Quitting/putting collecting on pause

[Justice]

I relate to a lot of what you said! Growing up gay in the south/midwest (Texas and Kansas), I had that traditional Catholic upbringing that still haunts me to this day. I couldn't come out for the longest time for fear of violence, and when I finally did to my friends at school, I too was kind of the novelty kid. The punching bag to half the class, and the harmless but funny kid to the others (being gay was fine as long as you made it clear you were silly and not "predatory" in any way, which is weird to say for a middle schooler, but you know how it goes). Eventually, by proving yourself enough of the class clown and a harmless commodity, even the jocks begin to accept you.

I'm thankful religion was not in the equation for me growing up. That would have added a lot of extra angst for me I'm sure. Truth be told growing up in the Bible belt I have no idea how I avoided it. My parents just weren't regular church goers. We would sometimes go on Easter Sunday and my mom would always talk about how we needed to go, but thankfully we didn't all that often. I wasn't out in high school and didn't come out until I was 23 and met a couple of rowdy lesbian bikers that I worked with and they took me under their wings. I learned a LOT from them. Rest in peace Beebe, she was killed when someone ran over her on her Harley in Knoxville a few years ago.

As much as collecting can be viewed as shameful in the straight community, I do feel like being a nerd in the gay community is a whole other can of worms. Very similar in many regards, of course, but a lot of the gay stereotypes are unfortunately true. For the longest time I had trouble finding someone to date because the idea of a "nerd" may have been attractive on paper, but upon seeing what it really entailed, they couldn't head for the hills fast enough. To a lot of gay men, a "nerd" is just a ripped jock or a skinny little twink with a pair of glasses on. If you're not the typical chiseled physique who likes to party, then you're not truly part of the community. It does kinda feel like those silly high school politics all over again, just with a little more glitter mixed in. Of course, there's someone for everyone, but it's certainly not the norm; the gay community can be uniquely mean-spirited when it comes to outsiders, ironically enough.

God is this ever true. I've just largely avoided others like myself for a while now because I'm in my comfort zone of "alone" anyway and don't see the point anymore.

My first serious relationship, it felt like my nerdiness was tolerated, but never truly accepted, and I hate that I cut back- and considered quitting collecting altogether- to try and please him. The things we do for love, eh? I'd convinced myself that my hobby was just a major turn-off to others, and resigned myself to a single life, but luckily, my current boyfriend and I have been together for 7.5 years, and he's just as big a nerd as I am. We actively support each other's hobbies, and even though we may not be the best of examples in terms of financial responsibility, it's that moral support that truly means the world. I never have to feel embarrassed talking about the things I love around him, and vice versa, and I know that if I tell him I'm looking for a certain figure, he won't look at me like I'm speaking a foreign language. We're definitely worried about when we do move in together, where all our stuff is gonna go, though- it's gonna be a challenge for sure. Especially living in NY, you can have space for both, but it's gonna cost you big time. Point is- I'm very glad I didn't end up giving up collecting, as I was very close to doing. The closest thing to that I do now is holding off on or foregoing a purchase so as to be able to do things together as a couple

It's a good thing you didn't give it up. No one should ever have to give up what they love like that for someone else if it isn't actively causing harm or anything. I've seen it happen so many times with things besides action figures and those types of relationships rarely work out.

 

[Damien]

This thread got super deep, man. Took me multiple sittings to get through, but I'm grateful to have read everything you guys are willing to share and I hope it continues.

Regarding the wives thing; I think I've been fortunate in that regard. My wife and I have been together for 16 years now. She is also a collector (although way more sporadic and dear god she cannot stick with a collection), and a big nerd for comics, fantasy, and sci-fi. In fact, I think she fell in love with me because I tried to open her Stargate figures when we first met (she was a MIB collector back then). We also tend to mostly agree about what looks good and what doesn't. We both agree that overly crowded displays in our living room don't look good - but we also both have plenty of collectibles down in the living room on our bookshelves.
She doesn't always love my other displays, but they're mine and I live here too, so she'd never try to stop me. And I feel the same way about her stuff - much of which I genuinely don't like but... I don't need to. It's not there for me to enjoy. It's there for her to enjoy.

The only other woman I lived with long-term was my ex from just before my wife. We lived together for a few years. She was also a giant nerd and collector. So again, my toys were never a problem unless I was putting them where she wanted her toys.

