I am ADHD af, I am not diagnosed autistic but I share a very similar info-dump tendency that a decent amount of autistic people seem to have and it feels really similar to me, not the same thing… but yes I do this constantly…

Info dumping in person is really NOT HELPFUL most of the time for people, but when you do it online in a well written comment than actually nobody has to read the whole thing right then and there right? Somebody can skim through and pick out the parts that are useful.

Unfortunately, I am driven to info dump constantly, I don’t know if I would describe it as “filling up my imagination” though I can certainly get along with that framing of it. I don’t pick what I do and where I go with my ADHD, so fediverse comments are actually in my estimation one of the more productive places for me to info-dump and be myself even if it weirds people out and people frequently think I am a bot because of my strange behavior.

I am an artist, when I see blank spaces I make a mess and see what happens, as all artists do. I don’t have a strong internal ability to envision things before I try them though, so I tend to impulsively try things to bring the visions to life so I can see them for myself. Neurotypical types don’t tend to understand this about my art, they will not listen to me when I say I don’t have a kingdom inside my head already furnished and I am just transferring it to reality as I create art. It threatens the societally accepted idea of imagination and beauty as something finely planned and executed when the heart of every great work of art is really the opposite (creativity is a flame not a blueprint).

I create to see how my intentions lead me to somewhere I didn’t expect, and that creates an emotional response in me. To try to put things in your words, I create art to fill up my artistic imagination because I don’t just imagine art in my head in incredible fidelity like some private magic kingdom I can retreat to. No, I create beauty by putting a pen on paper, making a mark, noticing how it was different than I imagined it would be and then reacting to that. Iterated out, these small nearly aimless moements build into an entirely different universe and honestly I think that kind of scares neurotypical people shrugs. It is the same reason European Classical music purposefully forgot improvisation as a core skill.

I think for people who have unusual minds, places like here are gardens where ideas, feelings and movements can happen that would have been otherwise repeatedly strangled by the normative demands of societal interactions in alternative, already established mediums of communication and connection.

When you have to work to fit in, when you are acutely aware of how unsustainable and incongruent society is because of how you think differently and are constantly hurt for it, that gives you a capacity to imagine entire alternative universes out of thin air that are better. You don’t need to necessarily to plan it out even, it just starts to come out in bursts of creative and imaginative energy that refuse to be denied any longer by the status quo…