Asklemmy

43945 readers

638 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

What should have hindered you when you were younger but ended up being a positive part of your growth? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago by Hammocks4All@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

And by should have I mean "should have" because this kind of thing can be subjective.

I'll start. Senior year of high school I would often skip class to go to the park and smoke weed with my partner (at the time). This park had a lot of birds. The sometimes silly, sometimes strategic, sometimes social and cooperative behavior of the birds blew my 17 year old stoned mind. I remember my partner and I would theorize about what they were doing and thinking. I thought it was super cool. I still think birds are super cool.

Now, many years later, I have a PhD in a behavior adjacent field. I don't study birds specifically or anything like that, but those experiences and curiosities pushed me in this direction.

Maybe it was all inevitable: these are deep interests that would have been pulled out of me in one way or another. The tinder was inside of me and if it wasn't getting stoned at the park as a teenager and watching birds that sparked the flame, something else would have. Who knows.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] gerryflap@feddit.nl 10 points 2 months ago

I think autism falls onto this category for me. I wasn't diagnosed until my early 20s. It did hold me back and probably made some things way harder than they should be. But likewise it also fuelled my desire to constantly learn new stuff. Especially when I was younger my interests would constantly switch around. My mind was constantly hyper-focused on the few topics that I was interested in at that moment. Anything else was deemed irrelevant.

This made me struggle with anything that didn't interest me, but I managed to just about get by in those subjects. But more "logic driven" subjects like math, chemistry, physics, and biology would constantly feed me with new interesting information to dive into. Throughout highschool and especially throughout university (Computer Science) this effectively became a way for me to learn without much effort. Whenever something is interesting to me, the information is just absorbed and I'd spend my free time still thinking about it. Many lectures in uni just led to an overwhelming stream of new ideas and as a result to me playing around with the concepts explained to me

Autism definitely isn't a "super weapon" like some people seem to claim, but certain parts of it can be very useful traits in the education system and beyond.