#got diagnosed as an adult but it definitely explained a whole bunch of things

[canisalbus]

i love how you draw i love how you render i love how you conceptualize your characters and your world...your work is such a huge Autism Resonance Moment for me (have you said whether you have autism? well even if you dont, my autism is resonanting hardcore with everything youre doing here keep it up!!!)

[valkerymillenia]

Finally had the appointment with the psychiatric specialist. Had to get up at 6am and go to a whole other city but I got it.

He was a guy (not the actual doctor I was supposed to see because she's on medical sabbatical). And he was nice but I am awkward with strangers and there were some things... Look, I just hate medical gender bias and there was a little here.

But most of all, there was... Some ableism?

Don't get me wrong, he was good and proper and did his job, he was also nice (and very young), but I was there for an ADHD and autism screening so I could have an official documented diagnosis and, well, there was quite a bit of gender bias about these disorders... And a significant amount of unconscious ableism too.

I'm already being treated for these things but my current doctors (psychiatrist, psychologist, and GP) don't have expertise in this area because these disorders aren't usually diagnosed in adulthood and that is their field, and this guy is the "expert" so we need his stamp on the matter just to dot the i's.

Turns out we didn't have enough time for all the tests because someone messed up and scheduled this as a follow-up appointment instead of an assessment but we made do. Here's my problem though: he only wanted to focus on the ADHD.

Also, he ignored a lot of details I was trying to put on the table but I might be reading too much into this.

According to him, yes, I definitely have ADHD and it's good that I'm already testing the medication for it but he wants to see what else he can do and if he can fix the side effects, but we didn't really have enough time for a full evaluation so he sent me home with a bunch of written tests to take so he can check them next month and have a more concise idea of my issues.

He also cut some of the older medication I had that is now obsolete with the new stuff.

I'm fine with all that. Grateful even.

But I wanted to talk about the autism diagnosis, I've been trying to approach this with doctors for years, I've desperate to be heard ever since I learned just how strongly the symptoms applied to me every since I was born, I'm been desperate ever since I discovered the gender bias in diagnosing females, I did so much research and talked to other autistic people and associations that gave emotional support, but the doctors keep brushing it off, not because they don't agree but because they literally don't want to talk about autism in general, they don't even wasn't to explain why they don't want to talk about it, the stigma is just too big.

Eventually, this is what this doc said:

"Look, autism is a spectrum and all so it's complicated. You definitely have serious autistic traits for sure but I don't think we should test you for it, there's no point because you're an adult and you've already learned coping mechanisms and masking the hard way, you struggled a lot but you're here, there's really not much else we can do help with and not much treatment we can give for this so why saddle you with a bad label?"

Like, it's so ableist. He totally missed the point? I told him I don't really care about what treatment they can give me, I just want confirmation because:

1. there's safety in labels, much more comforting to know I'm normal zebra and not a failed horse,

2. having the diagnosis gives me access to more information and a better ability to find good coping mechanisms and helpful tools for my daily life,

3. having the diagnosis allows me to find community and get mutual help and support without judgement,

4. having an official diagnosis helps me get certain amenities (or at least understanding) to make my life easier, be it with work or family life, even with social security or at certain events,

5. and finally, just because I survived my childhood without a label and found a way to blend in with neurotypicals doesn't mean that's a good thing (I was horribly bullied and abused for a reason), it doesn't mean that I'm currently happy pretending to be what society expects, doesn't mean it's not fucking exhausting, doesn't mean I don't deserve validation for my struggles.

But noooo, his whole focus was on "we can't medicate to FIX it so why bother" and on "what people would think of you if you had that label".

Bitch, I don't care about either of those, I don't care what people think of me, I care what I think of me, and autistic is not a slur, contrary to what people in this country seem to think! I just want to understand myself and my own struggles, and whenever I get harassed for being different I want to be able to defend myself with this knowledge.

For fucks sake, just test me and show some support!

I stg the doctors in this country are so scared of the word "autism", it's insulting.

[hebezunet]

also, since i am... 100% certain that the chip twitters aren't coming back, i wanna take a few minutes to talk about my experience as a mod for one of the characters (since i doubt it's any surprise that I was one lol)

firstly, i'm not revealing anybodys identities here other than my own, because everyone has fully moved on from the project and don't wanna be assocciated in any way with it anymore. i'm making this post mostly for myself and maybe 2 other people so even if you have inklings of who the other mods are, don't look for them. they will not be happy

with that out of the way-

if it wasn't supremely god damn obvious by this point, i was the most recent mod for bert. from like... what, may 2020? that whole big arc where he got out of the bertputer, that's when i started. definitely a lot of weight on my shoulders with that one.

despite how much i had fun writing for bert though... this whole project was really a nightmare from beginning to end behind the scenes. before we (the new team) could even start actually posting and writing stuff, there was a whole kerfuffle getting the keys (account log in info) from the old team. had to even get david involved for a few things, which we really hated doing just cuz we didn't like bothering him. the old team was also... well, its own thing. i've kinda blocked out most of what happened regarding that but what i do know was that it was very mentally taxing trying to get rid of the old guys and get us logged into the new accounts.

people also certainly had... mixed feelings about the direction we tried to take things in. we were handed a story that was already extremely jacked up with its own weird baggage attached and had to make do with what we could. the story beats set up by the previous team were really hard to work with and we genuinely just did not agree with some of the characterization that was happening. namely bert and otto, they were... something. so, we tried our best to work with it and find justifications or explainations for certain behaviors and actions. i do know for a fact that there were people that did not like what we did with bert, especially. remember seeing stuff saying that we 'aged up' bert for the sole purpose of shipping him with rotten which... is not at all what happened. he was already a grown up character, in his late teens or early 20s, but the previous team had infantilized him to such a degree and for so long that that was just what people knew. we ended up justifying this by basically diagnosing bert with trauma induced age regression. it's a little complicated and a little fuzzy to recall, but that's the intention we were going with, at least.