All that being said, and with no judgement at all about how anyone else lives their life or who they find love with; I don't think I could be in a relationship where I've got to squirrel away the things that I enjoy looking at. But maybe I'm also coming from a privileged place on that because it's never been an issue. Even women I dated before my ex were sort've just fine with it and didn't care. Granted, those weren't serious enough relationships that we were worried about how it's going to look in a shared home raising kids or anything like that. I think the worst reaction I ever got to my stuff from women I was with was passing disinterest.
NEVER got the 'ew, you collect toys?!' attitude. Or anything like that at all.


Regarding masculinity: I've struggled with my feelings about this for my entire life. As a young, skinny, long-haired Goth kid, I really fancied myself kind of androgynous and blatantly rejected masculine stereotypes. To this day I fucking hate sports and cars. But as a young Goth kid, I was also fairly traditionally good-looking, best I can tell. I feel that being a good looking guy that got along well with the girls and kind of liked to fight and cause trouble meant that I fit enough into a traditional gender box that people were less likely to come at me over some of my friends that maybe didn't fit into those boxes the same way. If that makes sense.

That continued to this day. I still don't FEEL like I'm traditionally masculine. Nor do I want to be. But I have done martial arts most of my life. I work in construction. I'm 5'10 and 188 with very little fat. I work out somewhat regularly. I dress in all black all the time, but it's fairly simple stuff because, again, construction job where bondage pants and fishnet shirts aren't really an option - so my dress tends to come off as more utilitarian austere than 'goth dude.' Maybe metalhead for the wise. The reality is, it's very easy for me to blend in and LOOK like someone that is very traditionally masculine. People ask my advice on car problems (I have no fucking idea, my dude -- I can change a tire and my oil and even those things I do not ever want to do) and immediately will start talking to me about sports as if I have any fucking clue if the Oilers won last night.

All that is to say ... it's probably very easy for me to say 'I collect toys' to people in public, because I otherwise fit so well into certain boxes and expectations that one thing being 'out of place' (as it were) doesn't really throw people or set me up for ridicule like it might with someone else. Those same qualities have also carried me though life being able to be a bit more flippant about what people think of me, which makes me more confident now as an adult. Sometimes I actually carry some guilt about that, because I recognize that I've had a lot of advantages that have made it easier for me to just be me than perhaps others have had. And that's not fair. And it sucks to see anyone be unwilling or nervous about expressing who they are to anyone and everyone.

I don't even know what my point is here except to say fuck anyone that makes you feel bad for being you.

 

[Ru1977]

Yeah, it's funny because I came here to discuss toys, and obviously still am, but I spend way more time getting into the real, nitty gritty stuff here.

 

[altcunningham]

I've kept a fluid collection the last five years.

I don't display everything. I rotate curated shelves as I feel like it. Got the idea from my art gallery manager bestie who helped me do some redesigns in my place. I do it with my wall art and statues, too.

This leads to the next method:

I also am not shy about selling or trading. If something doesn't make my rotations for display, then I don't really care about it. I might not know that at the time, but it's easy to figure out. You'll see a lot of collectors question why they bought something or forget that they owned something and end up with two or three of it after the fact. To me, that's a big flag that you don't really care.

I like to focus on the characters and franchises or just general aesthetics that I like. I don't need to own every X-Men, even if it's my favorite Marvel franchise. I don't need every variant of Batman. But I do want great representations of my all time favorite characters.

Hasbro made this really easy with Legends when they introduced the Shriek body and the Vulcan body. This was the start of a new scaling. I'm not a big stickler for scale, but it also was the beginning of them really nailing the face printing, and I find a lot of figures even from 2022 backwards just do not hold up in comparison. Obviously that is subjective for every collector, but for me it made it easy just to cut things - without worrying about completionism, I was concerned if the figure looked good on the shelf, and it turns out I don't think a lot of them do thanks to the newer figures.

Across the board I have scaled down my toy presence, but it's important to note I don't like toys less.Being fluid with what I display and what I want to sell also means it's easy to keep up with my mercurial interests.

It's also about joy. Maximum Spidey cost more, but very few figures have made me as happy as that figure just sitting at my desk and playing. When I'm overwhelmed with work, I like looking up and seeing my Mafex X-Men and Hush Bat family. I love Frazetta and Vampirella, so that figure anchors me during online meetings. As much as I like Avengers, Living Laser and even Black Knight don't hit like that, y'know? So they go or never even enter my equation.

 

[TheRealSmallville]

I'll never have a big enough or nice enough house to display everything I want to. (And that's not due to paying too much to collect - it's because I had the stupid luck of buying a house, alone, in 2012 before the market reversed. My mortgage is half of what rent is in my city and so I'm in the beneficial position of it being stupid to sell because I'll never get a better deal in this lifetime.)

