother out of my life eight years ago. He isn’t a violent person, but he is a passive-aggressive asshole. My life has been infinitely calmer since then, and I don’t regret my decision at all.

    If he were violent and had a vendetta against me? I’m putting a restraining order on him, moving states, and hiding my home address data as best as possible.







  • I can read UPC, UPC-8, ISBN, and EAN bar codes. Tear the numbers off the bottom of the bar code, hand me the lines, and I will tell you the numbers you tore off.

    I used to work the midnight shift at a call center back in the late 90s. It was incredibly boring because we weren’t allowed to browse the internet when no calls were coming in (which was most of the time, got maybe five calls total per night). So I picked up a copy of Yahoo! Internet Life, a now-defunct technology-centered magazine. This issue had a how-to section for wacky shit like that, so I committed it to memory because wtf else was there to do?






  • Cognitive empathy is the ability to put oneself mentally in another person’s situation and try to understand how they might be feeling (as opposed to emotional empathy in which one experiences those emotions with another person and truly understanding how they feel).

    Where I (also ASD Level 1) have long struggled is with emotional empathy. At age 15, I told my mom that I didn’t know if I loved her. I understand now that this was a symptom of my autism, that I didn’t understand a variety of emotions, apart from excitement about hyperfixation and annoyance at most of the rest of the world for moving and think so slowly relative to me.

    And, yes, cognitive empathy was also lacking when I was younger. I did have difficulty imagining what other people’s life experiences were like, mainly because I was…well…young and inexperienced, not necessarily because I was autistic.

    What I take issue with is the blanket statement that autistic people lack cognitive empathy because it is a sweeping generalization that doesn’t allow for nuance. The implication in your statement is that we’re born without it and never possess it, and that simply isn’t true. It isn’t difficult for autistic people can learn cognitive empathy and other sorts of emotional intelligence.