we did originally have bigger plans for these characters and their arcs and everything, but the team was losing interest and everything surrounding it was genuinely sending some of us into mental crisis. it made us all distance ourselves really far from the project and not wanting to touch chipspeech as a whole with a 10 ft pole. a lot of this stemmed from the sovereign station server too, it was fine like 80% of the time, but shit got weird in there. if you weren't in there then like, good. you've saved yourself the headache. but overall, pretty much everyone has moved on and is doing their own thing now. there's been a few mods that I don't talk to anymore due to other circumstances, but I'm still good friends with a handful of them. they're doing much better now, too.

long story short, the characters just... aren't gonna be coming back, as far as I can tell. it's been pretty obvious due to the 2+ years of radio silence, but just to put the nail in the coffin. i still believe that the twitters are a great springboard for your own interpretations, and that's kind of another reason why we stopped. these characters can honestly be whatever the hell you want them to be. making a rigid sort of canon to apply to them is a little silly, especially when it's a bunch of young adults roleplaying that canon on twitter dot com. do whatever you want. it was a fun enough ride while it lasted.

that being said though, i personally still hold chip near and dear to me. strong interest has definitely faded, but i still like making covers occasionally and drawing the guys and silly stuff like that. i have a lot of myself to thank for chipspeech, and that's not changing, despite the horrors that we faced. thanks for reading all this if you did lol.

and bert is best boy im DYING ON THIS HILL!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[reevezs]

random headcanons dump - Zach&Eric pt.1

//just a bunch of random facts, i've collected in my notes, let's go

Zach has his right ear pierced and usually wears his Mom's diamond earring. when she lost one earring Zach immediately claimed the other one.

he doesn't like wearing chains/pendants while Eric prefers them. Zach wears many bracelets and, guess what, Eric doesn't like those.

more look-related things; as for his go-to hairstyle:

Zach's existence is a constant coffee overdose and he only switches to matcha when he's in Japan.

never liked watching his parents’ movies, but can’t explain why.

he's mildly autistic, diagnosed as an adult. he's always displayed some autistic traits but they had managed to pass under the radar for years.

neither Zach nor Eric has ever smoked or vaped or anything like that, but they wouldn't mind smoking pot because, unlike cigarettes, it smells nice.

Zach's nickname's origin is obviously music-related; he got it from Duran Duran's album Rio and it was the first cassette he asked his parents to buy him when he got his Walkman. it also means "river" in Spanish, which happens to be Eric's middle name.

Eric got his nickname from not just one but a whole bunch of middle names his Mom wanted to choose from - Deveraux, Denver, Devin. the boys just played with those names, shortened and rearranged them, making fun of their Mom's ideas... until one day they realized Zach started actually using some of them.

although it perfectly describes Eric in general, his "Bad Idea" lightbulb tattoo was inspired by his Dad's reaction to the idea of getting inked.

Eric definitely has more clothes than Zach but they're all black so, welp, you can't tell.

[aboutcaseyaffleck]

Casey Affleck Gets Philosophical About Life, Time & The Whole Damn Thing

“Time,” reflects Casey Affleck, “is something I have been thinking about lately. It is ironic how the older you get, the better you are at being patient. With less time left, people become better at waiting. But this year, I feel much older and a lot less patient. I guess you’ve got to accept that time is never wasted? That doing is no different than not doing? That you can’t kill time no matter what you do, and that no matter what you do you can’t prevent the opposite from happening either? I don’t know. It’s a double-edged sword.”

It’s a Wednesday afternoon in early January, and Affleck and I are doing the Zoom thing, ostensibly to discuss his two new movies, the recently released indie Our Friend and the upcoming 19th-century period drama The World to Come. Yet our virtual tête-à-tête has become far more interesting, jumping wildly from his love of trains and travel to weightier topics like family, the future and the search for something more, something meaningful.

“I like the idea that time is an illusion. That past, present and future are all happening at once. I like it even though I can’t totally get my head around it. But either way, the me in the mirror gets older every day.”

Like most of us, he’s not only had plenty of time on his hands in recent months, housebound in L.A., but he’s tried to use his downtime wisely. “I tried to use this year of quarantine constructively,” the 45-year-old Oscar winner says. “I tried to see it as a winter season for shutting down and restoring something inside, but I just couldn’t. I’m not that evolved, I guess. I didn’t take up a new hobby or learn an instrument or get better at ‘self-care.’ If anything, I let my better habits and routines fall off. It was all I could do to keep my head above water and help buoy my friends and children when I could.”

As a guy with two teenagers at home — Indiana, 16, and Atticus, 13 — it hasn’t been easy, but he’s doing his best. He tried taking his sons on their annual camping road trip over the summer, but it was short-lived. Instead, he’s been focusing on making a happy home. “My kids don’t get to see their friends a lot, so I’m doing a lot more stuff with them, coming up with activities for the three of us, which they mostly hate, and I mostly let drop. And then I try again with the same outcome 90 percent of the time.”

While trying to create innovative plans to sustain his boys, he came up with one he thought might do some good, too. In June, he launched Stories from Tomorrow, a social-media initiative focused on creative writing by kids.

“At the beginning of all this last March, the first thing that occurred to me was that the quarantine would have a big impact on young people’s emotional well-being — the disruption they’re going to feel is really going to affect their mental health more than anyone else,” he says. “When I would sit down to write creatively, I felt better. But I couldn’t get my sons to journal or do creative writing much. I didn’t want to twist their arms about it. So I was like, ��I’ll make a social media platform that inspires young people to write creatively, because it is such a good way of working out difficult feelings. And the way I will do that is have well-known people read the kids’ writing publicly.’ I knew that hearing your own writing read was exciting. I thought it would be really inspiring, that creative writing would be a great outlet for kids stuck at home.”

