Questionable sanity!

[azurelunatic]

The Druids won the War on Christmas

Today I got to share my tea. They were out in the breakroom, so one of the ladies on another team got to share my stash. Because we tea-drinkers must unite!

There's been a hole in my heart for the past six months. This feels so much better. Not of the same egg, but of the same flock always.

Came home to find that Her Nibs had tagged my room. That was not so pleasant. I think it was on the rugs under my computer chair; I dragged them out because Myrrh said she will get them in the wash (probably sooner than I would have). Her Nibs is to be containerized until she is no longer hot. Not sure when her appointment is going to be.

I went collapsey-boom around 5; I haven't been getting enough sleep. I was out cold until 7-ish, when my phone started humming urgently to itself. I'm not at my most coherent when I wake out of a sound sleep, so hcolleen got to hear me waking up and freaking out when nothing (including my brain) was working. I did get her Myrrh's number, at length.

Last night I awoke in the middle of the night to a situation that I feel compelled to describe as "squish squish", even though there is already a canonical male version of that description (and if you know what that is and don't feel the need to have that mental image tampered with in ways you may find gross, you might want to stop reading here). Turns out my uterus had decided to expel a VERY LARGE CHUNK of uterine lining nearly intact. SQUISH SQUISH.

The concept that I present like adult ADD of some sort, and the concept that ADD may well be on the autistic spectrum, completely blows my mind. It doesn't change anything about me or who I am, but it gives me some hindsight about some of the social difficulties I had growing up. It might not have all been social isolation. It might have partly been just being wired differently from the vast majority of my classmates. I always have known that I thought differently, and it's sometimes been a rude shock that even when I think I'm acting normal, people around me see me as acting inexplicable and crazy, or at least inexplicable and very different.

I'm fine with being wacky when I choose to be wacky, but I want to pass. In the past, friendly acquaintances have hurt me badly by cheerfully declaring that I'm completely crazy but they love me anyway. I don't particularly feel crazy anymore. I still think at odd tangents to most of the rest of the world, I still have a highly entertaining inner free-association train going that jumps and jitters and goes at a few hundred miles per hour (just there, the "jumps" cued "The Beat That My Heart Skipped", and the thought of the specific speed 90mph but sometimes it's a whole lot faster than that, and an estimated range and some pondering on relative measures of "fast", and bullet trains, and trains of thought leaping the tracks, and how sometimes for hcolleen's entertainment I specify how I got to that specific topic based on the input I got, and a few other exploding trains of thought, and there goes the carriage with Susan Death's parents in it from *that* input), but I'm not broken. And for me, "crazy" is "broken", not "atypical". I know "I don't feel crazy" usually means you're flat-out nuts, but most of the stuff I do can be traced back to reality somewhere, and I'm not broken, and I'm actually functional. I figure, at that point I should be able to do anything inside my head I want to, so long as what comes out is relating to c'thia.

The depression/panic attack/agoraphobia combo is mostly under control, thanks to better coping techniques, St. John's Wort taken religiously, and better general circumstances (in this case, no more needing to contend with Leftover Leftovers Guy).

Comments

[lady-angelina.livejournal.com]

and the concept that ADD may well be on the autistic spectrum

Fascinating. I actually hadn't heard that before. Everything I've read is that they are two entirely separate, um... "disorders," for an extreme lack of a much better word. ^^;; And also that they tend to be concomitant, or that ASD can better explain some of the symptoms of ADD. But they are not on the same spectrum.

I haven't met you in RL, but at least as far as I've seen you on LJ and on IRC, you present to me as more of an ADD type than ASD. It's hard for me to say why exactly, but you do seem to me as though you have better social skills than someone with ASD would likely have. Of course, you might have had to consciously learn them over the years; I don't know. =)

But folks with ADD can and do have social difficulties, but (from what I understand, anyway) for different reasons than do folks with ASD, and both of which are related to being "differently-wired."

Urgh, don't mind me. It's 7 AM, and I'm sure that none of what I'm saying is making a lot of sense. ;)

[azurelunatic]

There are a lot of things that I've consciously learned, or learned late. I know a significant chunk of my ability to interact socially is due to theatre and writing. Theatre consciously deconstructs body language in human interaction, and you pick up the skills to study it that way if you didn't understand it to start with. I act well enough, but I'll never be brilliant there. I do write, and I write well; in order to do as well as I have at that, I have to script out what has to happen and then direct it through in my head, and once it's directed, I can transcribe what the characters are doing.

I've always had little models of people in my head, and I interacted with them better than I did with the people themselves, half the time. I check myself and my models of the people I know to make sure the model is consistent with reality, scripting through what I think someone is going to say sometimes, and then playing it out, seeing if I get the same responses. I used to have to rehearse what I was going to say over and over in my head, until I was sure of what I was going to say before I said it, and then work over my responses again and again until I could speak. I could make unscripted conversation with some people in some circumstances, but it took me literally rewiring my brain to make it possible for me to do that in most circumstances. (I realized that I could have typed conversations realtime in chatrooms, so I knew that I was theoretically capable of having voice conversations with strangers realtime, so I caused the mental source of my typed chat output to output into voice conversation as well. I still have no idea how I did it, other than it felt like pressing. I did it once previously with rewiring my brain to use either eyebrow rather than just the one.)

You're also seeing me after a whole lot of very intensive therapy, pastoral rather than clinical, as my Priestess-confessor isn't certified. Granted, most of that was to put my insides back together and back inside, but a coherent inside has a lot to do with a coherent outside for me. I'm very nearly incapable of serious deception, so I have to actually be whole and healthy to interact that way.

As far as what I am, I'm not tied to a label, as long as there's some acknowledgment that I am not only weird, but wired weird.