Ooooooh, man! This is me, in a nutshell. My first wife and I bought a house in 2006, first time buyers, got an incredible rate and it was in a small community so the price of the home and land it's on was a steal (I got the house in the divorce). My mortgage is $500/month, and that is something that I will never, ever, find anywhere else 20 years after the fact. The low cost of my mortgage has enabled me and my family to live very comfortably in the years since, and since this is a thread about quitting and hoarding and selling I guess I would say that I've been perhaps a bit too comfortable lol

Growing up, I had a lot of toys but they were usually yard sale toys because we didn't have a ton of money. I would get new toys at Christmas and for my birthday, so I didn't have a ton of "really nice" stuff. Add in that I was undiagnosed autistic child. Fast forward to my late 30's (I'm 42 now), still undiagnosed, but McFarlane Toys puts out wave 1 of their new DC line. I remembered McFarlane from the 90's, so I bought every figure on a whim to check them out. Instantly hooked. For the first 3 years, I was a completionist with DC - I bought everything McFarlane put out. I had also expanded things into Neca (Predators, TMNT), Mafex, Mezco, etc. By the time I was 40 I was also into Hot Toys and 3rd Party 1/6 scale stuff in addition to the 1/12 stuff. My basement became full of things, my display area was overrun. Boxes everywhere, stacks of things everywhere, and so much crap piled up that nothing was ever actually on display. At 42, I know now that I'm autistic, and I know that my overboard purchase habits the last 5 years is due in large part to "filling that hole" that child-me had from not having nice things. Knowing these things, and how autism can affect things like this (with the laser focusing and habits that come with it), have helped me in a way to make a plan to deal with it. I have sold things on ebay, which is a pain sometimes, but recently I had a buyer try to scam me out of a $400 Hot Toy purchase so I'm taking a break from the platform.

One thing you could try, if you're in the market to sell, is to check your areas for local toy shows that accept new vendors. I became a vendor at a semi-large toy show last year in May, and they had another show in November, and I'm averaging about a thousand dollars from each show. I sell boxed items and loose items, and I put out a $5 bin and a $1 bin. The bins drive people in, and then they end up buying the more expensive stuff later. It's fun to interact with toy collectors, and I don't advertise it but everyone who stops at my booth gets a deal on top of the prices. I've never told someone "no" when they've tried to haggle. It's a good time, and you can make some easy cash. I personally sell things to create space, I'm not in it to recoup costs, so while I'm not giving things away for nothing I'm not necessarily putting market prices on things (I sold a Mezco One:12 to a lady at the last one who came by 3 times to look at it...she didn't have the $80 that it was marked for, but on her 3rd visit I told her she could have it for $40. The look on her face was worth the loss). If you are in it to recoup your costs, then that's different, but if you're in it just to pare things down and have a good time, perhaps make someone's day, try a local toy show. My next show is May 10th, and I have 3 tables this time (the max here is 3). Currently sorting and pricing up a storm.

Sorry for the long post. It's my autism speaking, I annoy people at work with verbose emails all the time lol

 

[Ru1977]

I think many of us have our loquacious times here.

 

[TheRealSmallville]

I was another that went to town on Neca Predators but I sold most of them off relatively recently. I think I'm down to five now.

THEY'RE SO COOOOOOOOOOL, THOUGH

(but yes, same...I need to pare mine down, they take up an entire tote all by themselves)

 

[TheRealSmallville]

I’m a progressive psychotherapist

This sounds fascinating. I wanna hear more about this lol
"Tell Grimlock about petro-psychotherapists again!"

I’m super-duper neurodivergent

The missus is riddled with ADHD, and I'm Autistic (probably more like AuDHD), and we like the term "neurospicy"

Our youtube channel is called AuDHD Reviews, and during one of our video series while I review something on camera she crafts at the same time on camera so she doesn't get bored. Not sure why I'm sharing that, but whatever lol Carry on, spicy ones!