He enlisted some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Robert Redford, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Jon Hamm, Matthew Broderick, Kyle Chandler and Danny Glover, as well as two current costars, Vanessa Kirby and Jason Segel, and arranged for donations made through the program to go to children’s hunger nonprofit Feeding America and Room to Read, which supports female education. He reached out to schools in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Haiti, hoping to create a global community.

Affleck was excited to make progress, to have done some good, but the initiative didn’t take off as planned. “In the end, an Instagram account for creative writing by tweens just couldn’t possibly compete with the quintillion bytes of daily data generated online. I don’t know. But I tried! And anyway, since then lots of other organizations started doing basically the same thing, and they are more organized than I am, and they have done a better job. So be it.”

Yet, adults have been disrupted, too, including Affleck himself, who is aware that, relatively speaking, he has gotten through mostly unscathed. “Am I happy? I mean, I’m relatively okay. It’s been a hard time to find balance and to keep it. I would say it’s been a hard time in my life, but I know that it’s been harder for other folks. So far we haven’t lost anyone, and we haven’t lost our house. And I rediscovered that when you’re feeling bad, there’s nothing better to do than to try to help other people. Being of service not only helps others but is a great way of getting outside of yourself. Also — and I really believe this — I think this time will be remembered as one when our country made leaps and bounds in the right direction; we are changing and growing and it’s uncomfortable, but we will be much, much better. I wish I could see the next couple hundred years. It’s going to be amazing.”

At the end of the day, it’s family that’s keeping him going. “Having my kids around and being able to spend so much time with them has been amazing. It is the brightest silver lining in all of this. They are what gives me the most joy. They are funny and smart and interesting and interested. They are just the best company ever,” he says. “Anytime I try to parent out some ‘teaching moment,’ I find they are two steps ahead. They help me make sense of stuff just as much I help them, if not more. I don’t have any answers, but batting the questions around, back and forth, is a good way of coping.”

CALEB CASEY MCGUIRE AFFLECK-BOLDT feels he is luckier than most. Although he and many of his peers have gone jobless for a full year, he spent 2019 working hard. He had not one but three films done and dusted prior to the start of the pandemic; the last one wrapped a week before mandatory quarantine. Two of these have back-to-back release dates: the tearjerker indie Our Friend came out in January, and sweeping period drama The World to Come will be released February 12. Thriller Every Breath You Take is slated for later this year. “I am so, so, so glad I spent 2019 working that much. It is what kept us afloat all through 2020,” he says.

The films themselves are radically different, but there are a few common threads. In both of his winter releases, Affleck plays a man who has lost a family member and whose marriage is in shambles. In both, he is a man in pain.

In the LGBTQ masterpiece The World to Come, which revolves around the love that blossoms between two married women on the mid-19th-century American frontier, his character, Dyer, says very little but manages to convey a wealth of emotion with his eyes alone. He may seem stoic, but he is suffering.

“The World to Come is a story about a couple who have lost a baby. They’re dealing with the grief in totally different ways and having a very hard time coming together again,” he explains. “My character wants to heal that by having another, but his wife [played by Katherine Waterson] is coping in a different way. She is severing all emotional attachment to him because it triggers more and more grief. She [only] seems to come alive when she is with their neighbor, a woman on the next farm [played by Vanessa Kirby]. He wants his wife happy, but he also would like her to love him. To me, this is the story of how couples can have their relationship shattered by a sudden loss. And it’s definitely a beautiful story about two women who feel that they have to hide their love and find the courage to love each other anyway.”

Affleck likes layers. He himself has many, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he’s drawn to roles written as fully formed characters, not caricatures. With Dyer, that’s abundantly clear. “Crisis is fun to play, [and Dyer] is in an interesting crisis,” he says. “I think he’s a really good person — a really decent, solid, loving person — which is what I loved so much about playing him and what I love so much about the writing. It’s more interesting when there’s no bad guy, just a conflict of circumstances and feelings that get so complicated that it drives two people apart.”

In Our Friend, a different set of circumstances drives the leads apart. Affleck and Dakota Johnson take on the true story of Matthew and Nicole Teague, whose imperfect marriage was strained by his long absences and her affair, neither of which seem at all important when she’s diagnosed with terminal cancer.

“To me, Our Friend is really a story about how petty grievances between people can divide them and then be forgotten when a gigantic tragedy is dropped in their laps. [Matthew] was wronged, it’s true — his wife cheated on him. On the other hand, he wronged her in a bunch of ways; [they] were just more passive and not quite so salacious. He wasn’t around. Matt got to be a dad and he got to travel the world as a journalist. He left her to take care of the kids. She wanted to have a life too, she had dreams of her own — she wanted to be a singer, she wanted to work — but she didn’t get to do that. She just got to be a mom. She was left holding the bag, and it wasn’t fair.”

He spent a fair amount of time immersing himself in the journalist’s life while filming in Fairhope, Ala., in 2019. (The film’s title is taken from Teague’s award-winning Esquire essay, “The Friend: Love Is Not a Big Enough Word.” The friend in question — played by Jason Segel — is a man who puts his life on hold to help the family during their darkest days.) But he did not become Matt Teague, which is an important distinction. “[Director] Gabriella Cowperthwaite asked that we not portray the personality traits of the real people. No accents, no mannerisms. [But] I did steal his style, because I had never seen someone nail the dad look any better than Matt. I say that with affection.”

As for the dreams Nicole gave up for her family, Affleck says, “If you were to ask Matt, I’m sure he would acknowledge that he was neglecting his role. He was neglecting her dreams, and that is a part of marriage, supporting what the other person wants. Like all relationships, it was complicated.”

Like life itself, really. This is why he can identify with both sides. He understands Nicole’s pain about the deference of her dreams as well as Matt’s desire to escape through travel — especially now, when Affleck himself has been completely grounded. Since the age of 17 he’s taken 20 cross-country road trips. His love of driving is secondary only to his enthusiasm for trains: Amtrak is his jam. He even fantasizes about owning his own train car one day.

