Grocery line: This basket is too heavy. But maybe my physical limitations are all in my head and I should just get over it. Stop being so tired. Look there’s candy! It’s so pretty I bet it tastes so good I want it. No, remember, candy makes you feel bad (*remember the physical sensation of eating too much candy*). Is the person behind me mad at me for taking up too much space on the conveyor belt? Does he think I’m stupid or inconsiderate or poorly dressed? How fast can I make this transaction? In what order should I put these things in the grocery bag? What if I suddenly forget my PIN number and can’t pay? Am I being degrading by not having a conversation with the cashier?
Youtube: I’m not a regular watcher of Youtube, but the most recent thing I discovered was the genre of videos akin to “the Hamilton soundtrack but every time they say his name it gets 10% faster.” I also like in-depth analysis of movies and TV shows—even ones I’ve never seen, if the reviewers are entertaining.
Experience:
I’m in pain most of the time.
I’m unusually prone to anger and have a lot of rage fantasies, and I want to scream and break things unusually often (when I was in school I would often break my pencil in half when I got angry, because it was inconspicuous but still helped a little).
I barely have any episodic memory stretching back more than one year at any given time, and >90% of my memories are bad memories, despite me having had a pretty good life.
I dissociate a lot (and have since childhood), including dissociating basically every time I look in a mirror, because I’m like, “who is that? what is that? who are these people around me? how did I get here?”. As a result I have a constant sense of suspicion that nothing is actually real. This only goes away when I’m really wrapped up in what I’m doing and not thinking about the fact that I’m a human in a physical body in a physical world, but it’s easy to be jolted out of that.
I’m not good at allocating my attention between competing sensory experiences. If I’m in a room where a lot of conversations are happening, I’ll try to follow the ones to my left and right in addition to the one I’m supposed to be in. I can’t work while listening to music or if people are talking or if I can see movement in my visual field, or sometimes even if my clothes are too tight. I lose my train of thought when I hear a baby or child.
I pay much more attention to what other people (mostly strangers) are thinking about me than I think is normal. Oli phrased it as something like, the world around me is made up of giant heads and their giant faces are staring at me all the time and judging me. (I think he said other people’s heads are 20x bigger to me than they are to him). I learned to walk and eat and open and close doors maximally silently because I hated bothering other people. If someone tells me off or even just corrects me I usually want to cry.
When I have a plan to do something, I rehearse it in my head over and over beforehand. Usually before big events that I’ve planned I have a nightmare the night before where I experience the entire next day but a bunch of things go wrong. The rehearsing also makes me feel kind of stuck, so e.g. if my implicit plan was to sit in bed and read, and one of my housemates starts a conversation with me when I walk into the kitchen to get water, I feel a ton of internal tension even if I’ve read the book before and the conversation is way better than sitting in bed, because it’s just not what I planned to do and I can’t adjust.
Grocery line: This basket is too heavy. But maybe my physical limitations are all in my head and I should just get over it. Stop being so tired. Look there’s candy! It’s so pretty I bet it tastes so good I want it. No, remember, candy makes you feel bad (*remember the physical sensation of eating too much candy*). Is the person behind me mad at me for taking up too much space on the conveyor belt? Does he think I’m stupid or inconsiderate or poorly dressed? How fast can I make this transaction? In what order should I put these things in the grocery bag? What if I suddenly forget my PIN number and can’t pay? Am I being degrading by not having a conversation with the cashier?
Youtube: I’m not a regular watcher of Youtube, but the most recent thing I discovered was the genre of videos akin to “the Hamilton soundtrack but every time they say his name it gets 10% faster.” I also like in-depth analysis of movies and TV shows—even ones I’ve never seen, if the reviewers are entertaining.
Experience:
I’m in pain most of the time.
I’m unusually prone to anger and have a lot of rage fantasies, and I want to scream and break things unusually often (when I was in school I would often break my pencil in half when I got angry, because it was inconspicuous but still helped a little).
I barely have any episodic memory stretching back more than one year at any given time, and >90% of my memories are bad memories, despite me having had a pretty good life.
I dissociate a lot (and have since childhood), including dissociating basically every time I look in a mirror, because I’m like, “who is that? what is that? who are these people around me? how did I get here?”. As a result I have a constant sense of suspicion that nothing is actually real. This only goes away when I’m really wrapped up in what I’m doing and not thinking about the fact that I’m a human in a physical body in a physical world, but it’s easy to be jolted out of that.
I’m not good at allocating my attention between competing sensory experiences. If I’m in a room where a lot of conversations are happening, I’ll try to follow the ones to my left and right in addition to the one I’m supposed to be in. I can’t work while listening to music or if people are talking or if I can see movement in my visual field, or sometimes even if my clothes are too tight. I lose my train of thought when I hear a baby or child.
I pay much more attention to what other people (mostly strangers) are thinking about me than I think is normal. Oli phrased it as something like, the world around me is made up of giant heads and their giant faces are staring at me all the time and judging me. (I think he said other people’s heads are 20x bigger to me than they are to him). I learned to walk and eat and open and close doors maximally silently because I hated bothering other people. If someone tells me off or even just corrects me I usually want to cry.
When I have a plan to do something, I rehearse it in my head over and over beforehand. Usually before big events that I’ve planned I have a nightmare the night before where I experience the entire next day but a bunch of things go wrong. The rehearsing also makes me feel kind of stuck, so e.g. if my implicit plan was to sit in bed and read, and one of my housemates starts a conversation with me when I walk into the kitchen to get water, I feel a ton of internal tension even if I’ve read the book before and the conversation is way better than sitting in bed, because it’s just not what I planned to do and I can’t adjust.