Running Commentary

tell me everything will be alright

make me believe it. make me stop sliding and shifting and shaking and drifting away.

how can I miss someone so much if-when they were only ever real in my head.

why aren’t you here. Do i not need you anymore? are you not coming back? Without so much as a farewell? Or is that what you meant by ‘its okay, go ahead without me’ nothing to do with a video game. Please don’t leave forever. I still need you.

where they are particularly desperate for affection and emotional intimacy, and experience kindness with a much higher degree of intensity, and assume that caring about them costs their friends a great deal more than it does.

and i say this with all the sympathy and understanding in the world, because the first person who i noticed this pattern in was myself.

i’m still wrestling with it, to be sure! but i’ve been dealing with it for long enough that i have a better perspective on the way in which it has effected me, and the way it effects others.

i suspect that this behavior is a result of certain kinds of emotional abuse and neglect. it makes sense - you spend the formative years of your life receiving less kindness and emotional intimacy than you need, so you adjust your expectations of what kindness is. you assume it’s being denied to you because you’re not worth the effort, because people don’t care enough about you to bother. and when you finally get to experience the real thing, it’s overwhelmingly powerful.

i’m not just writing this post to ramble. i’m writing this post because there are so many people in my life that i think that this applies to. if you have the faintest inkling that i might be talking about you? then i am. even if i didn’t realize i was talking about you, i am now. this post is for anyone with whom it resonates, anyone who might get anything out of this message.

because here’s the secret that no one bothered to tell us - emotional intimacy isn’t a zero-sum game. caring about someone is worth so much more to the person being cared about than it costs the one who cares. two people, emotionally supporting each other, will be much happier and more stable than if either tried going it alone. emotionally draining relationships exist, where one party takes and takes and gives nothing back, but if you’re worried that you’re not worth your upkeep, then you’re almost certainly already giving far more than you realize.

and here’s the other big secret:

human beings - on a fundamental level - need emotional intimacy. and we didn’t deserve to have it missing from our lives.

we deserve to have friends who care about us.

we deserve to have people who love us.

As disabled people, we learn early that it’s our job to protect abled people from ever having to notice either the logistical problems or the hate we face. And especially, we learn not to show that it hurts us. And double especially, we learn that we are not allowed to tell friends or caregivers or ~nice ladies~ or others that they are hurting us. And triple especially, we learn that we are not allowed to be angry because that’s ~just the way it is~ and ~people don’t understand~.

I think that protecting abled people from having to notice disability and ways we are harmed as disabled people goes so deep we do it automatically and without noticing most of the time. And abled people *really* don’t notice, because they think it’s normal and natural and have not had any need to challenge it. They feel completely entitled not to have to deal with disability, and the entitlement feels so natural that they don’t even *notice*. And we don’t notice how much we protect them, either.

Becoming less verbal or nonverbal

Looking “spaced out” or detached from what’s happening 

Withdrawing, not wanting to be around people

Curling up in the fetal position

Hiding out under furniture, blankets, etc. 

‘Information’ is defined scientifically as the level of mathematical complexity of a signal, Galan says. Using a computational model, the study found that under the same conditions, the children with autism on average showed a 42 percent higher information gain than the controls did.

Samuel Schwarzkopf, a research fellow in cognitive, perceptual and brain sciences at University College London, questions whether the results indicate more intense sensory perception from outside — supporting the intense world theory — or indicate that the brains of the children with autism internally generate more information. “I think [Galan’s] main interpretation is highly speculative,” Schwarzkopf says.

Schwarzkopf has a study in the 12 February issue of The Journal of Neuroscience that offers only partial support for the intense world view. Using functional MRI on 15 adults with Asperger syndrome and 12 age-matched controls, he and his colleagues found that the visual cortex of the participants with autism responds more strongly to visual stimulation than that of controls do, which could make their sensory experience more intense.

I saw a new psych today. Does meds and therapy. I like her, I think. She listened to me tell her my life story for 2.5 hours and didn’t dismiss any of it. She actually said that it sounded rough, which was surprisingly welcoming to hear.

Based on what you said here, I would say you’re likely autistic, but you may also just be sharing traits without being really autistic as you only share three (and criterion for autism usually needs five from what I know).

I am curious, though. Does your eye glancing reflect into an inability to make eye contact with people and/or keep it, or is it strictly just constantly looking around? That might be a partial to ADHD or something similar if it’s the latter.

The eye contact glancing this is because I can't maintain eye contact for more than like a second without looking away for anxiety (or something like anxiety, or sometimes more pure dissociation that might stem from anxiety), but I can look away and back pretty quickly and I guess make it look pretty ... "normal?" I tend to fiddle with something when I talk both for the "hands doing something = thinking happens better" and because it kind of sort of gives me an excuse to glance at something else. If I am picking at my shirt, I can look at that. So I tend to go glance at eyes, look down at shirt, glance back, gesture widly and look at my hands instead of other person when I do, glance at eyes, glance down, glance at hair because it looks like I am making eye contact, glance at other things...