Immersing himself in each location — whether it’s the sleepy Alabama town of Fairhope or the more exotic locale of Romania, which served as a stand-in for the East Coast of the U.S. in The World to Come — is actually one of the most desirable parts of the acting life, he says. “One of the things I love about working as an actor is that you go to some brand-new place and the community invites you in in a way that they don’t usually if you’re a tourist,” he confides. “You get to see what it’s like to really be there and imagine yourself living there.”

And he has — over the past ten years he’s spent so much time in cities including his hometown of Boston; Vancouver, British Columbia, the location of Light of My Life; Atlanta, where he shot the 2016 action flick Triple 9; Argentina, where he made Gerry; Dallas, for A Ghost Story; Calgary, Alberta, where much of the epic western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was filmed; Our Friend’s Fairhope set; Cincinnati, for The Old Man and the Gun; and Braddock, Pa., where he filmed the 2013 drama Out of the Furnace. “I have loved moving in and settling down and living a character’s life and then moving on. But I feel most at home in places that are struggling to get by. It reminds me of the neighborhood I grew up in. I feel lighter in those places, more relaxed. I feel like myself. I fit in.”

For him, the where is almost as important as the who — immersing himself in the place is imperative to understanding his character. This is part of what makes him such an accomplished actor — he and most of the parts he plays merge. I draw a crappy analogy about how the characters are like a coat, which he very obligingly works with. “You have to build the coat from all of the scraps and pieces of yourself; all these characters are made up of little pieces of me,” he says, noting, “Obviously, sometimes they can’t be. Sometimes I have no connection whatsoever, and those are the jobs I look back on and I either feel nothing for, or worse. But sometimes you have to take the job that is available, like most people in the world. You know? I don’t think my dad wanted to be a janitor. But he did it.”

He’s won an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Critics’ Choice Award, a Golden Globe and an Independent Spirit Award, among others, and appeared in films that run the gamut from box-office juggernauts like the Ocean’s 11 franchise and Tower Heist to indie darlings like brother Ben’s directorial debut Gone Baby Gone and Manchester by the Sea. He has even written and directed, most recently 2019’s Light of My Life, a bizarrely prescient movie about raising children in a pandemic. At this point in his career, he should have his pick of parts. “Not really,” he says. “There are a lot of people out there who have done good work, who are driven, and who have something to share. I have never been someone studios embraced as a ‘movie star,’ never knighted. I have always had to fight for the parts I have gotten. And you know what? That’s fine. Let me fight. It’s how I cut my teeth, and it is how I will keep them sharp. You can’t ask for more than a chance to be in the ring. Also, movies and TV aren’t all I care about. Sometimes I think, ‘Well, jeez, I have to work, and there are two jobs available to me, and the one that isn’t as good is the one that is close to home and I can see the kids, so I guess I am doing that.’ I love movies and really try hard to make them good. I really bust my ass every day when I get the chance to make one. I care more about my family than any movie. It’s not [always] the job I love, but this is the reality of my life. But maybe life will be long enough for a few more chapters.

The forward momentum of his future is an interesting topic. At the moment, he isn’t so much planning for the future as he is exploring it, because Affleck is not someone who likes to live with regret.

“I guess [at the end of the day], regret should be reframed as a reminder to be different,” he observes. And so, with this in mind, he embarked on a personal journey several years ago and decided to go back to college (at the Simon Fraser University in British Columbia). He had completed two years at Columbia University, but he never graduated — his film career kept getting in the way.

“I went back to school because I hadn’t finished, and I wanted to think about new things in a way that school can help you do,” he says. “I couldn’t go in person, so I found a strong online school and got started. You know, I’m 45, and I just thought, ’This is halftime. This is where you hit the locker room and think about how you want the rest of the game to go.’ You know what I mean? Like, ‘Okay, we went out, we played our best, we didn’t know what the other team was going to be like, we made some mistakes, we are in the game, so let’s adjust like this.’ Also, I’m not sure I want to be an actor forever. I had made a small pivot from acting into directing, and into producing more. And I like to direct movies. The most satisfying creative experience I’ve had in a long time was being a director. But ultimately it wasn’t quite enough. So I wanted to go study some of the things I was interested in. I wanted to do more with my life.”

Although he needed general credits to graduate, he found an unexpected passion for juvenile justice along the way, with a particular focus on alternative accountability programs. “I don’t know where this will lead me, or why I am so interested in it, but finding and implementing better systems for addressing harm and conflict among kids, adults too, but mostly young people, is something I care about. And the work that I have done so far has been fascinating and deeply rewarding.”

When I ask if this stems from his own experiences as a troubled kid growing up in Cambridge, Mass., with Christine, a single mom — his parents divorced when he was 9; his father, Timothy, an alcoholic tradesman, checked into a rehab facility in Indio, Calif., when Affleck was just 14 — he muses thoughtfully, “I love my parents and think they both did the very best they could and cared a lot. Period. Did I get into some trouble as a teenager? I got into some trouble when I was a kid, and I struggled a lot through high school with depression and substances, yes. Much of it I didn’t even know wasn’t normal. I don’t know if I was ‘troubled.’ Either way, as an adult, I’ve come to see that, regardless of how I compare to anyone else, I want less conflict in my life. That might be part of the reason why I’ve been so interested in learning about better ways of resolving conflicts, both with children and with grown-ups. It isn’t something they teach in school for some reason. Man, there is a lot they don’t teach you in school, huh? A lot you’ve got to learn on your own.”

And on this journey, mistakes will be made. That’s par for the course, and Affleck is no exception. “I have made so many mistakes, but life is the time for mistakes. I do believe people should hold themselves accountable and repair harm they have caused. That is important to me, and I try hard to do that whenever it is called for: apologize for mistakes and repair them,” he admits.

