u/marrowbuster

I'm 24 and about to turn 25 at the end of this year.

I was born to folks who didn't sort out their own traumas and it had a pretty severe impact on the way I was raised. I was diagnosed autistic very early on and it's not fun.

I've had lifelong difficulties with making and maintaining friends, sociability, motivation, passion, and doing anything intellectually stimulating. Over the years I was diagnosed with a whole alphabet soup of mental conditions. I very much feel mentally disabled by them all.

The various ways it's manifested behaviourally have really set me back in terms of development and mental ability.

I've been on various medications to try to mitigate them all and they've never helped. My whole life I've felt like a dispassionate zombie.

I see so many others my age with stable careers, friends, and a very high quality of life. I only have a few friends that I hardly ever meet up with.

I did go to college yes. But it took every spare kJ of energy I had and left me sorely burnt out. Concepts came tougher to me than others.

I also was a daily weed user for around 3 years. I've given it up entirely now until I have my brain back.

I've been unmedicated for the past 6 months thinking I could white knuckle it but I can't. I sink deeper into depression; I have psychiatry appointments lined up but with my prior medication experiences I don't know if it'll work. I don't want to be a zombie again.

I did have a job adjacent to my field of study but was let go because I couldn't keep up. Other than that the application count is around 500 and I don't see any sign of alleviation any time soon.

This really is no way to live.

Clinic said it would take 10-15 days for insurance to approve but it was done in 3. First appointment in a month from now to get a current reading of my brain.

It's primarily for depression and residual OCD symptoms. But I also made sure to give my full ass psychiatric history, specific goals I wish to achieve, and what my concerns are. Clinic I'm with was even recommended by my psychiatrist so I know I'm in good hands.

I want my life back and hopefully this is the first step towards that.

I'm 24 years old and have been diagnosed with a whole alphabet soup of treatment-resistant neurological conditions. Some went into remission on their own but others still require intervention.

That's where I sought out TMS therapy. Right now just waiting on insurance approval (they should with all the medications I was previously on) and once that's done I'll be scheduled for 5 days a week for 6 weeks.

I'm really hoping this will provide lasting benefits as my quality of life, mental health, and cognitive flexibility relative to my education level objectively just suck right now.

You can't even tell it's CGI anymore; it fits in so well with the otherwise 2D animation. It's so seamless. It genuinely looks almost as if they were able to take otherwise 2D paintings and somehow give them coherent 3D perspective.

It contrasts so much with the CGI of the TV series. It worked, but you could tell it was somewhat "out of place" with respect to the 2D animation. Not this time. You really can tell a lot of effort and passion went into such.

It's just very delightful to see such vast improvements since I've been watching a lot of 2D/3D animated movies made over the years and seen how far the technology has progressed.

My siblings and I adored the original ATLA as a kid, and then we heard about TLoK. I remember the first time seeing it I was blown away by the action, animation, and very intense scenes.

I rewatched it this time around now that I'm 24 and wiser. Many of the more social parts of the show get a little uncomfortable to watch, especially when they involve Bolin, Bumi, or Tenzin's kids. It clearly is a show made for older children to young teens.

At the same time, the way it portrays its much darker aspects is really captivating. Especially regarding loss of identity and ability, dangerous individuals who wish to do serious harm, resistance against imperialist military conquest, and the arduous path to recovery after life-changing physical and mental injury, the last of which I personally relate to.

It absolutely could be better in my opinion, yet at the same time, what it does do well it does *really* well.

What I would really love is if Avatar Studios did an Andor-esque show but that will probably never happen.

Sounds a little quiet and lo-fi tho.

I wonder when they'll port over other features like the disability announcement, the male voices, and Megan Rapinoe's updates. They could also update the screens from the old LED matrices to modern LCDs. Either way, it's interesting to see these old rust buckets be modernised.

Either way I'm beyond happy I can consider the train as part of my commute, as lengthy as it is.

I'm 24 and for the longest time I never really took programming seriously outside of college, I was a heavy gamer yet rather studious person for most of my life focusing primarily on academic performance. But college was uniquely brutal and left me burnt out for quite a bit. There are reasons for this.

