Doing a talk tomorrow where I'm basically going to name and describe a bunch of ND traits and symptoms to an audience of people who are likely unfamiliar with them.

This thread will include the things I'm talking about, would love your thoughts per topic in replies.

Sensory Processing Differences

- some people process certain sensory input more or less strongly than others.
- this literally changes how you experience "reality".
- hyper-, hypo- and sense-seeking variants

OCD/Intrusive Thoughts

- a driving need to be *absolutely certain* of something.
- "Pure-O" variants often undetected, shame-inducing.
- Not a joke, can be seriously life-warping
- Understand and break the dopamine loop!

Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria

- Common in ADHD and Autism
- Hyper-attuned to being rejected by others
- Often triggers CPTSD symptoms from minor perceived rejections, can be horrific

PTSD

- You survived some traumatic event.
- It was too much to process at the time.
- You have unprocessed emotional pain.
- You organize your life around not thinking about it.
- Whoops you thought about, there goes today.
- Groundhog's Day of your worst experience.

CPTSD

- You survived an ongoing traumatized state.
- You learned to shut parts of yourself down to survive.
- You are out of touch with your body, emotions, needs.
- Your sense of self is situated in the approval of others.
- Fight/Flight/Freeze/Fawn

ADHD

- Your brain processes time and attention differently.
- Your reward centers are stimulated by curiosity not achievement.
- Paying attention to something you're not curious about takes hard, sustained work.
- See "connections" between things - creativity!

Autism

- Hard to define, still lots of disagreement, misinformation
- Think of it as a range of possible configurations of the human operating system.
- When you've met one autistic person you've met *one* autistic person.

Autistic Inertia

- When you're doing something, you want to keep doing it.
- When you're not doing anything, it can be really hard to start doing something.
- Changing context sucks, because we invest ourselves heavily into what we're doing.

Autistic Social Challenges

- Different things are obvious/important to us than to you.
- Leads to fraught and difficult communication where it's not always clear we're using words the same way.
- Often we learn that what we see is "wrong" and what you see is "right".

Special Interests / Hyperfocus

- Common in Autism and ADHD
- We *really* get into our hobbies
- Can lose ourselves in idea spaces for hours, days, weeks.
- Nothing wrong with this - it's how we're wired.

Aphantasia

- Common in some autistic people
- An inability to visualize a scene in your head
- I think in terms of interconnected ideas, not visuals.
- Some autistics think purely visually, with fine-grain detail

Face-Blindness

- Common in some autistic people
- Difficulty recognizing an individual by facial structure
- Do you look at hair, expressions, tone of voice to recognize some?
- Watch "Dead Poets Society" - can you tell the cast apart?

Bipolar Disorder

- Difficulty regulating emotions, emotions often swing through cycles of mania and depression.
- Hypomania - excited, high energy, good mood.
- Hypermania - excited and positive to the point of psychosis and delusion.
- Can be medicated successfully

Dyslexia

- Often understood as difficulty reading
- Results from a mismatch between brain speed (very fast) and visual processing (less fast).
- Often highly intelligent, but struggle to read quickly and comprehend.

Sleep Problems

- Common in some neurodivergent profiles
- Related to autistic inertia?
- Difficulty falling asleep, difficulty waking up, difficulty keeping regular hours.

Gastrointestinal Problems

- Common with high stress, which is common among NDs
- Many ND people live with IBS
- Not diagnostic, but informally a common comorbid symptom among autistic people

Work Challenges - things I had to learn the hard way.

- Prioritizing others' feelings over "correct" work
- Recognizing unspoken/unwritten rules of a given workplace environment
- Communicating complex ideas in understandable ways
- Why am I so tired every day?!?

Masking

- When a neurodivergent person learns to act as if they were neurotypical, they are "masking"
- Everyone masks to some extent here and there
- Lots of ND people confused their mask for their self, which leads to lots of problems.

Dyscalculia is like Dyslexia but for math! https://mobile.twitter.com/moniquepihl/status/1247552143776612352

Sensory Overload:

- Common in with sensory processing issues
- Can also happen with emotions (which are, I think, senses!)
- Person can be overloaded past their ability to consciously function and meltdown or shutdown.
- This is not a personal choice or a moral failing.

Ehlers Danlos Syndrome

- Commonly comorbid with autism
- Body's connective tissue is loose, can be very painful as joints will pop and basic normal movements can lead to dislocations and pain.

Gender Nonconformity

- Gender is socially defined by NTs (don't @ me!)
- Autistic people have their own social definitions of stuff that don't always overlap 1:1 with NTs.
- A great number of autistic people identify as trans or genderqueer - much higher than NT population.

The goal of this talk will be to reach undiagnosed people in the audience who have experienced some of these things but not realized the extent to which their lived experience is different from their peers.

Does anyone have any favorite resource links for any of these to add?

Dead Time

- Common in ADHD
- When you know you have to do something at time T, it makes it difficult/impossible to start anything else between now and T.
- Can be irrational - "oh no I have plans tonight I can't work on my thing this morning"-levels are not unheard of.