This is when our conversation, as such conversations are wont to do, comes full circle. Before we say goodbye, Affleck remarks, “You know, I heard Bono talking on Howard Stern’s show, and he said something about Frank Sinatra that was interesting. He said that he heard two versions of Frank singing ‘My Way.’ One version was recorded when Frank was young, and the other version was recorded when Frank was old. Each had the exact same words, same arrangement, same everything. But when Frank was young the line ‘I did it my way’ sounded proud, and when Frank was old it sounded humble. Whatever else time does to a person, I think it also does that.”

[source]

[thelastspeecher]

Hi! So like five months ago I sent you an ask about applying to grad school and you gave me a super amazing answer. And I'm back now because holy shit I got into grad school (CalArts for Creative Writing) and in the last one you said there was a whole 'nothing list of tips if you actually get into grad school? And I got in and I'm curious what the tips are? If there's anything you've learned in the last few months that changed your perspective on grad school? Thank you so much!

First off, congrats!  That’s a big accomplishment!  Grad schools in general are competitive, and big names like CalArts even more so.

So, you want my advice, eh?  Okay.  Let’s do this.

First step is getting organized.  You start in the fall (I’m assuming), so you have plenty of time.  Find out where important locations are on campus, familiarize yourself with the area you’ll be spending most of your time in (I’d focus on figuring out where the closest bathrooms and places to get food are, personally), and invest in a planner.  Keep that planner handy.  Use it.  It’s easier to stay organized if you start the semester that way than it is to try to organize yourself halfway through the semester.  Make a monthly budget.  Decide “I will spend X amount on groceries every time I go shopping”.  Keep track of the money in your bank account (a lot of banks have mobile apps that make this very easy).  Put some of your paycheck into a savings account every time.  You never know when you might need a nest egg.  Stay up to date on your medical needs (prescriptions, flu shots [for the love of god, get a flu shot], dentist appointments, yearly physicals).  You can definitely find resources at your school to help you with some of these tasks.  There is no doubt in my mind that you will be able to find a workshop on keeping a budget or other adult skills.  Attend workshops for new grad students.

Second, look into different support systems for students.  That means student-led organizations, departments that exist to keep the university complying with federal non-discrimination laws, and general resources.  Get a support system set up right away, particularly if you are going to be far from family.

Student-led organizations will be able to help you adjust and provide you a sense of community (particularly if you belong to a minority community).  Other grad students will be able to offer advice faculty or staff might not be able to.  Don’t isolate yourself!  That’s what I’ve been doing and it sucks!  The only reason I haven’t driven myself completely insane is because I have a roommate who happens to be my best friend.  If I could start over, I wouldn’t do what I did and avoid everyone because I was intimidated.  I would stroll into rooms with purpose and confidence that I am the baddest b*tch there.  Confidence gets you far in life, particularly in grad school.

“Departments that exist to keep the university complying with federal non-discrimination laws” is a very wordy way of saying the Title IX office, disability services, offices for students of color (schools typically have different offices for different racial minorities; find out which one is best suited for you), the LGBT resource center, and the like.  If you are part of a demographic minority, find out where you can locate help immediately.  If something goes wrong related to your status as a minority, you need to nip it in the bud RIGHT AWAY.

General resources are things like mental health services, university health services, survivor services, etc etc.  If you have any history of mental health issues or have been in therapy at any point in your life, I recommend jumping into counseling immediately, even if you feel like you don’t need it.  Just talking to a neutral party will help you more than you think.  Most schools offer free counseling for students, too.  If they don’t, then that’s really fucking weird, but they should be able to help you figure out a method for you to adjust smoothly without it being too much of a drain on your wallet.

Third, learn from my mistakes.  Good lord, learn from my mistakes.  I had a disastrous first semester at grad school.  I was overwhelmed, completely out of my depth, and the one thing I thought I was doing right I discovered I was actually completely fucking up.  I entered my second semester on academic probation and probation as a TA.  How do you learn from my mistakes?  A few ways.

The first time you TA (most grad students TA at some point), insist on someone observing you.  The department should automatically observe all TAs, particularly new ones, but it’s possible to slip through the cracks.  That happened to me.  The head TA was too busy to observe TAs my first semester, and I didn’t find out that I was a shitty TA until I was in a meeting with department and university head honchos, who were effectively accusing me of hating my students and hating being a TA and sucking in general.  That’s paraphrasing, and definitely not completely accurate, but that’s how the meeting felt to me.  I got by only because I explained to them “I am autistic, I struggle with new social situations”.  The extenuating circumstances in my situation allowed me to try to TA again, but this time with some accommodations and outside assistance.

Related: If you are disabled, disclose it to the department.  Disclose it to the higher-ups and the professor who will act as your advisor.  You don’t need to disclose it to anyone else, but I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to tell the people you will be working for.  Even if you have amazing coping skills, disclose it.  I’m damn good at pretending to be abled.  But my disabilities still bit me in the ass.  New situations and stress have a tendency of exacerbating symptoms.  You can’t expect everything to go smoothly.  And you can’t expect the department to hold your hand or even recognize what’s going on with you.  I’m the first diagnosed autistic grad student my department has ever had.  They had no clue how to handle that.  You’ll be going into a field that tends to be a bit more liberal than STEM (like my area of study), so you might not run into the issue of “uh we don’t know how to help you, please talk to some people at the office of equity”, but it’s best to find out sooner rather than later.

Related: If you are disabled, get your ass down to the disability services office and get accommodations.  Immediately.  Start the process over the summer.  Larger schools might have a more complicated process to get accommodations than smaller schools, so you need to get the ball rolling right away.  Even if you haven’t felt like you needed accommodations recently, get the ones you had in the past.  Don’t assume you’ll be fine without extra help.