I'm a computer engineer in name only. I have my degree and a lot of esoteric knowledge about what I've learnt but not much real-world experience in such, nor how to really apply it; right now I am just a data engineer. My knowledge of what I've learnt is very fragmented. I envy the brains of many folks I attended college with. I know I shouldn't compare myself to others, but I felt very much like a black sheep and I'm stubborn enough to continuously covet what they have.

I was considered "smart" but turns out this was relative to just being born into a family full of abject idiots. I was diagnosed autistic early on into a family that didn't really understand it and there was a lot of ableism and abuse. This of course led to many mental health issues growing up and various medications for it that I feel I could have gone without.

I thought I had ADHD but turns out I might have Cognitive Disengagement Syndrome, or some other issue with cognitive tempo.

More recently though, I have been diagnosed with sleep apnea. The combination of all of these issues can have a number of lasting impacts on the developing brain, regarding critical thinking, cognition, attention and focus, stress responses, emotional regulation, mindfulness, synthesis and application of higher-level abstract concepts, and other important faculties.

I have proper treatment now. I have CPAP. I discontinued antidepressants and antipsychotics. I have Vyvanse. I run every day. And I actually feel my cognition beginning to sharpen, with regards to working with my company's tools, learning difficult languages like Scala and C++, being able to network and socialise a lot more now, and endure my commute. I'm downsizing on a lot and clearing up my physical and digital existences because there's a lot I need to just get rid of. I'm in frequent communication with my doctors. All in all, I just want my brain redeveloped so I can eventually be cracked like some folks are, and actually be able to translate my ideas into reality for once in my goddamn life.

I'll let you know how all of this goes in due time.

I kinda am tired of living like this. I was severely abused for being an autistic person pretty much my entire childhood and had undiagnosed sleep apnea up until 3 months ago. From my teens up until recently I was on various medications to manage the mental health conditions induced by it. It first was Prozac and Risperdal at age 15, and then Cymbalta and Risperdal from 15 to 19, then Paxil and Adderall from 19 to 20, Then Zoloft and Wellbutrin from 20 to 21, then Zoloft and Ritalin from 21 to 22, then discontinued all medications for a time, then got back on Zoloft and Strattera from 23 to 24, then a short stint of a small amount of Abilify along with the Zoloft and Strattera at 24. Now I have discontinued all previous medications a few months ago, and also got on CPAP a few months ago, but also started Vyvanse 1 month ago. Still 24.

The Vyvanse does help me be studious and locked in at work and feel somewhat alive but that's about it. I have a lot of interests I wish to engage with and things to learn, but doing them feels less like something I'm genuinely interested and passionate in and more like something I force myself to do to try to carve out a better life for myself.

I don't know if it's depression, anhedonia, schizoid personality disorder, or some other developmental imperilment where my ability to really engage in anything and find genuine engrossment is just gone.

I need treatment but I don't wanna get drugged again. I don't want to just pop another pill and be gaslit into thinking everything is okay when it actually isn't.

Yes I still am able to engage in work and my hobbies but I just do them kinda ambiently as obligation rather than genuine heartfelt passion.

I've started running every day to heal my brain in that regard. I hope to see results soon. What else would you guys recommend?

I kinda am tired of living like this. I was severely abused for being an autistic person pretty much my entire childhood and had undiagnosed sleep apnea up until 3 months ago. From my teens up until recently I was on various medications to manage the mental health conditions induced by it. It first was Prozac and Risperdal at age 15, and then Cymbalta and Risperdal from 15 to 19, then Paxil and Adderall from 19 to 20, Then Zoloft and Wellbutrin from 20 to 21, then Zoloft and Ritalin from 21 to 22, then discontinued all medications for a time, then got back on Zoloft and Strattera from 23 to 24, then a short stint of a small amount of Abilify along with the Zoloft and Strattera at 24. Now I have discontinued all previous medications a few months ago, and also got on CPAP a few months ago, but also started Vyvanse 1 month ago. Still 24.

The Vyvanse does help me be studious and locked in at work and feel somewhat alive but that's about it. I have a lot of interests I wish to engage with and things to learn, but doing them feels less like something I'm genuinely interested and passionate in and more like something I force myself to do to try to carve out a better life for myself.

I don't know if it's depression, anhedonia, schizoid personality disorder, or some other developmental imperilment where my ability to really engage in anything and find genuine engrossment is just gone.

I need treatment but I don't wanna get drugged again. I don't want to just pop another pill and be gaslit into thinking everything is okay when it actually isn't.