 

[TheRealSmallville]

I come at this from the other direction: my folks keep their house like a museum and have a housekeeper come in a couple times a week. My mom is legitimately pathological about what she perceives to be “mess”, and also used cleaning and organizing as punishments when I was growing up. Hell, I spent the summer AFTER COLLEGE stuck in my room at night because it was never “clean enough to leave” before I moved out officially. When I say “pathological”, I mean that she convinced herself that I wasn’t *bathing* at college (which was absolutely absurd and provably incorrect, I literally brought home towels to wash my first time home). She/they were also obsessed with “appropriateness”, like super-rigid table manners and politeness, and also after a certain point some things I loved were no longer “OK”. They eventually softened somewhat, but for my 12th birthday I got a card with a cardboard cutout of a rabbit in it, which they said would be my last “little man”, no more action figures.
So I defied them and did it anyway, mostly in secret for several years.
When I packed my car for 2nd semester of college in ‘97, (wasn’t allowed the car at school first semester, had to prove my grades) they saw toys and comics in the boxes and my mom FREAKED. “YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE TIME FOR THOSE THINGS DOWN THERE YOU SHOULD BE WORKING”. I pointed out that I would have similar free time to what I had at home in high school, but that didn’t cut it. “Get those out of the car, or there will be no food/gas/go-to-the-movies allowance”. I said fine, drove down, and promptly got a weekend job as a birthday-party clown. Which they ALSO freaked out about. “YOU SHOULD BE STUDYING WE NEVER INTENDED YOU TO HAVE TO WORK DURING THE SEMESTER!” “Yeah. Well, you tried to take my joy, so I’m buying it back.”

And so it has gone in the 25+ years since. I got it all: “no one will want to date you/marry you if you like these things”, “don’t you think life would be easier if you were ‘normal’?” All that stuff. Again: they have backed off, mostly because I finally got married.
Like yes: I feel bad that these “regular” folks got saddled with a deeply weird goth kid more interested in medieval Eastern European folklore than integrating into society. And don’t get me wrong: they are VERY supportive of the things they “approve” of: they come to all my performances, even as recently as this last weekend. And they have MOSTLY stopped commenting on how I dress.
But yes, there is an element of my collecting that is absolutely a rebellion against their individualized oppression, and also basically a fuck-you to all their “grown men don’t do that” rhetoric.

It’s definitely why I own the giant Mondo vinyl Scare-Glow: I viscerally remember my mom gaslighting me out of buying him when I was a kid (talk ME out of buying a glowing skeleton man in a purple cape????), so every time I see a cool Scare-Glow thing, I grab and say “fuck you, Mom” out loud.

Anyway: all that is to say that it is hard to find balance when you were told most of your life that action figure collecting was functionally as bad for your life as drugs.

This is a pretty incredible post. I don't know if it's appropriate to say "thank you" for something like this, but I appreciated reading it.

My parents came at things with the best of intentions. It doesn't mean they came at things the right way, as we all know what road is paved with those intentions. I always had a good relationship with them, except for the things I like. To this day, every time my Dad comes for a visit, he'll look around at my collection of toys, or my library of movies (which is also large), and he'll say something like "so what do you think all of this is worth?" And I'll shake my head and say "nah, nah, don't start Dad..." and he'll shrug and say "I'm just saying, you could sell all this stuff and probably pay off a few things. I'm just saying."

It's not as bad as what other people get, but I understand a tiny bit where you're coming from. My brothers were wrench-heads, they can fix just about anything on any car and they can fix whatever you find broken. Need a new roof? They can do that for you. Me, though? I have none of that. I can build you a PC, and I can tell you every detail about how movies are made, and who made them, and the complete encyclopedic knowledge of Superman and Batman rests in my brain...but I don't have clue one how to change spark plugs lol It's always been a disappointment to some.

 

[AceofKnaves]