Don’t take too many classes your first semester.  And make sure the ones you do take aren’t all super difficult.  I fucked up my first semester, bc I took three upper-level classes, two of them in chemistry.  Yeah, three doesn’t sound like much.  But when you’re juggling adjusting to grad school, starting up your thesis, and being a TA, three classes is a huge fucking amount of work.  I’d recommend two classes, maybe one of them difficult, the other one sort of medium difficulty.  Of course, you have to talk to your advisor for what works best for you, but I highly HIGHLY recommend starting off with a light class load your first semester.

When things start going south, bc they probably will at some point, don’t just keep your head down and try to force yourself through it.  Talk to the family members you are closest to (I’m very close with my parents, so I talk to them when I’m having issues, but it could be a sibling or an aunt or uncle or cousin).  Talk to friends.  Talk to a counselor (PLEASE get a counselor your first semester).  Talk to your advisor.  Talk to the other grad students in your department.  You should be able to find at least one shoulder to cry on, if not a whole bunch.

I said this before, but don’t isolate yourself.  Please don’t.  It’s easy to avoid people when you’re stressed.  Don’t do that.  Reach out to other grad students in your department.  Make friends.  Go with them to coffee shops.  I wouldn’t recommend starting out by going to bars, bc that can be a slippery slope, and you shouldn’t have friends who only have fun while they’re drinking (that’s not a healthy behavior).   My grad school has a really nasty drinking culture that contributed to my avoidance of other grad students, but hopefully yours doesn’t.  And even if it does, you should be able to find someone who won’t want to always go to the bar.

Fourth, be confident.  I said that before, but like the “don’t isolate” thing, it’s important.  I’ve always been a confident person.  I took a huge blow to my confidence when I started grad school, bc I felt like I was surrounded by people with more experience (which is an objective fact, but doesn’t always have to be a bad thing) and more knowledge and more accomplishments and who had their lives together.  I was intimidated, for one of the first times in my life!  I’ve always been a top-tier person, cream of the crop, A+ honors student, go-getter, award-winner.  But in grad school, literally everyone else is that, too.  And that’s not a bad thing!  Sure, some people might be braggy, but other people will be more humble.  Having all this experience in one location is good, bc it means you have more help.  You have people you can talk to who have connections, who have run into problems you might run into, who can offer a unique perspective on things.  That is SO GOOD.  And if you’re still intimidated, think of it like this: You got there, too.  You’re just as good as the other grad students, otherwise you wouldn’t be there.  You have just as much potential, even if you don’t have as much life experience.  You have something unique to offer to the school.  If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have been accepted.  And it’s not like everyone else actually has it together.  Some people might, but most of the other students will be as lost and nervous as you (esp other first year students).

Fifth, toot your own horn.  It’s related to being confident, but not quite the same.  Talk about your accomplishments.  Tell people what you’ve done.  Try not to come off too braggy, but don’t hide your light under a bushel.  You have to promote yourself if you want to get anywhere.  You’ve already succeeded at it once, since you got into grad school.  Keep it up!  Oh, and don’t be afraid to toot your own horn when someone else is making you feel intimidated.  I was at a thing where one guy kept going on and on about how he’d been to this country, and that country, and tried this wine and that food and yadda yadda yadda.  I got sick of it, so I cocked my head and stopped him in his tracks by asking him if he’d ever been to Kosovo.  He hadn’t.  He’d been to a million places, but there was one that I had him beaten on.  That was a huge confidence booster.  You have your unique experiences.  Share them.  And don’t be afraid to use them to stop a braggart from controlling a conversation.

Sixth, stay healthy.  Mentally and physically.  Walk most places (that’s how I get my exercise), bike, do yoga, jog, whatever.  Get some exercise.  Eat well.  Make your own meals, keep track of whether you’ve had a vegetable today.  See a counselor, vent to friends, write in a journal.  Most schools offer wellness workshops where students can learn how to keep themselves healthy.  Look into that, particularly if you struggle to eat well or keep stress down.

Seventh, take a short break if you need to.  Grad school culture is intense.  People work way too long for way too little recognition.  Stress kills.  Burn out can make you question your path.  Say no to a third side project your advisor wants you to do.  Take a day off, or an afternoon.  Take a long weekend.  Make sure that things won’t fall apart while you’re gone (in my case, I would get lab work done the day before), let your advisor know you won’t be coming in today for health reasons (you can keep it vague), and then spend your day doing anything but work on your thesis.  Don’t give in to stress and burn out.  It will wreck you.

Eighth, enjoy yourself!  Grad school can be hell, but it can also be fun!  You’re here to learn and gain experience and, hopefully, not hate every second of it.  My own grad school experience has been roughly 92% hell and 8% fun, but I wasn’t prepared when I came.  I did the opposite of hit the ground running.  I tripped and skinned my knees and my face and I’m still trying to catch up with everyone else.  Being prepared, reaching out to people who can help you adjust, those things will ensure your grad school experience goes more smoothly than mine.  Just don’t expect everything to go perfectly right off the bat.  It’ll take some time before you feel like you truly can enjoy yourself.

…That ended on a weird note, but I hope it was helpful.

You’ve got this!  Best of luck!

[ameliabaggs]

Embarrassing admission:  I’m a savant.  Stick with me and I’ll explain, but it’ll take awhile.

Understand that I’m not saying this to brag.  This is not easy for me to admit to myself, let alone anybody else.  It’s taken me over a year to write this.It’s actually as difficult for me to discuss this as it is for me to discuss the fact that I actually have coprolalic vocal tics.  In fact autistic people’s discussions of savant skills often resemble Touretters’ discussion of coprolalia:  There’s a tendency to try to make out like they’re much rarer than they are.  

About 10% of Touretters are thought to have coprolalia, that is vocal tics that sometimes involve involve swearing or other offensive words (like slurs).  It’s embarrassing to Touretters as a whole because to a lot of people Tourette’s is like a punchline to a joke about cussing.  Similarly, about 10% of autistic people are thought to have savant skills (I suspect the number is higher), and autistic people are just as embarrassed by the fact that savant skills have become a stereotype.  10% is one in ten people. That’s not actually the tiny minority that people would have you think it is.  And I do believe savant skills are under-reported for reasons I’ll get into later.