Yes I still am able to engage in work and my hobbies but I just do them kinda ambiently as obligation rather than genuine heartfelt passion.

I've started running every day to heal my brain in that regard. I hope to see results soon. What else would you guys recommend?

I'm a junior data engineer working with AWS and decided to try learning Scala because I heard it has better performance and less runtime overhead than using Python. However I'm being increasingly cautioned against it with how Java and Kotlin have integrated many FP features, how many projects are transitioning away from it, and even though it can utilize JVM libraries, the Scala ecosystem and talent base are quite small.

Furthermore, I do see a lot of potential with its expansive feature-rich type system capable of powerful metaprogramming, but this seems a little... far-fetched for the work I'm currently doing.

It's not fun. This was the early 2000s and I was diagnosed at age 2. Dad had been a lifelong Catholic coming from a then-least-developed nation and Mom had converted not that long ago as a means of trying to find meaning and spirituality, likely after all the horrific mistreatment she endured being a poor Black woman. And in retrospect, it seems a lot of their traumas very often leaked out in the way I was parented.

Catholicism very heavily insinuates that we're all spiritually contaminated or otherwise fundamentally flawed which is why bad things happen to us, and that we must endlessly grovel, ask for forgiveness, prove piety, do charitable acts, pray, seek advice from faith leaders, or otherwise perform some ruminative ritualistic action.

Autistic people are also very often treated as if the way they are is fundamentally flawed. This is the source of many "treatments" that amount to not much more than teaching the autistic person to deprioritise their needs, sometimes even bordering on being straight-up dog training. In many cases, even dogs are treated better. Comorbidities such as OCD and increased tendency for rumination can make this so much worse. So I was living with a double whammy of "there is something fundamentally wrong with you" from both my caregivers and the faith they subscribed me to against my will.

Pumping one's neurodivergent kids full of spiritual jumbo jumbo like this before their cognitive faculties and critical thinking are fully developed is a recipe for disaster. Certainly was in my case. I was taught that God watches what we think, do, and wish or pray for. It led to a lot of anguish about my intrusive thoughts somehow having some profound irreversible act upon the universe that must endlessly be negated, and I certainly had my own methods for it. It induces so much unnecessary mental fatigue.

It wasn't just mandatory church attendance but also rosaries, acts of consecration, having to do CCD and youth group, EWTN and other religious media, and even church-offered programs like track-and-field, cross country, and faith healing. Lord knows the impact that this all had on my developing brain. Very little time was spent by my folks actually understanding autism; they just got me diagnosed and from there I was pretty much treated like a project to be managed. I will not accept the excuse of "we didn't know" as this continued into the late 2010s for me. So much research, technological advancement, and new modalities of understanding but they just buried their head in the sand.

Eventually at the age of 13 the inconsistencies began piling up and that's when I threw it off all together. My dad responded by taking away internet access every Sunday I didn't go to church, but if I did want to use my computer I had to waste an hour of my life daydreaming and trying to block out the grating homilies and sermons. Not to mention I still had to go to youth group. Punishing your kids for not subscribing to your archaic beliefs is abuse regardless of intent. This went on until I was 16.

I still do remember all of the arguments I had with my folks about their faith and how they would endlessly try to drag me back, gaslight me, and insist they were right. It was all the same talking points people have been making for centuries that basic logic would blow to smithereens, but they didn't have logic. I was just straight up parented by absolute idiots :(

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I could talk for a thousand hours about it all, and the other things that happened such as being taken to faith-oriented "mental health specialists" who prescribed me the wrong medications and therapies in my late teens, the residual superstitious thinking I had even after I threw off religion, the long neglected health issues and sensory needs I was told to "offer up to God", and other perversions that have a number of impacts on the developing brain, regarding critical thinking, cognition, attention and focus, emotional regulation, mindfulness, and other important faculties.

All in all, it led to lots of burnout, missed opportunities, mental health issues, resentment of my folks, and barely getting through college and being able to hold down my job. I'm getting better and better at it now that I have proper treatment modalities to restore my brain, but still. My folks should just be glad they still have a son that survived all this. Many wouldn't; many of us develop PTSD from it (I certainly did) and it's one of the many factors why the autistic self-inflicted mortality rate is so high.

