Personal #ActuallyAutistic struggle: #alexithymia making me question my actual feelings on things and whether I truly believe them or not, solely because even despite my age I still don't understand how my feelings work or how to tell when I feel a certain way on said thing.
And so I'm either non-committal or overly-committal and end up with less than ideal situations and bad decisions because my vibe check is defective
Maybe you've heard that people can be nonverbal or nonspeaking. But did you know there are many ways to be semi-speaking? I'll list some I just learned about below. Sing out if any of these resonate with you! @autisticadvocacy
@Dynamicallydisabled@autisticadvocacy Unfortunately, all this only applies if the difficult/expensive step is language to oral speech and working around it via text is possible. In my case the roadblock is the thought to language step and oral vs. written usually doesn't matter much.
I get it though. #alexithymia makes it hard to distinguish the two apart. & I have made the mistake of over relying on my gf for emotional and physical intimacy AS well as sex. & then the relationship goes south & it feels alienating & awful having no more source of sex or cuddles.
To go out & SA women tho requires more than that tho. Like a complete lack of empathy.
One of the "fun" things that's common in #autistic folks (including me) is #alexithymia, which is described as "an inability to identify and describe emotions."
I feel like one of my issues is that I have no particular baseline for "normal" (ie, neurotypical) emotions.
Thus, not only am I unable to describe what I'm feeling, but I do not know whether what I'm feeling is a "normal" part of human experience, or if it's something common to ND folks, or it's normal for NTs and heightened for me.
Current state: Last night I had six hours sleep (avg is 4.5-5), but could barely stay awake at 7am.
I've just come off an on-call work week, which is (in theory) "Work from 9am to 3pm (M-F), take a break, then work from 8pm to 10pm calling end-users and responding to support tickets." (aka 6/5/2). Handover at 10:30am on Saturday morning.
Part of the problem is ADHD distraction, so the 6 hours blows out with 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there, so I end up eating into my break time. On the other hand, some days are just 6+ hours of hyperfocus, and my break time just gets smashed.
Firstly, the whole "talking/responding to end users" thing will be a red flag for ND folks, because I have to mask on being ND, but also emotionally because it's #techsupport.
Secondly, I did not work a 6/5/2 day any day this week. Every day was extremely stressful, with a lot of hyperfocus chunks, but some "ADHD lost time" and was more like a 8.5/2/2.5.
I just did my handover, which (once again), took 1.5 hours from start to finish, but 30 minutes of that was ADHD distraction.
So I started working at 10:30am, finished working at 12pm, but "lost" 30 minutes in the process.
But EMOTIONALLY, I was doing great. I was feeling relaxed & chill, relieved to hand off. I signed out from Slack & work stuff, swapped back to my PC.
Within half an hour, I was a cranky, snappy, hyper-reactive mess, who feels like I'm spiralling into a depression?
I've got so many things around me that need to be done. Being sick for several weeks, then relocating to the new office has left my home office a disaster. Son's friend is coming to stay for a week as well, so lots of cleaning needs to be done, plus there's all the chores that didn't get done because I was working. AND someone (ME) has to go grocery shopping.
The ONLY example I had for this kind of thing was a workaholic father who just kept going and going like the fucking Energizer bunny.
I don't know what to do right now. If I take some time for "self-care", the other shit still needs to be done.
When I look at the numbers, I charged 46 hours of billable time, but I feel like I worked a 65 hour week.
Plus, my brain was still in "work mode" this morning, until I completed the handover, so today feels like Schrödinger's work, where I was both working and not working from when I woke up until I handed over.
In short, I have no fucking idea what "normal" is, and I don't know what to do right now.
Advice please #Autistic peeps. I also have #alexithymia.
My mom has days, possibly only hours to live. She was not a good mom, she didn’t understand autistic me, but I love her. I am totally mixed up. My logic and my emotions are confusing.
How did you cope when someone close to you was dying?
@MarmadukeCWest I have no experience with unexpected losses, but my nanna died of old age a couple of years ago. I'm not sure if I felt something or not. I think i did, but have no way of knowing what i felt because I too have #alexithymia. Anyways, sorry for your loss :(
I hope other #autists find the following statement validating and righteous-anger-inducing rather than invalidating because it's meant to be the former:
#Alexithymia is not developed by autists due to their #autism. Alexithymia is developed by autists because #neurotypicals continuously invalidate our #emotions until we become utterly confused by them and incapable of expressing (or even of knowing) anything about them.
The #trauma that our society heaps upon autists is the cause of autistic alexithymia, and we really need to talk more about how "normal" people psychologically fuck us.
New research suggests that, rather than representing a core feature of #autism spectrum disorder (ASD), emotional processing difficulties reflect co-occurring alexithymia. Autistic individuals with alexithymia could therefore represent a specific subgroup of autism who may benefit from tailored interventions.
@mystique@actuallyautistic@academicchatter
"there is a disruption between how autistic individuals subjectively experience their emotions, and their physiological emotional arousal" - yep, my body can thrum with emotion I'm oblivious to until - bam!💥
I'd say what's "core" to autism is the spiky profile due to different connectivity patterns. It tracks that many but not all have #alexithymia & support strategies must be tailored to specific needs in this (& all other) areas. #ActuallyAutistic
#Alexithymia is a personality construct characterized by altered emotional awareness which has been gaining diagnostic prevalence in a range of neuropsychiatric disorders, with notably high rates of overlap with #autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
The kids I grew up with knew I was "different", but my parents and school insisted I was normal. Now I've explored #Autism#Prosopagnosia#Alexithymia and #Aphantasia and have an idea what was going on, but then I thought everyone saw the world like I did, just coped better. I coped by becoming a #PluralSystem by age three when I realized my girl self would have to be hidden. After six "guy" IDs, I'm now back being that girl. Still running the system, but with more E and less T...
Despite all that, I've been online since #ARPAnet and #DJNR, wrote the first magazine article with simultaneous code distribution (via 8" floppies in the post), coded fab robots to move 6" & 8" Silicon wafers, built my (almost) independent #SolarPV and #SolarThermal house (7K lines of C++ from 1998, 42 device outs), and evolved an audio system with bandwidth from DC to a half MHz. Helped raise four unique kids, as adult minds in young bodies. Still mystify most of the adults I encounter...