What's your superpower?
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Old. Repost.
I've never seen this in a post before, sorry if I accidentally reposted it
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Sorry, but can't everyone blur their vision? You just use your eye muscles to lose focus, right?
I have to squint to blur mine
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I have extremely sensitive hearing. I can tell when there's an animal scarer nearby.
This brings me to Microsoft Teams. You might have seen people mention that their dogs know when someone joins the call before they do. That's because they introduced "ultrasonic howling" to detect if they're in the same room as you, and mutes their mic.
It hurts like fucking hell with headphones on.
Animal scarers make me feel like someone shot me in the head.
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I can make the sound of one hand clapping.
It was a thing that went around my middle school. You keep your hand at about a 90 degree angle to your arm, and then flap back and forth with your fingers loose so it hits your palm. Takes a little practice.
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I can blur my vision on command, kinda useless but a bit of fun to play with.
I also have a lazy eye, so I can scare unsuspecting people, sometimes two at a time if they're positioned right.
Huh, I did not realize not everyone can adjust their eyes' ~focal lengths at will!
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I aquired this superpower trough habits, but i can intuitively find the north.
Apart from that, well, I'm just myself
Like based on the position of celestial bodies like the sun and stars or ?
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I can count almost perfect seconds. Most people think they can count seconds until they try to prove it.
Like, give me a stopwatch. I can count seconds to within an average of .05 of a second.
I can do this consistently over a long period of time, i gave up counting when i tested it.
It's because i used to have 3 clocks in my living room, and they all used to tick at different times. I guess from when the battery was connected and it would create all these different rhythms.
After many years of hearing these rhythms and noticing the different rhythms that would be made as we changed the batteries over time, i ended up being able to tap the rhythm out on a table/in my head etc and now its just ingrained into my head.
taTA ta... taTA ta... taTA ta...
Absolutely useless.
I have a similar good sense of timing, but not to that precision, based upon a childhood experience with shower length.
My parents were frustrated with how long I would shower, so I brought an egg timer in to help myself keep track of time. Over a year or two of this habit I developed a very good sense of timing in 5-10 minute intervals.
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I have super sensitive hearing, so while I can hear the faintest of noises, it also means loud noises are overwhelming and painful.
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I can't stay angry; I have multi-sensory aphantaisa, this comes with not being able to re-experience emotions.
I remember that something made me angry, but I can't relive the emotion. It lets me dispassionately examine the past to see what made me angry and thus work through the trigger and try to reduce it in the future.
There is the downside to this, it is on all emotion, so I also can't re-experience happy emotions either.
As in, when you are remembering/reimagining an experience that you've had?
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CRT TV's emit a high frequency noise while in operation. Apparently there must be a significant number of people who can't hear frequencies that high. My wife can't hear it and had no idea those TV's made any noise at all.
I remember I was able to hear them as a kid. It's been a while since I've interacted with one, so who knows if it's even likely that i still have that acuteness of hearing, but I do remember it. Some good amount of years ago I found a crt monitor and turned it on and the dimming and slightly-static clicking sounds sent me back
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I've hit some killer long-range underwear-into-the-basket shots with my toes that honestly should've been on Sportscenter.
Same here! Why isn't this a weird Olypmic?
...Why don't we have weird Olympics?
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I think I can smell progesterone, in some women, and in some months (far more than others/other times). Being male, this is absolutely is not something I can collect a lot of data on very quickly, and I don't know whether the strength or clarity for me correlates with women who have higher levels than normal, but I do know it correlates really well with this chart in terms of timing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Estradiol_and_progesterone_%25_changes_across_the_menstrual_cycle.tif
So often I know that it's a week and a half before your period, and I know what that means, but I promise you that I have never ever used this knowledge, partly because I'm pretty shy, but not even with my wife (who doesn't know I can tell) when we were aiming for pregnancies, because that was a very busy time indeed in that arena and I saw no reason to reduce that in any way whatsoever.
Idk your wife, but I would feel like that's a very intimate connection to share that you have with her. I could see it going a number of ways, of course. But what's kept you from sharing with her, overall? If you don't mind me asking
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I can make the sound of one hand clapping.
