Sarah Bagley Hammock

weird olfactory insight: freshly cut cucumber skin + chicken cat food = crushed trail-laying ant (ant who leaves pheromone trails). Similar to cut home-grown bolted cilantro, but also different. Very very specific pungency.

I often understand allistic feelings/motivations - but I miss how they want/expect others to react to those feelings/motivations.
Autistic empathy: I see how you feel
Allistic empathy: I see how you want me to feel like you feel

We do need to talk about autistic empaths more - but I still think the double empathy problem applies. The empathy difference isn't just about understanding feelings, it's about understanding how empathy works. Autistic empathy often still relies more on pattern and analysis than allistic empathy.

Yes... But I also realized that much of what I feel as "punishment" doesn't fundamentally carry that intention. Like, I often feel as "punishment" a physical world consequence ("punished" for tripping and falling by pain). I have to interrogate whether I'm BEING punished, or FEELING punished.

I think the scarier thing is that a lot of people in the tech biz don't seem to believe humans amount to anything more than complicated AI. They're not rigging the game so they can win, they actually think the rigged game is a true microcosm of reality.

Your Questions Answered: We're Already in the Aftermath On Trump and Russia, defeating the mafia state, and more.

"We're better than we seem and hurting more than we show."
sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/your-quest...

Just misheard the words "resume soon" as "stress-mason" and yeah, that's about right. Brick by brick.

I teach @alexispauline.bsky.social to fight this and show how to imagine a future where systems support rest/inspiration/love. Recently I see so much more anger from students when they realize how much imagination and hope they've been denied.

Weirdly familiar, to be accusing a specific group of people of being simultaneously overly influential in the economy, and lazy/shiftless. And then use this as a premise to destroy their economic self-sufficiency. Wonder how long until unemployed DEIAs are being rounded up for work camps?

Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong. Here’s why unemployment is higher, wages are lower and growth less robust than government statistics suggest.

So Dems are delusional about shortcomings of institutional "science", and Rs focused on experience, but w/ delusional ideas for fixing (i.e. Trump).

What about how progressives saw experience accurately like Rs, but w/ non-delusional proposals for repair?

www.politico.com/news/magazin...

this really is the absolute apex of “move fast and break things” - except the thing in question is the entire United States government

and we are in the process of learning what a catastrophic mistake the entire ideology was from the start

Years ago in my SF class, a student reported on international restrictions on AI (he was curious about about lethal self-guided UAVs). He found that AI guidelines are to do no harm UNLESS demanded by nations for defense, or companies for profit.

I am 100% unsurprised by this news.

THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION IS A DEPARTMENT CREATED BY STATUTE; IT CANNOT BE ELIMINATED BY EXECUTIVE ORDER! EXECUTIVE ORDERS CANNOT REPEAL STATUTES! JUST LIKE DEPARTMENTS CANNOT BE CREATED BY EXECUTIVE ORDER!

she shouts into the void

You're also receiving care as if from someone else. They did it for you, because they love you. Just like you always wanted. There is no transaction - you don't even have to perform a smile in return. You don't even have to feel gratitude if you can't right now - they'll understand.

5/

So you have to keep yourself in the "delusion" for a minute. You are NOT reasoning out how to care for yourself. You're caring for someone else. Her. Him. Them. Give it a name. Whatever it is, you're caring for someone else who needs care. You can do this. You've been doing it your whole life.

4/

The point is to use the stuff that is *actually* easy and obvious for you, as weird or unintuitive as it might seem to other people, to get you healthier so you can make bigger, broader changes.

3/

But the underlying motivator there is shame. "The logic is easy and obvious to follow. If you can't do it, you must be awfully stupid. Just do the smart thing."

But shame is already not working. You are already ashamed at how many "easy" and "obvious" things you cannot do.

2/

On caring for the "other" in yourself, if you're a people-pleaser or an overfunctioner:

It's essential to be very precise about your thinking on this.

A lot of people formulate it like: you can care for other people, right? And yourself is a person, right? So just care for yourself!

1/

Depends but probably - gotta dig into the why to figure out what kind of ND & best how of working through if that's the goal. HMU if you wanna talk about it (or anything ever).

If you can't roleplay defending yourself loudly you can't do it IRL, full stop.
Nobody tells you that when your life is at stake, it will actually feel EXACTLY as stupid and weird and pathetic and awkward and embarrassing as the roleplay.

Roleplaying this shift is one of the few things I'm pushing on my kid, past her comfort zone.

Realizing you can use your voice and body despite/through the fear of getting in trouble or being embarrassed is an essential life skill that is forcibly taken from most of us in early childhood.

I'm busy with teaching work and I read this as "let that be my grade" and I'm happy with that guidance.

It's a weird time to have a PhD in nostalgia and love.

Learned my lesson when I tried to teach "Burning Chrome" to undergrads in ~2015, specifically for the novelty of the prose. They found the world and prose utterly blah - had been so thoroughly subsumed into the media landscape as to feel "normal," "average," "done," and "not even sci-fi."

Bacon the owlet - adorable
Bakin' the owlet - surrealistically epicurean, or high
Bakin' Bacon the owlet - kinda sadistic
bacon bakin' the owlet - surrealistically ultra-luxe epicurean

From down in the hole you're trying to dig yourself out of, gaslights can look a lot like the moon and stars you've been promised.

This is also not anti-community. It is essential to exist in communities of mutual care.

But if you're an overfunctioner, you may choose people and groups don't know much about community and mutual care. You may strive to be in a community, and end up in yet another hierarchy.

This is not a long-term solution. Caring for yourself, as yourself, is an essential skill.

This is a shortcut, to use your energy to build towards caring for yourself, instead of using your energy to try to build others into people you hope will care for you.

If you struggle to care for yourself consider caring for the someone-else in yourself who needs care.

They will be grateful in a way nobody else can be. And you will feel that gratitude from them in a way nobody else can convey to you.

I'm an overfunctioner. One tool I've been using to work on this is envisioning myself as an Other who I can care for. Right now this persona is Her - because it's the she/her corners of myself that have most felt the need to serve and self-efface to survive.