Whatever Matt Feels Like Posting

Hey! Turns out there's a TERM for the EXACT type of depression and anxiety that I frequently struggle with!! How long has there been a term for it?

https://www.additudemag.com/rejection-sensitive-dysphoria-and-adhd/
https://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/rejection-sensitive-dysphoria
https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/rejection-sensitive-dysphoria#takeaway
https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/more-than-thin-skinned-rejection-sensitive-dysphoria-1130197

I recommend reading these articles to get a better idea of what I typically have meant in the past when I say that I have depression, anxiety, social anxiety, or PTSD, or am worried about being hated or disliked. In fact, it's probably what I meant in some cases when I say that my behaviors or reactions or feelings are because of my autism.

Good news: I no longer feel like people might see me as a horrible person or hate me just because of the fact that I've had this userpic since I was 15-16.

Bad news: I now feel like people will DEFINITELY see me as a horrible person and hate me just because of the fact that I've had this userpic since I was 15-16.

https://blog.emojipedia.org/ios-13-1-emoji-changelog/#fn4
https://twitter.com/jeremyburge/status/1050038527155691520
https://intheloopaboutneurodiversity.wordpress.com/2019/03/20/the-ableist-history-of-the-puzzle-piece-symbol-for-autism/
https://www.learnfromautistics.com/the-problem-with-the-autism-puzzle-piece/

(Like most entries when I post a lot of links that make me worry, I wanted to address everything I saw on these pages that worried me, but that would require looking at them for much longer and taking a lot longer to write this entry. Also, the less I write, the less likely I am to unintentionally be offensive? Maybe?)

What I feel like these articles are saying in a nutshell:
- I'm a bad person because I made this userpic, even though I was 15 at the time (16 when I made the current version; both versions have identical text)
- I'm an even WORSE person because I continued to have it even after the first time I saw anyone being offended by the idea of puzzle piece(s) representing autism in general
- I'm even worse still because I continued to have it after the first time anyone specifically told me that they were offended by my userpic specifically, which was about two years ago by now
- I'm even worse because I don't want to remove or replace this userpic. Especially not after so long. And because I still like the autism puzzle piece symbol. And because I like how colorful this userpic is and how I used color palettes from Super Mario World for the non-painted-over pieces. If you like other symbols of autism better, that's fine - I just wish I didn't have to feel like almost everyone with autism will hate me because I prefer the puzzle piece(s).
- I'm a horrible person for supporting Autism Speaks, even though I AM autistic. And for thinking that a lot of things Autism Speaks has done that people have issues with remind me a lot of how *I* used to not understand autism very well, so I feel like I'll be hated because of that and for having worded so many things badly over the years. And since a lot of those things were things Autism Speaks has said *in the past*, when autism wasn't well-understood in general, seeing people talking about that makes me feel like *I* can NEVER be forgiven for ANYTHING I do that is wrong or problematic, no matter how much time is passed. More on that: https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/323952.html
- I'm a horrible person for the fact that I thought I strictly *needed* there to be a cure for autism for so long, and while I now get that not everyone wants there to be one, I still feel like *I'd* be a lot happier in general if I weren't autistic. (Because I feel that if I weren't autistic, I wouldn't word things so poorly so often or make userpics that turn out to offend everyone, for starters...)
- I'm a horrible person if I prefer person-first language, and I'm a horrible person if I DON'T prefer person-first language, and I'm a horrible person if I don't care either way. (FWIW, I'm in the "don't care either way" category. More entries about my thoughts about that: https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/306411.html https://matt1993.dreamwidth.org/325430.html)


When I wrote the text on this userpic ten years ago, I was expressing my frustration at how autism isn't very well understood, even by me, and how I wish it was understood better. (It DEFINITELY wasn't well understood for a lot of my lifetime!) In other words, I felt that autism IS a puzzle to those who don't understand it well (including well-meaning people, and I feel that well-meaning people don't need to be yelled at and called jerks just because they don't understand; they just need to be educated on the subject) - sometimes including autistic people themselves such as me. Similarly, I've always felt that I never know what to say or do to not offend people and not unintentionally make everyone hate me - social skills have always been a "puzzle" to me in that regard. And I felt that way even more back when I made the userpic.

