hell brain: avoidant edition

you can call me poss!

i have avoidant personality disorder (AVPD), and that’s what i talk the most about on this blog. i spend a lot of my time researching AVPD as well as living with it, so the posts here will generally be a mixture of casual posts about my life and more formal posts about the things i learn in my research.

i also have depersonalization/derealization disorder (DPDR), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), social anxiety, and double depression with psychotic features. i’m auDHD too, but that probably won’t come up as much, since i want to focus on the parts of my experience that i don’t often see included in discussions of mental health and neurodivergence.

please note, if you...

are anything less than enthusiastically pro-self-diagnosis

try to force people to disclose if they’re self- or clinically diagnosed

disagree with anti-psychiatry/psychiatry-critical ideas

think “narcissistic abuse” and “borderline abuse” are real

call people “psychopaths” or “sociopaths” when you see them as evil

say you’re “schizoposting” when you’re not schizospec

purposefully trigger someone’s paranoia or dissociation when you don’t like them

armchair diagnose people you see as “bad” with NPD and/or ASPD

exclude personality disorders from the neurodivergent umbrella

don’t believe in personality disorders and think they’re “just autism” or “just cptsd”

romanticize OR demonize self-harm and/or disordered eating

would call the cops to “check on” a suicidal person

think “recovery” should be the goal for every single person with a PD

...you’re probably not going to have a great time here. i can’t stop you from staying, but i don’t like you and you probably won’t like me either. don’t say i didn’t warn you.

Again, apologies if this is too personal to ask!

it's not too personal! i just haven't talked about it much because honestly, i don't have a particularly satisfying answer for it. i just...got lucky and met my partner before the avpd really hit. we met in high school, which was the Very Bad Mental Health Period that led to me developing avpd. it was college when things sort of solidified and i started completely isolating myself, but at that point we were already together and very comfortable around each other, so they became the one person i actually talk to outside of my family.

(i also got lucky because our friendship also bypassed my pre-existing autistic inability to make friends. i had a friend group in high school because i was still more social then than i have been in the years since, but it took me forever to make those friends and i had no idea how to get closer with them. a bunch of random circumstances just pushed us closer and closer together until we eventually realized that we were both social anxious idiots who really wanted to talk to each other more but were scared that the other person didn't want to. we texted literally every day before we were dating, which is something i've never really had with anyone, even my other closest friends at the time.)