perhaps the cliffs are moving (as might happen in a dream of mountain-climbing) at the same time that the climber is climbing them; that will improve the analogy?

and perhaps your “ground level” is a river valley, that is why it’s full of interesting stuff that can’t be experienced the same from above.

plus it has more oxygen - haha

Thank you very much for showing me that I was right that she is trying to communicate with me.

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Theres video there, too.

Perhaps only at the top do we experience essence, before we are catapulted to the bottom again to grind our way back up in a perpetual cycle.

Well my favorite metaphor for life is the tightrope, it looks easy when you do it, because no-one sees the effort it takes to learn and sustain, but if you fall it is a long way down.

Running my landie is also a sisyphean task. They will soon finish painting the Forth Bridge, so that metaphor will no longer have meaning, but keeping the landie roadworthy is a continous task.

I started off not doing that well, driving my car, and a lot of people (parents, family, teachers,..) have pushed my car that I stalled over and over again.

But when I grew older I finally learned to drive my car and everything seemed to be fine. To other people it seemed that I drove that nice flat area you were talking about. But that’s only how it looked like.

I spent a lot of energy driving and every turn I made was difficult because the steering wheel didn’t functioned properly and at the end of the day I was exhausted.

Later I finally wanted to know what was exactly wrong with my car and so I brought it to the garage and it was diagnosed. They told me what was exactly different with it and I was glad that I finally knew what exactly made my car different from other cars. I thought that knowledge would help me driving my car more smoothly.

So, I assumed that the new knowledge would help me, but I made a mistake there. I started to speed up because knowing your car means you can drive it faster, right ? No, I crashed it severely.

Now I’m trying to rebuilt my car, with the help of others, all my energy is focused there for the moment. One day I will drive again, but it will be at a speed that I can handle, I don’t have to drive as fast as everyone else.

In fact, in one video I was trying to make to explain this, I used a set of objects where the thing really did differ depending on whether it was solid or not.

But what I’ve noticed is that non-autistic people tend to be born with certain skills solidified, or solidify them extremely early in life, that are not solidified for at least some autistic people.

They also probably never solidify some skills solidified that are solidified in at least some autistic people.

But what I’ve noticed when it comes to stuff that I either can’t do or have trouble doing, that non-autistic people can… it often feels like I’m starting at some earlier stage in the process than they have ever thought about existing. And even if I’m sometimes going further than some of them in some areas (thus convincing them that I’m “smart enough” or “skilled enough” to do whatever they can do and sustain it long-term), I have to go back to that starting point that’s further back than they start.

I think that the best we can do in my profession is to adopt loose analogies: that is precisely where we fall down in this field… reifying loose analogies.

As for stress, we do know that there is an window of optimal levels of stress that can lead to peak performance, on either side of which is a continuum of stress levels known to impair performance (the whole thing follows a Yerkes-Dodson law); I’d say that even the window of optimal stress levels for an individual might well vary according to circumstances. Which might go some way to explaining (and even supporting experimentally) the analogy you give.

As you can see from my post, I think you’ve come up with a very good metaphor that can stretch pretty damn far without losing it’s meaning.

Some sorts of stress seem to drive people to do more than they otherwise would, other times it makes a person less able to do them, and sometimes (usually disastrously) it does both at once.

And I’m really not sure what bearing it has on this sort of thing. Certainly any sort of person I’m talking about seems to be able to have any level of stress, it’s the reactions that would be different. And of course being either of these things in an environment not designed for being that way, is stressful in itself.

As far as consistency, I think they might combine in some ways too, like a person could have some areas that are totally consistent, and other areas that shift around all the time. And a person could have things very consistent at one point in their life and very inconsistent at another.

I’m not sure about this becoming a whole new classification system or anything, because I’m sure it’s flawed as much as any other, not least by the fact that it’s all based on my own observations and conversations. I’ve certainly got a larger number of people to have observed and talked to about things like this than most people would, but it hardly qualifies me to run around shoving people into categories, which is something that always annoys me greatly when done to me.

So these are just shorthands of convenience, they’re not something I’d like to become written in stone. It’d horrify me for instance if I suddenly saw message boards full of people trying to force-fit themselves into one category or another when neither one fits, which is something I see a whole lot of already with the existing categories.

So I’d prefer it to be a loose analogy rather than some kind of convention adopted, however well-meaningly, by your profession.

Very good observation.