A thought about the autisms:

[snarp]

People's reactions to me changed a lot during the ~2 years I spent in Japan - like, incidents in which I was treated badly because it was visible that I had brain issues became much less frequent.

I think I just figured out how to read people and do "normal" vocal intonation better during that period. To some extent that was a biological developmental thing - I was still having hormonal upheavals more common to thirteen-year-olds throughout college, and my hallucinations had only just died down for the final time when I moved to Okazaki - but part of it was probably the foreign language immersion.

It's kind of like I got to re-do part of the childhood language acquisition/socialization process, but with better control over my sensory bullshit. In a lot of situations my intonation and facial expressions come across more naturally when I'm speaking Japanese than English, but the connections I was making helped with English, too.

Comments

[chomiji]

If it's any help, I didn't detect anything amiss back whenever it was.

[rachelmanija]

That's really interesting. It's too bad that's not something that would be really practical to use therapeutically.

[snarp]

Yeah, annnnnnd a lot of adults with ASD have trouble handling noisy classroom environments, either due to processing problems or shitty trauma-associations.

The classes at Yamasa were well-managed enough that it wasn't bad for me, but I think I'd have had a meltdown in an environment similar to one of those shitty predatory ESL schools.