My situation was compounded by some pretty extreme poverty. My family were basically transients in the eighties and we lived in campgrounds. So it’s not like they were taking me to the dentist when I had a toothache. I stayed in school though, and once I went to a field trip to a dentist and learned about teeth and gums, yadda yadda. Anyway when I came back to camp I asked my parents “Hey why don’t you guys ever take me to a dentist” and they straight up said “What? You got dentist money kid?”

lol. Ah. Nostalgia.

My teeth are all rotten because this has never been the case for me. It’s a chore that I have to actively decide to do every day, it’s a decision I have to make. There’s a phenomenon called “decision fatigue” that basically means you can only make so many decisions in a day before your brain just shuts down and refuses to make another one. Since neurodivergent people have to make more decisions and can’t rely on habits to lift decision making off of our shoulders we often hit that wall of decision fatigue and just kinda shut down.

If you add disincentives, like the fact that brushing your teeth is an inherently unpleasant thing to do, it can be very difficult to stick with it. Hence, rotten teeth and all of the associate health issues that come along with having rotten teeth.

Playing an instrument or doing art gives you a dopamine boost and gets you hyper focused. When we’re hyper focused we’re like learning superheroes as long as we’re hyper focusing on a single thing, and that thing is novel.

I’ll hyperfocus on a new thing, like playing an instrument, or painting, or whatever and I’ll become very good at the thing very quickly. Then I’ll walk away and forget I even have an instrument, or forget that I like to paint. As a result I have a fuck ton of skills and I hardly ever use any of them. Hell, I learned book binding. I bound leather books that were gorgeous, and then after three or four I never did it again. Oh, then there was that month where I learned video editing and production, which I also never did again. I was a draftsman for awhile, where I got really good at autoCAD, and aside from a few things I did for pay I haven’t used that skill in a decade.