I'm 24 now yet I feel like I'm 54 with all that I have had to endure. The only thing that really challenged my folks' faith was when my mother was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia and had to undergo rigorous treatment for it, which left my dad severely burnt out. I had been so desensitised by all that I had to endure that I just didn't feel anything. The very fact that it only took something as severe as that for them to radically change their relationship with their faith despite all my repeated pleas once upon a time makes me really sad.

Massive fuckin sigh.

It's not fun. This was the early 2000s and I was diagnosed at age 2. Dad had been a lifelong Catholic coming from a then-least-developed nation and Mom had converted not that long ago as a means of trying to find meaning and spirituality, likely after all the horrific mistreatment she endured being a poor Black woman. And in retrospect, it seems a lot of their traumas very often leaked out in the way I was parented.

Catholicism very heavily insinuates that we're all spiritually contaminated or otherwise fundamentally flawed which is why bad things happen to us, and that we must endlessly grovel, ask for forgiveness, prove piety, do charitable acts, pray, seek advice from faith leaders, or otherwise perform some ruminative ritualistic action.

Autistic people are also very often treated as if the way they are is fundamentally flawed. This is the source of many "treatments" that amount to not much more than teaching the autistic person to deprioritise their needs, sometimes even bordering on being straight-up dog training. In many cases, even dogs are treated better. Comorbidities such as OCD and increased tendency for rumination can make this so much worse. So I was living with a double whammy of "there is something fundamentally wrong with you" from both my caregivers and the faith they subscribed me to against my will.

Pumping one's neurodivergent kids full of spiritual jumbo jumbo like this before their cognitive faculties and critical thinking are fully developed is a recipe for disaster. Certainly was in my case. I was taught that God watches what we think, do, and wish or pray for. It led to a lot of anguish about my intrusive thoughts somehow having some profound irreversible act upon the universe that must endlessly be negated, and I certainly had my own methods for it. It induces so much unnecessary mental fatigue.

It wasn't just mandatory church attendance but also rosaries, acts of consecration, having to do CCD and youth group, EWTN and other religious media, and even church-offered programs like track-and-field, cross country, and faith healing. Lord knows the impact that this all had on my developing brain. Very little time was spent by my folks actually understanding autism; they just got me diagnosed and from there I was pretty much treated like a project to be managed. I will not accept the excuse of "we didn't know" as this continued into the late 2010s for me. So much research, technological advancement, and new modalities of understanding but they just buried their head in the sand.

Eventually at the age of 13 the inconsistencies began piling up and that's when I threw it off all together. My dad responded by taking away internet access every Sunday I didn't go to church, but if I did want to use my computer I had to waste an hour of my life daydreaming and trying to block out the grating homilies and sermons. Not to mention I still had to go to youth group. Punishing your kids for not subscribing to your archaic beliefs is abuse regardless of intent. This went on until I was 16.

I still do remember all of the arguments I had with my folks about their faith and how they would endlessly try to drag me back, gaslight me, and insist they were right. It was all the same talking points people have been making for centuries that basic logic would blow to smithereens, but they didn't have logic. I was just straight up parented by absolute idiots :(

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I could talk for a thousand hours about it all, and the other things that happened such as being taken to faith-oriented "mental health specialists" who prescribed me the wrong medications and therapies in my late teens, the residual superstitious thinking I had even after I threw off religion, the long neglected health issues and sensory needs I was told to "offer up to God", and other perversions that have a number of impacts on the developing brain, regarding critical thinking, cognition, attention and focus, emotional regulation, mindfulness, and other important faculties.

All in all, it led to lots of burnout, missed opportunities, mental health issues, resentment of my folks, and barely getting through college and being able to hold down my job. I'm getting better and better at it now that I have proper treatment modalities to restore my brain, but still. My folks should just be glad they still have a son that survived all this. Many wouldn't; many of us develop PTSD from it (I certainly did) and it's one of the many factors why the autistic self-inflicted mortality rate is so high.

I'm 24 now yet I feel like I'm 54 with all that I have had to endure. The only thing that really challenged my folks' faith was when my mother was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia and had to undergo rigorous treatment for it, which left my dad severely burnt out. I had been so desensitised by all that I had to endure that I just didn't feel anything. The very fact that it only took something as severe as that for them to radically change their relationship with their faith despite all my repeated pleas once upon a time makes me really sad.

Massive fuckin sigh.