Could I have worded the userpic better when I first made it? Well... no. Remember, a) I have autism, which in my case has always made finding the right words difficult for me; b) this was back when I was still fairly new to posting online in general, so I was still naïve enough to think that I could word it however I wanted and people would understand what I meant; c) this was also back before I knew that there was ANYONE who hates Autism Speaks, or ANYONE with autism who wouldn't want there to be a cure for it, etc. because my experience with autism back then was so limited.

Could I have worded the userpic better when I redrew it later that year? Probably not. I could have tried to if I'd known that 8-10 years later I would end up feeling like everyone will hate me for wording it the way I did, but since I didn't know that... I didn't. I just used the same wording again. And *even if* I'd known that I should reword it, there's no guarantee that the new version would actually have been better, for all of the same reasons that the first version turned out as poorly-worded as it did.

Could I make a new version of the userpic that is worded better NOW? Maybe. I've even considered it. But I don't want to.
First off, whenever I try to word things in a way that has no possibility of offending anyone, I always feel like I'm being forced to add dozens of disclaimers that make whatever I'm writing far too long to read, which all turns out to be for naught when I inevitably offend someone anyway.
Secondly, I now feel that this userpic is good at representing my personal struggle with autism because it contains symbols and wording that could be seen as problematic. What could be a better representation of my anxiety about being misunderstood and disliked for things I've made years ago when I was worse at wording than something I made years ago that I have anxiety about being misunderstood and disliked for? How can the rainbow/gold infinity symbol (or any other proposed autism symbol that I've never heard of until just today, and am therefore probably a bad person for not knowing about them) represent MY experience with autism in the same way?


I hope this makes sense - as usual, I had to write it quickly so I can get this posted so I can stop worrying about it sooner. So if I worded something wrong, it's because of that AND my being bad at wording in general.


Well, time to be unable to sleep at all for another week or two thanks to worrying about this. :(

Woefully late in posting this, but:

----

Go to Wordle and...

1) Paste in all entries you posted in January 2017 and make a Wordle configured any way you like
2) Paste in all entries you posted in February 2017 and make another Wordle configured any way you like
...
12) Paste in all entries you posted in December 2017 and make another Wordle configured any way you like
13) Make a Wordle out of your entries from ALL months of 2017, configured any way you like

Then post all of these Wordles to your LiveJournal and/or DreamWidth and/or whatever other blogging site(s) you're on!


You may do steps 1 - 12 only or step 13 only if you prefer.

It's up to you if you include subject lines, comments, community entries, friends-only entries, music tags, location tags, etc., and it's up to you whether you post your Wordles in a public or friends-only entry. Anything else I didn't think of is probably optional as well.

And if you're on more than one journal site (in this example, LJ and DW), you may do this for your LJ entries only, your DW entries only, your entries on both sites combined, all of the above - whichever. And you may post it to only one site or the other, or to both - whichever you prefer.

----

Personally I opted to do this for my LJ and DW entries separately AND combined, and post all three versions of each to both LJ and DW. Which means this took about six times as long to make as it usually does...

Left: LJ only
Center: LJ+DW combined
Right: DW only

You can also tell because I tried to skew the colors of the LJ-only ones towards LJ-blue and away from DW-red/pink, and vice versa for the DW-only ones. Looking at how some of the color schemes turned out, though, I might need to adjust my algorithm before my 2018 Wordle Year in Review...