Some background about myself

I was first recognized as being autistic at the age of fourteen.  I was in a mental institution following a suicide attempt, at the psychiatrist I got was randomly assigned.  In other words, he had no reason to be specifically looking for or expecting autism when I first became his patient.  I would remain his patient until his retirement and subsequent death in my twenties.

Anyway, after he met me, he asked to meet with my parents.  My mother describes him interviewing her extensively about my early development, asking pointed questions about certain things.  She said he very quickly said of me, “Your daughter sounds like an idiot savant.”

A note on terminology

Idiot savant sounds outdated or downright rude, depending on your take on things.  Even in 1995 when this was taking place.  To understand what he was saying, you have to understand the history of terminology around savant skills as well as his own personal history.

So first off -- my doctor was old.  He was trained and did his residency at a time when Southern mental institutions were still fully and officially segregated by race.  His age and specialty in child psychiatry meant that he had met a lot of children over the years, including a lot of autistic children.  It also meant that he used a lot of terminology that would at best be considered quite old-fashioned today, because he learned his clinical vocabulary in probably the early sixties.

Idiot savant does not mean a specific type of savant.  It has nothing to do with the outdated classification of idiot which usually meant what today would be referred to as a severe and/or profound intellectual disability.  There was never an IQ cutoff for being an idiot savant.  Idiot savant meant “wise idiot” and was meant to cover the unevenness of cognitive skills that was characteristic of cognitively disabled people with savant skills.

So him saying I was an “idiot savant” would be the same way that someone today would say “Your daughter has savant syndrome.”  He was not making a judgement about my IQ, which at the time had only tested as high, at the age of five, largely due to the effects of hyperlexia, a learning disability involving early reading ability usually combined with comprehension issues, that is in some contexts itself considered a form of savant skill.

People talked about idiot savants, and then it became autistic savants (except that this term would only be applied to autistic people, who are not the only people with savant skills), and these days it’s savant syndrome. You don’t need a cognitive impairment of any kind (such as autism or intellectual disability) to be a savant:  There are a lot of blind savants, for instance.  Today people mostly just say savant or savant syndrome.  

But definitely understand that idiot savant was its own term, separate from both low IQ/intellectual disability in general and the classification of idiot in particular. In fact, very few people identified as savants throughout history, including when the term idiot savant existed, have ever fallen into the official classification of idiot or any of the terms that replaced it.  

The confusion people have about the technical term idiot savant (mistakenly relating it to idiot in particular or intellectual disability in general) is very similar to the confusion over the term psychomotor retardation.  Psychomotor retardation refers to a mental and physical slowing associated with certain medication side effects as well as a number of conditions such as depression.  It has absolutely nothing to do with the category called mental retardation, a recent but now outdated term for intellectual disability.  They both have the word retardation in them because it means slow, but they refer to entirely different types of (purported) slowness.

Back to my own history

So he called me an idiot savant before he even used the word autistic to describe me.  Both words came up in the first few sentences of that conversation, but idiot savant was the term that came up first.  Savant skills were the first unusual thing he recognized in me.  Within a month, after further interviews, conversations, interaction, observation, and formal testing, as well as consultation with a team of psychiatric and neurologic professionals, he diagnosed me with autism.  Within the description of my diagnosis, he mentioned idiot savant qualities.

The actual autism diagnosis happened in a way that was extremely common in the nineties.  He knew that I met the full criteria for autism.  He told my mother I was simply autistic.  But in the nineties, saying someone was autistic was equivalent to saying “This person will never improve, all therapy is wasted, don’t spend any more money on them than it takes to permanently institutionalize them.”  He knew it would be terrible if the insurance company took this take on me -- which they were already trying to do without that encouragement.  So on paper, he alternated between saying I had a complex and diagnostically confusing developmental disability, and saying I specifically had PDDNOS or atypical autism.  Using PDDNOS/atypical autism as a substitute for a flat-out autism diagnosis was extremely common in the 1990s and had nothing to do with whether you actually met full criteria for autism.  

My diagnosis was changed to autistic disorder later on by the same doctor, after the danger had passed and an autism expert had suggested making the change but suggested I go back to the psychiatrist who knew me the best to confirm that this was an accurate thing to do, since the expert in question did not know my family or have years of observation and testing to go on, whereas my psychiatrist did.  This was after a bunch of misdiagnoses that would take way too long to explain but that were also quite common in the nineties, in fact some of them were among the most common psychiatric misdiagnoses of autistic people.

The savant thing

So... at the time of my autism diagnosis, autism was an abstraction, and a word I did not understand how it applied to my life.  Words like ‘underlying developmental disability’ and ‘pervasive developmental disorder’ and really anything with ‘developmental’ in it might as well have been gibberish.  Even when I heard these things over and over, most of the time I ignored them.  I’d occasionally read a book by Donna Williams or Temple Grandin, identify to one degree or another, but not grasp what autism was any better for having read these things.  And most of the time, while others in my life apparently thought about this diagnosis a good deal, I didn’t.  The savant stuff was way under my radar most of the time as well.

I was an adult before I understood why I was diagnosed with autism.  I was also an adult before I really saw that I’d been labeled as having savant skills or savant qualities, and before my mother told me the story of my initial diagnosis. And to be honest, I mostly ran away from the label, inside my head, and neither said much about it nor thought about it any more than I had to.

Like many autistic people, I was conscious that the popularity of Rain Man had caused people to view autism as inevitably involving savant skills.  Being a savant had become a stereotype.  And Rain Man was an unusually talented savant.  Most savants have neither his degree of savant skills nor his sheer number of savant skills.  He was based on a small number of real people, most notably Kim Peek, who had agenesis of the corpus calosum and a huge number of highly impressive savant skills.

