For the past several years, music has been an integral part of my daily life. Whether it be walking around the school campus, attempting to do my schoolwork, or even just idling in my room listening to music, it’s very rare for me to not have something to listen to. In fact, I’m actually listening to music right now as I write this. Besides the ways that music is woven into my daily life, it is also a huge part of my background. I grew up learning how to play the piano, joined the school choir in elementary and middle school, and later joined band and the marching band for the entirety of high school. I’ve always been fascinated by the ways people create and compose music, especially instrumental music. Game soundtracks fall under my interest in instrumental music, with one of my favorite songs of all time, My Castle Town by Toby Fox, being extremely high on my spotify wrapped for the past 3 years (plus me being in his top .005% listeners for 3 years straight). Music also helps keeps my brain ticking whenever I do work since it helps take the “edge” off my procrastination sometimes. Writing on the Wall by Will Stetson in 2023 was my most played spotify song because I had a deadline due and I listened to that song for around 5 hours straight in order to actually focus on my work.

Despite being friends with a few autistic people and also being neurodivergent myself, I never recognized that I viewed autism with some form of infantilization. Autism itself feels very “normalized” to me since a large majority of my friends have sensory and communication issues. I myself struggle with socialization and communication with others, so its not like those aspects of being neurodivergent are weird to me. However, I am always pleasantly surprised to see autistic characters in fiction have some sort of sex drive. Of course, autistic people can have sexual feelings and participate in intercourse, but it never occurred to me that I too could witness autistic characters experience the same sexual feelings as non-autistic characters do. Now that I know that this also plays into the infantilization of autism in media, I try to be more mindful.

Often, I am told by my parents to “spend more time on your schoolwork” or get asked “what do you spend more time on, your schoolwork or your computer games?” I’ve always understood this as a dig towards me in order to make me prioritize my schoolwork, but that’s difficult in of itself. When I get home after school or work, I’m tired from just being around so many people or having to interact with people at my job. On top of that, when I genuinely want to try and do my work, a brain fog takes over and it gets super difficult to get started on doing any work. There have been many times where I have essentially wasted 2 hours trying to get myself to start my work, only to fail and do something else like video games to see if my brain wants to cooperate then. I tried many things too; I used to listen to music, but when that didn’t worked, I listened to videos on youtube. And when that didn’t work, I even had to once play a fairly hands off game on my other monitor in order to keep progressing on my homework because I couldn’t focus otherwise. Nowadays its better, though it’s at the cost of my own motivation to attempt my school work because I enjoy doing my hobbies so much more. I feel like this may be some form of ADHD or an attention problem of mine, though because I don’t have any kind of official diagnosis to get proper help or accommodations in school.