( Wordles under the cut! )

Oh, and this year, I thought of a little word search game I could add onto this meme! (you don't have to make a little game like this if you make your own Wordle Year in Review though)

( Wordle Search! )

(music tag should be: Snippets of Mario, Kid Icarus, SSB, BtVS, Enya, Dido, Céline Dion, Sarah McLachlan, Moya Brennan, Matchbox 20, Rascal Flatts, & Savage Garden music thrown together randomly in Audacity)

This has been kind of a disappointing April Fools' Day because:

1) Homestar Runner didn't update at all today, even though they did for April Fools' Day 2014, 2015, and 2016, and April Fools and Halloween are almost the only times they ever update nowadays.
2) I don't think many people noticed my April Fools prank at all.

For reference, my April Fools prank was this entry; however, when I first posted it (on March 31 in my time zone, but late enough that it was April 1 already for some of you), it was an exact copy of my first entry. Then I waited a few minutes or so and changed it to a copy of a different past entry in the same way... then changed it to another after a few more minutes, and so on - basically, if I was at my computer, I'd change the entry anywhere from once an hour to once every few minutes. (At first. I gradually updated it less and less often because it seemed like no one was noticing...)

By "exact copy", that means including the subject line, repost button, userpic, tags, mood, music, location... basically, everything except the timestamp, the comments, and friends-only status [though, of course, the only friends-only entries I used were ones that probably would've been fine being public]. And anything that I intended to change each time but accidentally forgot sometimes. Though if I used an entry I'd posted in _dreams_, autism, or asperger, I added a notice saying that it was cross-posted (even though I don't think copying a community entry to my own journal years later for April Fools' Day actually counts as cross-posting).

I chose the entries semi-randomly, sometimes by going to my Calendar for random years and months and picking a random entry I'd feel comfortable posting again, and sometimes by just putting in notable entries that I remember and wanted to include in this prank at some point. Some entries were used more than once.

And just to mess with your heads even more, I thought it might be fun to come up with a hypothetical FUTURE entry and add it into the mix! That's what the 2023 year in review is for. It ended up being my favorite thing about this prank, so I left that one up significantly longer than any other single entry.


Now that April Fools' Day is over, all the entries I ended up using are listed below for posterity. (Don't expect the repost buttons to work correctly, though...)


( The entries that you could've sworn that you'd seen already and/or that they said something completely different a few minutes ago, in order of their first use in this prank )

I just looked at the interests in my profile for the first time in a while and...

WHOA. It's WAY outdated.


Homestar Runner?!

Garfield??!

MARIO?!?!

When was the last time I liked those?!



Unfortunately I can't fix it just yet either because I've been busy lately. I had enough time to come up with a new interests list:

/b/, 15, 16, 23, 300, 4, 4-8-15-16-23-42, 4chan, 42, 4815162342, 5 nights at freddy's, 69, 8, all your base, angry video game nerd, arguing, arguing about gender, arguing about politics, arguing about sports, arguments, arrow to the knee, assuming bad faith, assuming everything is homophobic, assuming everything is racist, assuming everything is sexist, assuming neurotypicals are jerks, assuming nts are jerks, atheism, avgn, ayb, ban comic sans, being a jerk, being mean, bell peppers, cake is a lie, call of duty, captain falcon, cars, chili, chuck norris, cinema sins, cinemasins, controversy, creative writing, cussing, cuss words, debates, dirty jokes, do a barrel roll, do not want, dorkly, double standards, dragonball z, dubstep, encyclopedia dramatica, essays, estj, extroverts, feminism, feminist frequency, final destination, five nights at freddy's, flame wars, flashgitz, fnaf, football, for glory, fox only, foxadhd, game of thrones, game theory, gaming sins, gamingsins, geno, grand theft auto, grudges, gta, guns, halo, hating everything, holding grudges, hoo-hah, hot-button topics, hunting, i lost the game, impromptu speeches, indexed, innuendo, innuendos, insults, internet memes, it's over 9000, it's over nine thousand, jersey shore, judging people, lettuce, little mac, lucario, malleo, matpat, matthew patrick, memes, metal gear, moral dilemmas, mr. z, mustard, no items, no wai!, o rly?, onions, overanalyzing cartoons, overanalyzing comics, overanalyzing everything, overanalyzing movies, overanalyzing video games, paint.net, photoshop, pickles, political arguments, political debates, politics, potato salad, profanity, psychcentral, public speaking, rap, research papers, rickroll, rickrolling, salad, shoop da woop, sonty mick, sports, sqrt(-garfield) memes, sromg memes, starting arguments, swearing, taking offense to everything, team fortress, team fortress 2, that's what she said, the game, the game theorists, the office, the walking dead, this is sparta, tl;dr, uncyclopedia, walking dead, weegee, weegee stare, writing essays, writing papers, ya rly, yolo, your mom, your mom jokes, yu-gi-oh, zero wing, zombies

