Personality type is especially valuable for neurodivergent people because it systematizes things we find difficult to understand intuitively. The problem is that autism and ADHD make us nearly impossible to type correctly — including ourselves. Read more
Quilts from Gees Bend
People email me their result from my personality test, and I can tell from the way they write the email that the test result is wrong. Finally, I realized that a huge percentage of the people who find their way to me are autistic, and autism breaks the Myers Briggs test. It’s like I accidentally ran a fifteen year study on autism and personality type. Read more
Chairs (1970) Tom Berg
This is a guest post from a college senior I coached.
When my parents divorced, my mom more or less kept my younger brother and my dad more or less kept me. We each saw the other parent, but never very much and never for very long. My brother and I only saw one another every other weekend for the better part of four years. Read more
Z tells me the list of things I can never write about — just to be sure I don’t forget. I am surprised he’s doing it at our local coffee shop where anyone could hear. The last one is, “Don’t tell people Nino left us because he didn’t want to raise two autistic kids.”
“Wait. What? You’ve never said that to me before.”
“Forget it. Everyone already knows. I just thought the list needed more things or you wouldn’t remember.” Read more
My first sense that recent college grads are in hell is when I realized the job hunt process is totally broken. Kids use AI to write their resumes, screen ads, and fill out applications. Meanwhile, AI is sorting resumes for companies, and the AI sorters prefer AI-written resumes, so kids are sending out thousands of applications before getting a single interview. Read more
Dance scene from Bande a part by Godard (1964)
When Z was young, I overheard Nino saying he doesn’t like playing Candy Land. And Z said, “Dad, I’m the kid and you’re the dad, so you have to play games that are boring to you because you’re not the kid.” Read more
detail of Lips Open into Certain Gendered Sounds (2016) by Ragnhildur Johanns
List of things my family hates about me:
I lie.
I misconstrue conversations.
I don’t remember what I say.
I exaggerate.
I’m manipulative.
They have all told me this. Read more
I spent ten days preparing for my court case, telling myself each day that tomorrow I wouldn’t need to prepare anymore. But when I get so focused on something I can’t get enough of it. I bound out of bed in the morning because I’m so excited to think about it and have new ideas to organize. And then I thought: this is why autistic people are so effective at what they do. But also: this is such a dangerous skill to have. Because it’s destroying my life. Where is the rest of my life while I’m doing this
When I started doing research at Harvard, I noticed that almost every family study used poor families as subjects. I assumed the funding skewed that way, but it didn’t — even race-based grants used poor families.
When I asked my PI why, she explained that high-earning families almost never participate. That’s when I understood something about the research: it’s parents who are the problem in families, not children, and Institutional Review Boards don’t approve research that might destabilize a parent. So obvious parenting patterns are ignored in favor of centering solutions around the children – as if they are the problem. Read more
I don’t use personality type systems the way they’re taught. Memorizing what each letter means is just the entry point. After that, it’s faster to stop using the system directly and start using pattern recognition instead. Read more