winterkoninkje: shadowcrane (clean) (Default)

Hi all, long time no post. A lot has been going on, but I’m finally starting to get on top of things again. I’ve been meaning to write in a bit more depth about some of this, but that want for perfection has been the enemy of the writing anything at all. So, here’s a quick synopsis of what’s been going on in my neck of the woods.

Both of L’s parents passed away. We’ve known this was coming, but it’s still hard of course. L was out there for a bit over a month taking care of her mom. They died very close together, so we ended up having a single combined service. I was out there for about a week helping to wrap things up before whisking L back home.

I finally got back the results of the genetics test. Turns out I don’t have Loeys–Dietz, or at least not the same genetic variant my mother did. But I definitely have something. So it’s back to the diagnostic swamp trying to figure out how to give it a name so that doctors’ll take it seriously. Current working hypothesis is hypermobility-type Ehlers–Danlos. Alas, “hypermobility-type” is medical jargon for “we have no idea what this is, but it kinda looks similar to the forms of Ehlers–Danlos we do know stuff about, so let’s call it that.” So, yeah, no medical tests to “prove” that’s what it is; just your usual game of convincing folks you have enough of the symptoms to match the syndrome.

I’ve been getting used to paying attention to my ADHD and working with it rather than trying to plow through it. It helps a lot to recognize that it’s not a failing on my part (e.g., that I can’t focus on boring things for as long as other people) but rather just part of how I’m wired. That makes it a lot easier to stop beating myself up over things, and instead figure out better ways to work with my brain rather than trying to force it into a shape it won’t take. As I’ve gotten better at this I’ve finally started getting caught up on a bunch of things that’ve fallen to the wayside over the past few years.

For example, I’m slowly getting caught up on the backlog of bug reports and feature requests for my various Haskell packages. Mostly been focusing on logfloat and unification-fd so far, but will make it around to the others in time. So, if you sent me an email about some bug or feature over the past few years and it seems to have fallen into the void, consider filing a ticket.

Still working on getting caught up to where I should be on my dissertation.

Work has also been going excellently. It’s all seekrit and nonsense, so I can’t say too much about it. But lately I’ve been doing a bunch of work on characterizing families of mathematical objects, and discovering their symmetries so we can exploit them to simplify and optimize things. So lots of mathy goodness going on. It’s a bit more geometric and combinatorial than my usual algebraic fare, but it’s the sort of stuff that arises from algebraic structures so it’s not too far from home base. (If that doesn’t make sense to you, maybe take a look at Brent Yorgey’s thesis to see an example of the connection between combinatorics and algebraic data types.) Plus, it helps that I’ve been getting to know some of the hella queer ladies who work in my building :)

In other health-y news, round about the time I got officially diagnosed with ADHD I had a bunch of friends going on about what the symptoms of allism (aka non-autism) are. Though I have a bunch of autistic friends, I’ve never really known much about what autism’s really like because all the literature is written by allistic folks, for allistic folks, so they’re all “patient has underdeveloped/insufficient blah” and I’m like “according to what baseline? How much blah does it take to count as having ‘sufficient’ blah? What are diagnostic details for measuring how much blah you really have?” So I finally got to hear some details from the autistic side of the fence, where people actually explain shit and elucidate the differences. And based on that: I’m hella not allistic. I can (and should! and have been meaning to!) write a whole separate post on this topic. I’m still not entirely sure I feel comfortable adopting “autistic” label (for reasons which are, themselves, further symptoms of autism), because my experiences don’t match up perfectly with some of the parts of what is traditionally called “autism”, but I’m absolutely non-allistic. I think the spectrum of non-allism is far larger and more diverse than allistic people currently believe, but —again— a post for another time.

winterkoninkje: shadowcrane (clean) (Default)

For a few months now I’ve been increasingly convinced I have ADHD. I forget what exactly got me started thinking along those lines, but the more I started digging the more convinced I became. ((Then, in my usual impostor syndromey way, I started wondering if I “really” have it— that is, focusing on whether my internal psychological experiences match those of folks who have it, or whether I merely fit the external descriptions but am “really” just absentminded, bored, stupid, fill-in-the-blank. (Am I the only person who has metaphysical crises about the qualia of identity/diagnosis labels?) Luckily I found some folks willing to talk about their internal experiences and what convinced them that they had it. And, frankly, those descriptions sounded even more spot-on than any of the external descriptions I’d found all over the internet.))

This monday I went in for official screening. I’d already filled out a questionnaire thing for them, so this was for a computer test and a one-on-one with the doc. The “test” was more like a peripheral vision test or a psychological experiment than a test per se: press the button when you see a foo but not when you see a bar, etc. I’ve done plenty of timing-based psych experiments before, but this one was brutal. Unlike the usual random spacing of stimuli, the spacing for this test was like explicitly designed to be as aggravating as possible. As someone who’s good at videogames, not being able to “win” was awful. Yes, I know it’s the sort of test you’re supposed to fail, but still. If there were any doubt left by this point, just taking the test would’ve convinced me. When the doc and I went over the results, I did indeed fail with flying colors. Off the charts for one of the metrics ::chagrin::

So, yeah. Started meds yesterday and —like every other time I anguished over whether I “really” had something or not— the difference is like night and day. I really should learn to trust my self-diagnoses more.

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