POV: Mister Devon Price, PhD, Telling Me That I Am Right About Everything

"autism/neurodivergence isn't an excuse!" "I'm autistic and I act normal!!!" and phrases like that are usually said by other neurodivergent folks who are probably more functional and sociable, but the reality is that it's still a disability that is ON a spectrum. sometimes it is an "excuse"

people forget not all autistic folks act the same and some are very high support needs and will say and do things that may be "off-putting" or heavily misguided. please kind about autistic folk who need help with basic tasks or can't socialize well. the ones who are "weird" and don't understand boundaries correctly.

a list of people who i think could lift thor's hammer

rod serling

lil nas x

christopher lee

the dude who makes the train videos with the face camera thing

misa from death note

buffy (the vampire slayer)

the dude who made the 10 hr icarly dissertation

bugs bunny

miss rabbit from peppa pig

Trick-or-Treating Facts!

Trick-or-treating is a derived from the much older practices of guising, souling, and mumming

guising was a Scottish tradition of children wearing “disguises” to protect themselves from evil spirits, and going door-to-door to receive food or money. it dates back to at least the 16th century!

souling was a British/Irish practice of soulers (mainly children & the poor) going door-to-door and receiving soul cakes (’souls’) in exchange for song & prayer. this practices dates from the 15th century.

mumming was a similar British practice, though more commonly performed on Christmas and Easter. Amateur actors (mummers) would visit houses & pubs to perform folk plays in exchange for money. These often involved sword fights, and occasionally sword dances! 

Immigrants brought these practices to North America, where trick-or-treating itself developed in the 1920s. It’s gained popularity in a number of other countries since them, with different countries developing their own variations, but is still most commonplace in the U.S. and Canada.

Guising, souling, and mumming are still practiced today in certain parts of Britain (and elsewhere), though not on the scale that trick-or-treating has reached. Soul cakes look like this:

Me and my sister have actually been bonding over the whole late/undiagnosed ADHD thing, and ever since I brought up to her that maybe she should get tested too, she's been spotting all sorts of Holy Shit How Did Nobody Notice signs about both of us. After finding out about stimulant resistance/paradoxal reaction, she pointed out that would explain why she's been hooked on coke (the drink, not the snorty stuff) and how I started my unfathomable coffee habit so early.

I started drinking a whole pot of coffee every day since I was like 10. I'd come home from school and brew myself a pot of coffee. I wasn't secretive about it and I was unaware that adults literally did not know that I was doing it, because by the time my parents got home from work in the evening, the whole pot would be gone.

The thing with ADHD is about a chemical imbalance in the brains, below average amounts of the kind of reward chemicals that prompt you to do anything. That's why procrastinating until last-minute panic is a regular habit - the task itself isn't just boring, it's intolerably tedious all the way until the adrenaline from the deadline panic boosts the brain to function on a - well, functional - level.

A lot of undiagnosed ADHD people unconsciously self-medicate with caffeine. I'm not a chemist, but as a mild stimulant, the caffeine gives you a boost that helps balance out the brain. Not as much as actually being medicated, but it's still better than nothing.

I didn't do it on purpose because it would "help me focus" on anything important or constructive - I didn't do my homework unprompted, not once, ever, since I was like 15 - but considering that nobody noticed a 10-year-old drinking a whole goddamn pot of coffee in the span of 4-5 hours every single day, one could conclude that it wasn't making me noticeably hyperactive.

I didn't drink coffee because I wanted a specific effect, though. As far as I was concerned I was drinking it because I liked it. And the reason why I started the habit in the first place was because at the time, I was reading a shit ton of Garfield comics for some reason and that orange cat managed to convince me that drinking a shit ton of coffee every day is cool. Anyway, the moral of the story is

Mulling over something right now.

My journey into understanding neurodivergence and my own AuDHD-ness has changed how I doctor, and sometimes I can see this when looking at things like auto text scripts I set up previously.

For example, when it comes to picky eaters, I used to do a lot of education about how to get kids to eat, discussing strategies like gamifying intake of fruits and vegetables, enforcing #-bite rules, and having cutoff times for meals. I also put a lot more weight on having a balanced, whole-food meal. The only thing I discussed that was focused on any underlying reason was involving kids in meal prep, though I didn't necessarily have a reason as to why. And, to be fair, these strategies work for picky, NT toddlers.

Contrast that to today, where I'm asking questions about texture sensitivities and taste preferences. I'm acknowledging that processed foods are more predictable than fresh. I'm discussing meal prep involvement as a means of sensory food play. I'm discussing about how stressful #-bite requirements can be and I'm encouraging having safe foods available and permissable - not as a means of giving in, but to make trying a new food less stressful. I'm also acknowledging that some food is better than no food, as long as we get the basics/macros in as we can always supplement micros with multivitamins.

These are things that weren't taught when I was in medical school or residency. I attended in 2015, just after the DSM changes and the focus then was, and largely still is, eating a "well-rounded", normativized, white, upper-middle class diet. Anything other than that was treated as subpar and is bad medicine, let alone parenting.

You know the other thing? When I started asking, do you know how many of my picky eaters DIDN'T have some kind of sensory basis to their eating patterns? Do you know just how many undiagnosed, unseen neurodivergent kids are out there, masking along, not making waves, with equally ND parents who don't know otherwise?

The number of times I see at least one parent squirm when I start asking the kids, especially older kids, autism symptom questions and autism distinct anxiety questions... Why, if I had a nickel for every time, I would definitely have more than two. It's not a coincidence.

Bat cat character sheet

Albuquerque Journal, New Mexico, December 27, 1929