One of my brain-bugs that I'm aware of

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I wanted to run a question past some of the other people here who've had to deal with executive functioning problems related to short-term memory and fast processing.

I really have no idea at this point how much of this problem results from my being an only child, raised in the country until I was eight with no normal kids in the immediate area (one cluster B kid where things were off both with him and his family, as in small amounts of SA poured down while we were playing, he was slightly older, the police were called due to things I was saying in school, and for him to even have the lexicon he did suggests that older adult relatives were likely bothering him). I had a beautiful time playing by myself, inventing imaginary friends, but that kind of development has sharp costs that you can't possibly know or be held accountable for at age five, six, or seven.

What I mean - I learned quickly that I didn't have the immediate presence to do well at sports like soccer, football, etc. because there was too much visually going in to process in the moment. I also realized that part of why I couldn't enjoy sports with my family as a child (adding to my disinterest back then) because I couldn't follow what was happening on the screen, I'd always be looking at the wrong thing, I'd miss the plays, and consequently I never developed an interest until I realized in my early 20's that it was something of an obligation to be able to process those things passably. Also, being a deep inner-world introvert my priorities were much more science, art, and mysticism oriented - even as a child and that 'reality over social pecking' (IMHO an abstraction of Christian ethos to live a God-centered life) followed me in various ways for most of my life so far. My obsession with telescopes, space, science, gemstones, was pretty intense back then and because I was raised Christian and had no concept of Darwinian game theory or 'life as a gene war' I had no clue that sports are relatively involuntary unless you want to be in the bottom of the social hierarchy and that things completely other than personal morality, like achievements in sport or person-to-person competition, are critical for a person 'making the grade' in the NT world. I mean, I saw it and I saw the evidence but I always dismissed it as people being vapid or shallow, I treated it as a mistake on their part but little did I know at that age that I was really dangerously wrong about that (and obviously very few NT's have the depth of introspect to see these things so it's hard for them to be helpful when it kind of just happens for them without them knowing how or why fully).

I'm thinking about it tonight because I played some rather complex board games with friends and it got me thinking - these are relatively complex games, similar to games like Magic the Gathering where you have complex schemas of interaction where you have to hold not only what you have but what your opponents at the table have because anyone can attack anyone at any time. My problem - when learning a new game I'm really awful with being able to monitor other people and I find myself asking really stupid questions and not remembering. Maybe this is just part of the curve for everyone (short of geniuses or people who've been gaming for years) but I get the sense that most people with the chops to be able to do this kind of thing are much quicker learners.

So my primary thoughts on the issue:

1) It feels like a vigorous short-term processing bottleneck, where I'm almost 'slow' when it comes to reacting to things in real-time or requirements to react in real-time.

2) Short-term reaction seems to be a genetic health marker in the NT world, ie. have a PhD, be slow at immediate short-term interaction (or fast twitch like fighting) and NT's will reckon you're in the lowest social strata, where anyone else faster at coordination tasks or fighting is automatically the superior man or adult, and whoever doesn't have that should stay (by this way of thinking) at the bottom because they've proven they're 'less fit' in the Darwinian sense.

3) My life-long workaround was to play to my strengths - such as go for depth of concept, depth of knowledge, to get around the bottleneck but I realize that my not slugging it out enough with this particular shortcoming has cost me a lot in life, and mostly because most of the activities I might chose from to try and correct this like video games, board games, etc. feel as vacuous to me as watching TV - which used to be enough of a depression trigger for me that I couldn't even watch TV unless I was over someone else's house and they had it on.


I'm curious as to what other people here have tried for working though and improving your way around short-term processing issues, mainly because I'm trying to think of what all of my options are.

One concern I have - anything I learn autonomously at my own speed won't solve the problem because I can work around it, learn at my own pace, ie. more compensation without solving the root problem.

I thought about maybe taking up a jazz instrument but that falls into the workaround category.

I also think about how one of my close friends is an avid mountain-biker, like to the extent of going out every week or two to race, having $5K bikes, and constantly trying to get me out on the trails. That might help force me through some of my visual processing issues and perhaps those would improve (and he's patient enough to ride absolute beginner trails with me) but it wouldn't help fast-processing social information, the way a bunch of friends can sit around a table playing games and be right on top of the rules, right on top of all of the details of what everyone is doing, and TBH - this kills me with work meetings because I can almost never process what clients are saying in real-time, especially if they're the kinds of NT's who bounced all over the place in a random manner to where I can't build a stable picture of their system.


Also - I get that I get myself in trouble with these kinds of posts where my thoughts and comments can seem either too heady, too judgmental (to where I end up sounding like a bad person), it's what life's been so far for me (ie. for having fought like hell to survive as almost 'normal' what I get to be as a bottom feeder screwup NT - because the spectrum is 'hidden' thus they assume that I'm an ultra-weak NT who has no clue what 'real effort' is because if I did or had any kind of real integrity I'd be much more jaded, cynical, judgmental, etc.). They've pretty much smashed my life by dismissal on first sight, I realize I'm playing an ape-screw game, and thus I have to face it as an ape-screw rather than hoping for fairness or any other liberal preconditions for my life. The world's a mess and I can either make it work or I can die right where I'm at, and if I have any time on my hands and any capacity - at all - to better the situation on my own and don't choose to, then by that logic I deserve to sit in neutral and go nowhere. I never want to project that on other autistics or tell them that's what they need to do, this is more of an acute issue for shadow-AS where you have permanent deficits and, like dyslexics, you get to just be an inferior NT who just needs to be 'sorted out out back' for not knowing your place and either 'growing a pair' or hanging your head low and making eye-contact (ie. accepting inferior status as an inferior) rather than actually have a disability. NT's are psychotically obsessed with status, because it's a proxy for genes, and IMHO that will never go away - it's baked into their way of thinking through many, many iterations of that over evolutionary history working out favorably for them, nature literally can't see morality unless it makes more and healthier babies, thus the problems we're stuck in both as a patchwork of civilizations and as spectumites trying to survive an NT world.

Also - if someone did want to talk to me about what it is I do (here) that turns people off to not want to talk to me and say more about it, it's probably feedback I could put to use in understanding some other angles of the disconnects I run into with society. Some of it obviously is disconnects in terms of interests, some of it's rare cognitive style, some of it's executive dysfunction workaround, and I want to try and understand better which 'buckets' the bigger issues I have are in to figure out what my best strategies are for resolving them. There's also the whole thing were everyone's increasingly overloaded and disinterested in everyone else, I just have zero clue whether that's 10% or 80% of the issue and no real way to test that myself (that I can think of).