But that's over 150 interests, and I don't have time right now to narrow it down to just 150. Hopefully I will this weekend. At least this gives you a chance to marvel at just how NOT ME my old interests list is, I guess.

And I still need to come up with a new default userpic... and like 40 or 50 new non-default userpics, and a new profile, and a new profile name...

There's only two votes so far in this poll, but I gave each thing to do 1 point for each first-choice vote it has, 1/2 a point for each second-choice vote, 1/4 a point for each third-choice vote, etc., and catching up on my friends page more is currently in the lead with 1.25 points.

However, as I've mentioned in a couple of places after posting that poll, realizing how many unfinished projects I had made me depressed for a while because it sunk in even deeper that I probably will never finish all of them, and I felt even worse about abandoning most of them for two or three years. While I feel a little better about it right now, this probably isn't the best time to risk seeing much more online drama.

I'll continue reading new entries in my friends page at least once every 3 days like I've been doing (and I might read it a little more often now that I've seen the poll results), but I really think I should post the lists of non-LJ-related things I'm worried you'll hate me for and of things that remind me of the Forbidden Comment Threads fairly soon (because, remember, I probably do have to do so eventually for my mental health).

At the same time, I also don't want to wait too long before I finish catching up on my friends page, so I came up with the idea to work on both things at the same time with this method:

( Blah blah blah blah blah... )

But even that compromise doesn't seem like something I should work on right this moment given the state I've been in (but, fortunately, not this moment), although I'll probably start switching back and forth between other things and this later on when I'm in an even better mood.

The next highest project in the results is finishing those autism self-help books, with exactly 1 point, but I think right now I should go with something that I won't have a lot of time to do next semester while I still have the chance.

The third highest score is new userpics with 0.5078125 points (one second choice and one eighth choice), so for now I'm going with that :) Although that will also have to wait for a bit... I was planning on making a separate table and poll about my userpic ideas, but all I've finished so far is a list of them. (And given how I only remember some of my ideas when I'm not writing any down, I'm probably not even done with that...) So I'm gonna have to get started pretty soon!



In the meantime, here's a few videos I've been meaning to post here!

http://mostexcitingworld.com/video-helmet-camera-captures-firefighter-bringing-a-tiny-kitten-back-to-life/ - I don't think I can embed the video, but this firefighter actually took the time to revive a kitten he found. Very heartwarming! (EDIT IN 2018: The link is broken now, but I found an archived version of the article with the video still missing and the video itself separately.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bB7obyuuY8 I can't embed this either since my Internet is being slow, but these people recreated the dance scene from A Charlie Brown Christmas. Cute!

Presumably, repost just the videos and
remove all the boring stuff about my creative vortexes

Yep - I created my LJ account on August 19, 2007. Sad how the anniversary of LJ should happen to be the day after I accidentally deleted a lot of LJ-related stuff, though... in fact, I was so busy after that happened, I didn't get to finish this post until the day after the anniversary of my LJ. :(

I also wanted to include LJ comment stats (which I said I'd do every three months starting on the fourth anniversary, but ended up deciding to just do once every year), but since this post is already late, I'll post them later.