Heh, three cheers for undiagnosed childhood neurodivergence!
I’m definitely out there on the autism/adhd spectrum, “diagnosed” as a “gifted kid” in the 80s and never revisited until I started getting rocked by trauma and various rough situations in my 30s. Had some pretty serious maladaptive coping mechanisms. Maybe someday I’ll go into some details about how messed up my mid-30s were and all the over-the-top and misconceived “treatments” that were applied to me, but for now suffice to say that the main reason I started on a track to become a psychotherapist was to try to help make it so that what happened to me in “treatment” NEVER happens to anyone else.
I will say this: at one point, I was literally forced to turn in my action figures and also stop wearing black. Seriously. Some jackass “clinicians” actually thought that forcing me to change my appearance, interests and identity would make me “happy”. Fuuuuuuuuck that.
Fortunately, I’ve had a great therapist for the past 10+ years and she’s much better at understanding me. And while she feels like it wouldn’t be particularly productive to put me through a bunch of tests at this point, she’s definitely helped me understand that the only thing naturally going on with me is that I am quite neurodivergent and that a fair amount of my childhood trauma (I’m a complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder guy, cPTSD for short) comes from the constant, rigorous masking that I had to do.
I’m still pretty chaotic, cluttered, and really struggle with executive dysfunction, but embracing that I am truly different, not “wrong” or “lazy” or “too much”, has helped A LOT.
But hoo boy my biggest nd “tells” are hyperfocus and my special interests. I was absolutely that kid who, at like four, would talk an adult’s ear off about very specific paleontological facts. I could, right now, deliver an extempore five-hour lecture about Vlad the Impaler. Action figures are just the tip of the iceberg. BUT the thing about action figures is that they help me direct my focus to things I love. Like ABSOLUTELY I joined a Tae Kwan Do school at 9 because I desperately wanted to be like Snake-Eyes and Batman. I doubt I’d have gone into psychology if not for being fascinated by Batman villains and Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth by Grant Morrison. I have this crazy vocabulary where I can use these wild words correctly but sometimes can’t actually *define* them because I picked them up from binge-reading books as a kid. It’s pretty nuts. My wife calls my ability/compulsion to store knowledge about my special interests my “superbrain”. I don’t know how “super” it is when I also wind up stuck with mental recordings of really old commercials that “stuck” because I was watching some cartoon I loved and was already in hyperfocus when they came on. Sigh. “They will move into your heart and give you love right from the start, Bouncin’ Babies, FROM GALOOB!!” Yeah, that lives rent-free in my head and I’d love to let it leave.

Anyway, yeah: I also do word-vomit verbosity that I have to try to curb all the time, especially in session so I don’t overpower my clients. The good news is that all that nd gives me hyper-empathy as well, which not only make me a better therapist but also (now that I’ve figured out how to use it) helps me absolutely slay in enotional acting roles. I played George Bailey in a stage version of It’s A Wonderful Life over the last holiday season, and was so “into it” that I absolutely horrified my mother. “I was really uncomfortable watching you suffer and fall apart like that!!” Heh, it’s acting, Mom.

 

[TheRealSmallville]

When my son was born, I lost my toy room, and it's going to stay that way until a kid moves out or I can afford a four-bedroom. In this economy? Not fucking likely. When I got together with my wife a 'starter home' around here was about 175k. Now the same home is 420k. We're not getting a big ass house any time soon.

Yeah, I get that one too. When the lady and I met 12 years ago, she had 2 daughters 7 and 4. I have no bio-children, but my stepdaughters are my daughters straight up. No ifs, ands, or buts. When they moved into my house back then, we felt fortunate that I had a 3BR place. And I always planned on getting a main collection room back when one or both moved out. Now, they are 19 and 16. The 19yr old has zero idea of what she wants to do with her life, and the 16yr old is undiagnosed but further along the spectrum than I am and I have a feeling she may be with her mother and I for the long haul. She could live on her own just fine, but I don't know if she'll ever be ready to. And the 19yr old has zero ambition lol I think it's a generational thing, my friends with kids the same age have talked about it too. It's not a case of "not parenting enough", but things are just different for them than they were for us and you add in the insane cost of everything and what kid these days can afford to live on their own? I moved out at 17 and moved in with my brother, and I finished high school while partying and dating. Married and bought a house at 23, divorced by 24. Lots of "life events" at a young age, but kids today are just entirely different. I don't think I'm ever getting those bedrooms back....lol

 

[AceofKnaves]

This sounds fascinating. I wanna hear more about this lol
"Tell Grimlock about petro-psychotherapists again!"

Essentially, while I use a vast “toolbox” of modalities and theory orientations when I work with clients (although I’m always trauma-informed and recovery-focused), my specific orientation is post-modern, so-called “feminist” theory (I say so-called because it differs in a practical sense from what one might generally understand in the more global sense), and from a theoretical focus on systems. Basically, that means I come at every client’s issues not just by looking at “what’s wrong with them” (in fact I don’t do that at all, I would ask “what happened to you” not “what’s wrong with you”), but also by examining the family/work/soxial/sociopolitcal/etc systems that they are a part of. Social injustice and cultural trauma are always a part of my work, even if the client and I aren’t openly talking about those things. I will take literally any type of client, but a major part of my “mission” is empowering and uplifting and affirming the identities of socially-marginalized folks. Also my longtime therapist and mentor is a cult expert (like “sits on panels for Scientology exposé shows”-level expert), so I’ve trained hard in that as well, which is very useful for the current socio-political climate.

