Unexpected Triggers I’ll return to tech/career stuff, but had a fresh experience today to write about now. In a comment I’ll share another frustration. I ❤️ board games. They’re how I met my friends and wife. I have heard about Legacy-style games, originally Pandemic. I hate Pandemic and everything I read re: Legacy made my skin crawl. These games have you write on elements and physically destroy cards as part of the game. It is a persistent “experience”. I hate it. Our family plays games together. Every night our bigs (ages 8, 9, 12) are with us, after the littles (3 year old twins) go to bed we have family time, 4 of 5 times we play a tabletop game. We love Machi Koro (thanks to Anna + Alex Makris for introducing me) but with 5 players the original+expansions takes 90m+. Today Jill took our middle son to a local game shop 1:1 because such opportunities are rare. They played Life, he won, and she let him pick a game to buy. He picked Machi Koro Legacy. I read about it but never bought it due to my fear of Legacy games. I thought you could replay it, but wasn’t 100% sure if you ripped up cards. I told Jill that if so she’d have to do it, that was too traumatic for me. Otherwise maybe I could handle it. Nope. It seemed OK. Each person had a sheet with a spot for a town name. Maybe we could leave it blank, they were color-coded so we could track it for the 10 sessions of the campaign (~30m/play). The instructions said write names in pen and I figured just lean in. I imagined we could use scotch tape, write on that, peel it off, do that again, but I let it go. I realized more slowly than I should have that the initial round had no way to lose coins, so it was a monotonic race to 65 of them. It was setup for 4 players so Jill and I were a team. Too late I realized our strategy was good but slow. Our middle son had a similar strategy. When he rolled 8 on two dice (good chance, 5/36) he got 9 coins. We had similar cards, but more so we’d get 36 coins on an 8, giving us victory one round later. We never did, he hit 4 times. The writing was on the wall. OK, losing seemed fine. There were 9 more rounds we’d play and I didn’t think it would be a permanent advantage to win one. Spoiler alert *** The winner got to decide which side of some cards would permanently be used, marked with pen. *** That was rough, I didn’t like it and would have chosen differently. Triggered. I didn’t understand the instructions on how to store the game, what persisted, etc. This pushed me over the edge. I was near tears, but tried to hold it in for kids’ sake. I busied myself for 30-45 minutes and calmed down, but tried to hide the depth of the meltdown from Jill (bad choice). I recovered and can likely engage with the next 9 sessions, accepting whatever else we do to sully the game. I don’t know what was Autism-related or not. I don’t have Occupational Therapy for 3 weeks, but my weekly therapist may be able to help figure it out. I’ll share what I find out here. Whew.
When one of my kids asks “will you do X with me” or “will you read Y to me” I tend to be very goal-oriented. I notice myself getting frustrated whenever the kid doesn’t want to adhere to instructions (such as for a Lego set), makes comments about the story or pictures, or interrupts with whatever the situation causes them to think of. That frustration is a strong indicator that I’ve missed the child’s intent. Their primary goal may not be to finish the literal task. At that point I silently acknowledge that I’ll need to abandon my misaligned goal and focus on making the kid feel valued, accepted, and safe expressing whatever they want to share. My oldest (8) is more than capable of getting himself a glass of water. I’ve noticed that he’s much more likely to ask me for help when he hasn’t gotten much of my attention recently. I’m glad he does this as I do need the reminder that the task isn’t always about the superficial outcome. I’m no less goal-oriented, but my interactions are much better when I reframe my task as supporting their emotional needs even if the activity doesn’t meet my preferred end.
As noted above re: posting: I wrote a longer post specifically about the Musk email that I intended to avoid, but about 1 out of 4 times, when closing a post with the X in the upper left on LinkedIn, it doesn’t prompt to save a draft. There is no other path to save a draft, so I can’t even choose to do so manually. There is not another path to access any of the rest of the LinkedIn interface while you’re writing a post. I guess my workflow can be to always copy the text out, but it’s a bad experience. I feel a bit defeated when it comes to filing a bug because I did regarding replying to your own comment after posting without completely exiting back to feed, where your comment just disappears. It’s 100% repro. I have never heard back on it. So I wrote almost all of a post and it disappeared, which is why I didn’t make a post on Sunday.
I’m not autistic, but I do present some OCD traits and I could not for the life of me play a game in which I had to permanently mark cards or rip them up. I’ve gotten better about things like this, but I used to not even be able to use my art supplies or sketch books because I couldn’t stand the idea of having to rip a page out if I messed up, or using one colored pencil more than the others and them not being sharpened evenly, etc. I can relate to this particular struggle.