I don't know if this is really abnormal eye contact making patterns or not, but making eye contact for like a whole tick of the second hand or more is just... very strange and kind of make my muscles tighten and my skin crawl? But I can look away and back pretty quickly so I guess it feels like I am making eye contact?

Obviously because I am not looking at the other people, it seems to me like other people aren't making eye contact more because I wouldn't see if they were?

According to the new DSM-5 criteria, I hit:

A-1 - depends on the interpretation of the language - pressured speech, irregular volume, long winded answering , over sharing, info dumping missed cues etc. have always been linked to other things like mania or social anxiety, but then psychs keep dismissing autism as a possibility so.

A-2 - see above about eye contact. I miss a lot of social cues, specially the "i am not interested" cue from other people, but again, can't say how bad it is?

A-3 - difficulty maintaining and making friendships, mostly the maintaining, has always been a thing, but i had the opposite problem on the imaginative play front. I kind of wanted to keep playing imaginative games after other kids stopped. Also my imaginary games were more complex than most other kids wanted to play. Like I played house w/ major chronic illnesses and possible eviction drama rather than, you know, house. I was a weird kid....

B-1 - one story my parents like telling from when i was a kid, like really little, is that they would walk into my room and I would have all my figures and plastic gem stones and dolls lined up in some weird category system all over my room and I would get really mad if they moved things so. In elementary school I used to spend the wait at my therapists office (3x a week) organizing and reorganizing the magazines. Also stacking disposable cups into different shapes. Also, as far back as I can remember i've made little "shrines" out of anything I can get my hands on. Not actual shrines, but symmetrical assemblies of objects from sticks and pebbles and dirt on the ground to wooden blocks to chess pieces. My living spaces are always a mess but sorting things is fun...

B-2 This is the one I think I have the least. Actually strict schedules make me anxious and sameness for too long makes dissociation worse.

B-3 I really don't know how to judge what makes an obsession into an autism criteria level obsession? Does writing a 7 page single spaced essay about  it for fun push it over the edge? Daydreaming about possible fanfictions or aus or alternate timelines? Does it count if the obsessions are short and for just like a 2 week period you read every article on consciousness you can find and then stop? What is just a fangirl who takes her fandoms too seriously and someone who thinks too much" and "spends to much time on things" and "can't let things go" and "over thinks everything" and what is an autism trait?

B-4 OMG yes. Bright lights are painful and evil and brooms should be illegal and loud sounds bad. Also why do humans sweat there is literally nothing less comfortable. Other than how they decided to make socks. Socks are made by the devil. And on and on. Also sensory seeking. Like wrapping ropes or sting or rubber bands around my arm/fingers. Or playing with fire and wax (okay that might be also some other things but), or running my fingers on walls as I walk because fun tingles. Oooo or fences and letting them bang on each post. Or... yeah I do this a lot.

C- some were? Like I said, lining things up, some social difficulties, not being able to stand tights or socks or clothing tags or jeans. My parents say I was always really talkative and bad at letting other people speak, which might just be the "how to turns in conversation work" thing at a young age. I think everyone was too busy dealing with the fact that I threw temper tantrums constantly... My memory recall is not tied into time so if there are no context clues, I can't say if a memory of stimming was from when I was 3 or 6 or 14... but the definitly some from I think around 1st grade. I remember I found a way to make my stomach muscles do a weird thing and i kept doing it over and over? Also chewing on my baby blanket for way longer than "normal..."

D - hahahaha. well, that's why I am at the new doctor, because my parents think I am being a terrible adult. (they are not entirely wrong)

E - I don't know my IQ but my mother told me it was v. high and the testers said "significantly above avg. last time I did a test thing.

That is the DSM 5 autism list.

But like. This is two doctors in a row, possibly 3, plus several non-doctors I have spoken to who are just like "you, autistic? no way. " And I don't get why they think I am so obviously not? It is confusing because the psych today knew most of this info. Not all of it, not laid out like this, but most of it. and she was just. "you don't have autism" like it was silly.

Is it because you can explain some if not almost all of these things by saying I have some sensory processing issues maybe somewhat tied to migraine or other things, and social phobia, and bipolar and mania has fucked with my thoughts and brain, and i am "creative", and  have GAD? I mean, that about covers all of autism, right?

Everything is confusing and weird and like - i don't know how to even bring it up again.

*collapses*

All those little mental “no” post-its on things like “just make a bunch of ground beef for dinner because you’ll actually eat it”, which gets replaced with “you have to make a whole meal that ground beef goes into" , and of course you don’t have the energy for that. So you just don’t eat. Maybe you cry about it a little. And like, you’re so in the habit of it you forget why or how the "no" post-it is even there.

So you end up in this trap where you can’t do things the way you’re “supposed” to do, and so you can’t end up doing them at all. It’s all that extremely random and essentially unimportant crap that trips you up until everything you try to do takes ten times as long as it should, and you’re exhausted even by the idea of trying to do something.

that can be in relation to cultural ideas, in relation to what they want to hear, in relation to what they just expect to hear, in relation to what I want or expect… it can be a lot of things.

and it’s not what actually comes next. or true. in any way, or just partially.