Honestly, I got started in this business to learn how to fix myself. However: I went back to grad school in the fall of 2016, and suddenly I found that my calling had become wayyyy less self-focused. I saw what was happening with the rise of MAGA, I found myself sick in my soul, and I decided that I had to change how I looked at being a therapist. So now I’m in this to fight fascism, bigotry and hatred as something of a D&D cleric. Many of my clients wouldn’t even know this part of it all, because it’s not directly relevant to what we talk about in session. But it’s still there in the background.
So yeah ultimately my practice is hard-leftist, aggressively LGBTQIA+ affirming, culturally humble, radically empathetic and (usually on the down low) anticapitalist.

In fact, I just broke away from my old boss after getting fully licensed a couple months ago, and my official business title now features one of those naughty “DEI” words.

Come at me, Nazis. My work address is public record, you know just where to find me. I’ll be waiting, and if you’re not careful I might just deprogram you and help you be human again.

 

[TheRealSmallville]

Wait. You guys' wives let you put toys in any other part of the house besides your office? Whaaaaaa

I mean that's the big take away for me. MIND .... BLOWN . I'm allowed a few of the holiday ones now during the holidays in the rest of the house and I can feel the stare.

Since we have 3 bedrooms, and all bedrooms are taken, I have utility shelves on one end of the LIVING ROOM Imagine that! We have a very long (wide?) living room, so when you enter the front door the couch/chairs/tv/etc are to the left and behind the door the living room keeps going and that end is the "collectible area". Toys, movies, things hanging from the ceiling...it looks like a museum. If you only looked left, you'd see what looks like a "normal" adult living room, and turn right and you're in Toys R Us. I got lucky with this one, otherwise all my stuff would be in the basement where I can't see it.

 

[Damien]

Yeah, I get that one too. When the lady and I met 12 years ago, she had 2 daughters 7 and 4. I have no bio-children, but my stepdaughters are my daughters straight up. No ifs, ands, or buts. When they moved into my house back then, we felt fortunate that I had a 3BR place. And I always planned on getting a main collection room back when one or both moved out. Now, they are 19 and 16. The 19yr old has zero idea of what she wants to do with her life, and the 16yr old is undiagnosed but further along the spectrum than I am and I have a feeling she may be with her mother and I for the long haul. She could live on her own just fine, but I don't know if she'll ever be ready to. And the 19yr old has zero ambition lol I think it's a generational thing, my friends with kids the same age have talked about it too. It's not a case of "not parenting enough", but things are just different for them than they were for us and you add in the insane cost of everything and what kid these days can afford to live on their own? I moved out at 17 and moved in with my brother, and I finished high school while partying and dating. Married and bought a house at 23, divorced by 24. Lots of "life events" at a young age, but kids today are just entirely different. I don't think I'm ever getting those bedrooms back....lol

My daughter is only 15 and sometimes talks about 'when she has her own place' and I just laugh at her. Like.. girl.. you're not going anywhere. Not in this economy. So I, also, don't think I'll be getting any bedrooms back. At least not before I'm retired. (Retired? In THIS economy? Pfft.)

And dude - please feel free to autism all over this site. I can't imagine too many hardcore toy collectors AREN'T on the spectrum, so we all get it and appreciate it. Hell, can't think of a reason all these folks would be here if they DIDN'T want to read long-winded posts. Twitter exists if they want a couple sentences.

Also, severely ADHD myself (can you tell by the average word-count of my posts?) and probably AuDHD, but that wasn't really a diagnosis that existed on any level when I was diagnosed as a kid.

 

[RunestoneCowboy]

I know self-diagnosing mental illness is pretty trendy at the moment, but I've started to wonder over the last few years if I might fall somewhere on the neurodivergent spectrum/graph/pie chart.

I share a lot of your aforementioned behaviors, ESPECIALLY the hyper-focused collection of trivial knowledge because of executive dysfunction, and it's not the first time I've related to other folks' neurodivergent stories. I was also that dinosaur kid (I hated The Land Before Time because it taught the other kids to call hadrosaurs "duckbills" and sauropods "long necks", etc.) and my forever-remembered commercial is "When I bite into a York Peppermint Patty, I get the sensation of cold, crisp, mountain air against my face as I race toward liftoff!"

Sometimes I think about getting diagnosed and maybe medicated for that executive dysfunction, but I have two childhood friends with pretty severe bi-polar disorder and I've seen it absolutely upend their lives several times. My wife also has pretty bad depression and we had a couple of scares before she finally got help. Compared to them, my troubles just seem so small that it stops me from pursuing it further, like I need to make space for people who need the help more than I do. Brains are funny like that.