It was a thing that went around my middle school. You keep your hand at about a 90 degree angle to your arm, and then flap back and forth with your fingers loose so it hits your palm. Takes a little practice.
I figured that out once and now I always break that out when someone references the sound of one-hand clapping. It gets me mostly eye-rolls which as a dad are my life's blood.
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I can blur my vision on command, kinda useless but a bit of fun to play with.
I also have a lazy eye, so I can scare unsuspecting people, sometimes two at a time if they're positioned right.
I can do this as well. Pretty easily too. It feels like I can pick a direction to look in and then I just look behind the thing my vision is centered at. If I go a bit slow, I can look around the room and keep my vision somewhat blurry
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I can't stay angry; I have multi-sensory aphantaisa, this comes with not being able to re-experience emotions.
I remember that something made me angry, but I can't relive the emotion. It lets me dispassionately examine the past to see what made me angry and thus work through the trigger and try to reduce it in the future.
There is the downside to this, it is on all emotion, so I also can't re-experience happy emotions either.
I can't get angry without a lot of reason, and even if I get angry, I can't stay angry, but that's on my specific presentation of C-PTSD.
Let's be unflappable twins!
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That's really impressive, since to be cucumber mostly just tastes like water. (This could just be where I'm getting my cucumber, though.)
This might be one of those things we haven't discovered yet, like the soap/cilantro thing.
Cucumber has a very strong flavor to me.
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My ADHD is not a super powerful and I'd give it up in a heartbeat.
Mine is a super power in a crisis. The rest of the time it is a massive hindrance. But! I also think it's why I'm so unique and why I developed so many other skills, so I wouldn't trade it so much as living in a world that can't accommodate me.
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My boyfriend can smell when someone drank alcohol hours (or even days!) later. He seems to smell it in a person's sweat, so we suspect he senses some kind of metabolite.
As to me? In-person I seem to emit a comforting, trustworthy aura. Children and stray animals approach me like they just know that I'm a safe space for them. As a result, I've acquired quite a list of no-kill shelters in my phone. I also ended up working in children's therapy.
Adults who share my wavelength can also recognize it in me, and I can recognize it in them - we're drawn to each other in the same "inherently trustworthy" way. I suspect it's an aspect of neuro-divergence.
I also have that aura, and I am here to lend credence to being able to see it in others, and them seeing it in me.
I have this cute phrase for when it's not just that aura but also the obvious background of trauma, "We have so much in common! I'm so sorry."
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I can't get angry without a lot of reason, and even if I get angry, I can't stay angry, but that's on my specific presentation of C-PTSD.
Let's be unflappable twins!
I'm definitely not unflappable, I still get angry. But it fades quickly.
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Mine is a super power in a crisis. The rest of the time it is a massive hindrance. But! I also think it's why I'm so unique and why I developed so many other skills, so I wouldn't trade it so much as living in a world that can't accommodate me.
Obviously my past experiences have made me who I am, but plenty of neurotypical people are unique and have skills too. I genuinely believe I'd be the same person I am today but "better" if I didn't have ADHD. I don't want to sound like a doomer, but it's genuinely difficult for me to do basic things. The narrative that disabilities are actually super powers is deeply troubling to me. At times it can even feel like toxic positivity.
I'm not trying to say you're doing anything wrong by describing your ADHD as such. I don't see a problem with it. I view it similar to the way some people who are deaf don't want to be able to hear. Nobody can dictate your experience to you. You know what is best for you. Individuals with ADHD saying things like that don't bother me. What bothers me is when neurotypical people do it or it's a trend.
I got into an argument with someone about this before. They were using the idea of hyper focus as being a super power. If the planets align and I'm able to hyper focus on what I need to be doing at the time and somehow I don't need to be doing anything else then sure, it's a super power. More often it's me being unable to stop thinking about something I'm fixated on for days. Losing sleep while I think about it. It distracting me from work. It distracting me from friends. Only to just suddenly leave making me wonder why I'm not interested in the thing I had been obsessed with for so long.