( First line of my first entry on or after the 19th of every month )

5post

3 days ago, my mom found 7 binders' worth of the notes from back when I was in therapy! It's really interesting to look through it and see how far I've come. Some observations I've found so far that surprise me:

- I apparently used to get the letters C and S, P and Q, U and M, and G and J mixed up a lot despite still becoming able to read before kindergarten, and also despite my obsession with the letter Q around first grade. Plus, in my grapheme→color synesthesia, most of those letters are completely different colors (C S P Q U M G J), and I never confused Q and G even though their colors are the closest out of any of these, so I must not have had it back then.
- I seemingly used to not like ketchup, as when the therapists were teaching me about choices, they'd ask me whether I wanted a certain food that I liked or a certain food that I hated, and the food I "hated" would sometimes be ketchup.
- I was actually better at pretend play than I remember - in fact, I bet my 3-year-old self just might be better at D&D dialogue than I am today :)

While rereading the notes, I also like to put my iTunes on shuffle, and when a song that isn't from Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, or Super Mario World (i.e., a song I first heard after age 3) comes up, I try to get an idea of how my 3-year-old self would feel if he time-travelled to when I first heard it by pretending that I'm 3 years old but born in 2008 instead of 1993 and that my "future" self will first hear the song 15 years after I actually first heard it. (example: with the exception of "Sand in My Shoes", I first heard each song from Dido's Life for Rent in 2007, which in 1996 was 11 years in the future, so I tell myself that I'll hear it for the first time in 2022) :)

Qoct to yomr gomrnal!

(what I wanted to put for the music tag: "Dr. Mario - Chill (SSBB version), Super Mario Galaxy - Speedy Comet and Final Bowser, Enya - Cursum Perficio backwards, and Sarah McLachlan - Black all at once and in G Major")

I visited the college that I am the most interested in from Sunday to Monday, staying overnight in the dorm (like I'd done before at another college).

Although the first day was pretty good, the second day ruined it for me. It all started when the fire alarm went off at 12:30 AM for no reason. Once I realized that it wasn't just imagination, I was hit with the realization that I hadn't quite memorized the fire escape route, so my plan was to just run through random hallways on the floor I was on until I either found the elevator (because I hadn't remembered "oh yeah, I can't use the elevator during a fire or fire drill" yet) or someone who knew where it was. Fortunately, this was actually much sooner than I expected - I heard some guy's voice so I followed him down the stairs and outside the building. Even though there wasn't a fire - the fire alarm came on by accident - it was clear from right then that I wouldn't get anywhere near enough sleep that night, since breakfast was at 7 and I hadn't even fallen asleep once yet. Especially since, in my no-common-sense hurry to get out of my room, I forgot to take my room key with me and ended up having to borrow the master key. Which I accidentally used to open the door to the room next to mine at first.

And, as expected, I briefly woke up and went back to sleep several times starting at 6, eventually becoming awake enough to get up at around 7:30 or 8. By then, my roommate was already gone, and only a few people were downstairs, none of whom knew where to go either. I ended up missing breakfast completely - and I thought I was late that one time at Camp El Tesoro when I got to breakfast just a few minutes before it was over! Throughout the rest of the day, I also got separated from my group and ended up lost 3 more times. :(

The lack of common sense apparently didn't end after the trip was over, either - I somehow managed to post even more comments in asperger that I ended up regretting despite the fact that:

A) I didn't even mention a cure for autism this time, and
B) I had a feeling it would happen just like I knew this, this, and the fact that I probably haven't heard from Schrödinger's Enya in awhile because I acted like the paparazzi countless times would.

Will I ever say anything that I won't end up regretting? :'(

Speaking of those comments in asperger, people there have pointed out that "creative tumors" isn't a good term for, well, creative tumors because it's kinda unpleasant-sounding, but I can't think of anything better. Do any of you have any ideas?

Things that won't work for a renaming of creative tumors:
- daydreaming (that would imply that I am creative enough to come up with these ideas almost constantly, rather than every now and then randomly)
- creative spasms (saying "4 or 5 years ago, the most creative spasms I had at once was four" implies that I thought about four ideas at the same time, when really I mean to say that four ideas kinda took turns distracting me)

This entry is late for your journal