PTSD & Mirroring

 Now I also have a PTSD diagnosis. That’s all I have to say about that for now. 

I’ve learned something new about myself, which is really fascinating to me. Yesterday I got home so close to shutdown that I put in my noise-cancelling earbuds, and watched a kdrama. I realised after about a couple of hours of complete passivity, when my mind started sparking again, that my face was mirroring the faces on my tablet. Almost every movement in the faces of the actors was being reproduced on my face. I focused on my own face for a further hour, and realised it was mainly positive, attractive, warm expressions. Is my masking so seamless that when I don’t have the cognitive bandwidth to calculate what my face needs to do, I ape neurotypical faces in front of me and don’t even know I’m doing it? 

Life Undiagnosed

 I’ve been in full-time employment my entire life. Aside from one summer, when I was very ill and on a sickness benefit, and a few months at other points in my life, I’ve worked or studied full-time for 35 years. All that time I’ve gone through cycles of overload, shame, mental burnout, imposter syndrome, depression, physical burnout, and emotional dysregulation, and life has been a near constant struggle. I had no idea that everyone else wasn’t struggling with the same traits, because I thought I was neurotypical. The worlds of work, family, couplehood, socialising, study, etc. just aren’t neuro-funky-friendly. Right now I’m trying to work out how to generate an income for myself in such a way that I can avoid these pitfalls. I’m thinking of creating my own line of sheepskin products, utilising materials that aren’t of use in my current employer’s product range. I need to get help working out the nuts and bolts of that, because even though I’ve spent a good part of my career as a sole trader, I’ve never done concrete production. I’ve always sold my expertise and time. I’m thinking about which products will work, in terms of overheads versus price, how to finance buying my required plant, and the logistics of shipping such products. The best way to market them, and who my target market will be. My sister has been an entrepreneur her entire adult life, so she can help with that. I don’t want to expand too much, as I just want to make a living, but I am considering documenting the process, so other neuro-funky people can learn from my mistakes and victories. I’ll update here as I go.

Ritalin

 I’m 52, going on 53. I’ve been on Ritalin for around three weeks, and the change when it hits is phenomenal. My whole demeanour apparently changes. My entire family has been gobsmacked by the change. What has interested me has been the high I get from completing tasks. I actually feel euphoric when I’ve done something to my own satisfaction. My emotional dysregulation is hugely improved too. As you might imagine, this has made my job even more enjoyable, and I’m sure it makes me much easier to be around. 

My performance in the IVA2 CPT is radically flipped from hugely sub-normal, to, on some measures, super-normal, but other-wise generally normal. My worst medicated measures are those that are hearing-based, which makes sense.

I still can’t read between the lines, tell the difference between different emotional responses, outside of their polarity, or modulate my own vocal tone instinctively. It still takes huge amounts of bandwidth to mask. The upside is that I have more available energy during the day to manage this, though. I’ve given up on trying to unmask at this point. It’s so habitual that I actually forget to shed my smiles and inflections, and I have more important things to deal with right now.

Like how much more positive I feel. On the whole, my quality of life has improved drastically. I’m less upset by my lack of upstanding of or from others, my imposter syndrome fades out, I’m more tolerant of things that used to be problems, and most of the time my affect is positive, so long as I’m on the Ritalin. This is hugely important to me, because when I think of my life pre-Ritalin, it seems dark, desaturated, pain-wracked, and incredibly overwhelming. I have lived in that world for half a century, but now, with the swallowing of a pill, I step into this new existence.

The flip-side are the crash after the Ritalin has been metabolised, and the traits it doesn’t alter. When the drug has left my system I become intensely fatigued, much less resilient, and much more unstable, emotionally. My intellect is still there, but I just don’t have the bandwidth to tap into it, and deal with anything else that’s going on. 

My sensory issues are still terrible, but noise-cancelling earbuds or headphones have made life much smoother, and less overwhelming. Without them I am constantly on the brink of meltdown while driving, working, shopping, and just being in a crowd. I can’t believe I didn’t try these years ago. They’re now a vital part of my toolkit, for living as a functional adult.

I have found a third downside with the use of Ritalin. It makes me queasy. Sometimes it’s so bad I feel that vomiting is imminent, and at best I feel nauseous. The next step is trying another ADHD medication, for which I have an appointment this coming week.

Diagnosed

 I’ve had a formal assessment and have a diagnosis for my ADHD. I don’t need one for autism. 

The Struggle

 

To Start With…

 

Actually Autistic

 I’m autistic. All sorts of aspects of me-ness turn out to be part of a widely shared autistic experience. I’m now learning more about autism than I ever did, either as an undergrad or postgrad psychology student. I studied psychology for five years at university in the 1990s, and when I dropped out of grad school I had learned way less about autism than I have recently, with my student days long gone.

My autistic traits showed up from the beginning. I was a bed-wetter, with gastrointestinal problems, who zoned out, was monotropic, became super-focused as soon as my interest was captured, resented interruption, surprises, and demands, and had weird food fads. I was late, first to learn to ride a bike, then to drive a car. I’m clumsy and accident prone. My brain literally doesn’t fit into my skull, with part of my hindbrain protruding into my nape. I retain ridiculous amounts of information in it.

I don’t see or hear the nuances of human expression or communication, with everything being positive, negative, or neutral. I struggle to take part in conversations with more than one person, and I experience really, really bad feelings when talking on the phone. If a service provider customer care representative calls me about anything it can take me hours to recover. I suspect my expression and tone are often either inappropriate or flat, because it’s such hard work to apply the correct reaction filters to my face and voice.

My pain tolerance is through the roof, while my sound tolerance is at floor level. I can’t stand nuts and hard seeds in bread or cake, crunchy things in pasta, or combination of lemon and sugar. The smell of metal oxides, unwashed humans, and cooking meat (apart from bacon) are deeply distracting in a bad way. The smell of wood, soil, and some animals make me feel safe. I love the feeling of animal hair or wool. I hate it when particles stick to my feet. 

There is so much more, but I won’t put it all in here. Needless to say, living in a world geared towards people who aren’t thinking or feeling similarly is exhausting, painful, and stressful, because, aside from the bed-wetting, every “me” trait I’ve found to be linked to autism has persisted, and makes operating in a professional context, to the timetables of others, pretty nightmarish. Don’t get me started on relationships.

I’m 52, and I can’t always cope with adult life, and even when I’m coping, commonly known as being “high functioning”, I’m in pain, worn out, and using huge amounts of energy masking. I’m so highly adept at it that people question whether I am actually autistic, but it makes me less alien and scary. In order to reduce my fatigue and discomfort I am going to try and shed a lot of my masking, which will be more disturbing to others than to myself. Honestly, I’ve spent my entire life, and expended huge amounts of energy on trying to fit in and operate outside my spec’, and I’m over it.

Nobody in my life, even me, had ever considered if I might be on the spectrum, until I was in my late 40s, and in the end it was me who worked it out, just as I did with my endometriosis. 

From this point, until I reach a state of balance and energy in my life that I feel is sustainable for me to live out my remaining years in comfort, I will be sharing my journey here. If you are interested feel free to bookmark or subscribe. If not, then thank you for caring or being interested enough to read this far.

Ngā mihi.