Like many other autistic people, I was very critical of the concept of savant skills.  I thought it was just a way of passing off talents as somehow unexpected or pathological or both, when they happened in disabled people.  I thought it was just a shorthand for giftedness, a concept I have a great deal of trouble accepting as real or useful, at least not as it’s currently defined.  And in many cases it has been used in these ways and autistic people are correct to be suspicious and critical.

And honestly I was afraid of it.  For reasons I still can’t articulate, it really terrified me to face the idea that I might be a savant for real.  But as I discovered, I am.

What kinds of savant are there?

One of the things that had me confused about savant skills was that, like many  people, when I think of savant skills, I think of the most extreme skills.  Those are also the rarest kind of savant skills.  Prodigious savants, as such people are called, are uncommon.  They have never been the most common kind of savant at any stage in the development of the idea of savants in general.

So here are the modern, official classifications of savant.  Remember here that I don’t make up the words for each kind of savant skills and may not  like  them.

Splinter skills are the least spectacular kind of savant skill.  They represent talents that are highly impressive specifically when compared with the cognitive difficulties the person has in other areas.  They are very common among savants.

Talented savants are savants with talents that are likewise in contrast the person’s difficulties, but they would very obviously be things the person would be considered talented for regardless of disability or lack thereof. They are also pretty common among savants.

Prodigious savants are the rarest kinds of savants.  They are people who have skills that would be considered not only highly talented but well beyond the range most people even consider humanly possible for someone to have a skill in.  Like the way Stephen Wiltshire can fly over a city once and then do a detailed and almost entirely accurate sketch of he entire panoramic view from memory.

Knowing these categories, I can see that I have a lot of splinter skills and sometimes veer into the realm of talented savant.  This is a much better representation of my areas of talent than te concept of giftedness in general is, because the the term savant refers to a talent in a relatively narrow area surrounded by areas of great difficulty.  That contrast has been a fact of life for me forever.  Like back when my hyperlexia gained me a high IQ at a time when I literally didn’t know what the word test meant.

Hyperlexia is something that’s sometimes considered a savant skill and sometimes not.  In my case, I feel like it is, because it’s an extreme and isolated talent that came seemingly out of nowhere and that is accompanied by extreme cognitive difficulties in areas that most people would assume to be related to the areas of talent.

I also had musical savant skills.  Perfect pitch is another thing that’s considered a savant skill some of the time and not others.  But the fact that I was first chair, first violin in the junior high orchestra by the age of seven, I can’t read that as anything other than an obvious foray into the realm of talented savant.

Up until I was in my early twenties, I had a spatial (not visual -- closer to kinesthetic, or the way blind people map space) map in my head of every place I had ever been, indoors or outdoors.  I never got lost.  Ever.  I don’t know why I lost this but while I had it, I can’t see it as anything but a savant skill.  My mother, who has severe spatial awareness problems (she’s very visual -- she and I are opposite kinds of proof that visual and spatial are not the same skill), has used me as a navigator since I was a small child,

I also have something that I feel like must be extremely common and not usually recognized at all.  I would call it a partial savant skill.  It’s a skill that isn’t quite a skill because it has no outlet.  I am constantly composing detailed, complex, original cello music without even trying.  But with no way to play it in realtime, and no way to write it down (translating to musical notes is a laborious, slow process for me), the music remains in my head and never shared with the world.  So I don’t know that this counts as a “real”savant skill by objective measures, but it feels like a savant skill with a  crucial piece missing.  I wonder how many people have partial and/or unexpressed savant skills like this.

I think my art (specifically, painting in recent years) falls somewhere in the category of either splinter skill or talented savant skill.  Which may always be a subjective thing, and it’s difficult to judge the quality of your own work.  But this has less to do with some objective measure of quality, and more to do with the way in which the art takes place and the way the skill developed and functions.  Savant skills are more than just the presence of an unexpected skill, there’s specific ways they are learned and function in a person that mark them out as different from your average talent of the same level.

And people do hide their savant skills sometimes, even when they are obvious savant skills.  I am not open about all of my savant skills.  Additionally, not all savant skills are in areas where people normally look for savant skills.  The current savant experts focus almost entirely on certain areas for savant skills, to the exclusion of other skill areas.  

Additionally, many disabled people develop skills that are entirely unknown to nondisabled people and therefore unmeasured and not accounted for in descriptions of possible savant skills.  It is entirely possible, in fact probably common, for people to have savant skills in these unmeasured skill areas.  I am no exception to this.   I have savant skills I can’t even describe because nobody has ever acknowledged the existence of the skills in question never mind come up with language for them.

Anyway, I eventually realized it was important that I face the fact that I have savant skills.  It’s more than a little embarrassing.  It’s not something I wanted to admit to myself.  I’ve spent over a year agonizing about how to articulate what I’d found out about myself.  As well as whether to tell anyone about it at all.

I know a lot of people don’t believe savant skills are a thing.  I have read several books on the topic and concluded that they are a thing.  And that they apply to my life.  I’m not capable of explaining all the details.  And calling something a savant skill is and should be very different than just a way of saying that someone disabled has a talent or qualifies for some definitions of giftedness.  (In fact, I don’t believe in any common concept of giftedness that I’ve ever heard of.  I do, however, now believe in savant skills.  They’re entirely different ideas.)

Anyway, I can’t explain why this was so hard to believe, herd to face up to, and hard to admit.  But it was.  I still can’t escape the fact that I have savant skills, and I’m better off not trying to escape or deny it any longer.  I have to admit that the doctor who first categorized me as autistic was right about the savant thing as well.  As I said, i’m not bragging.  I’m simply publicly admitting that my combination of skills and difficulties -- both current and past, since some skills have vanished and others have appeared over time -- fits the savant pattern perfectly, both in areas that are usually widely recognized as common savant skills and in areas they would never even notice.