serious answer though for me....a sense of self is not an 'I am' statement. 'I am' statements are labels I cling to in order to feel like I have some semblance of a self, and I basically just hoard them. even ones I've kind of outgrown, I'll still cling to, because I feel like I need them. but if you asked me to describe myself--like, personality traits, likes and dislikes, just talking about myself at all--I'll be unable to come up with anything and likely become incredibly uncomfortable because I have no answer. and it's also 'no sense of self' in the sense that....I shape who I am to fit whoever I'm talking to. you don't like a trait of my personality? bam, gone. I change everything about me to suit people's needs because I don't have any idea who I really am anyway.
okay honest thing here, though: I feel like most people wouldn't know which one?? like, a lot of people I know are uncomfortable being the center of attention--but that doesn't mean being ignored is comfortable either.
hypocrisy isn't a symptom but a lot of symptoms and traits are contradictory in BPD so i'm really not sure?? it's easy to get hypocritical when you're splitting tho
slight elaboration on this: I saw a post once that went as follows-- person: you don't have to change yourself for me :) me: I have a different fabricated personality for every person in my life, so if you have any critiques lmk and this is, in essence, what I mean.
that makes sense but. yeah i get the "you don't like X trait? that's okay because it's Gone" thing. which... is probably part of the reason why i got so fucked up over my (ex)fp not telling me that they no longer wanted to be close. they didn't want to be close because they were starting to dislike some of my personality things but had i known those personality traits were causing issues they would have ceased to exist and my fp would probably still like me. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
i don't even know whether i do this. i don't connect to people on the basis of Me, only the things that i can do. as long as i'm entertaining people, i don't have to have a personality!!!
Some non-BPD input on the sense of self thing: I also suck at open-ended "tell us about yourself!" things, but if you give me specific questions I can give detailed, relatively consistent answers. I had fun filling out the personality questions on okCupid, because while they weren't all easy, I could answer most of them and the patterns the data formed were interesting. The one type of question I consistently struggle with is the ones about how other people see me. I'm just bumbling around behaving as comes naturally, so when other people's evaluations of me contradict my own, it's genuinely surprising (and sometimes unsettling.) I tend to assume people I know are on the same general page as me wrt what kind of person I am, even though my own self-understanding is hard to briefly summarize.
I've sort of had vaguely similar experiences related to my learning disability, except with people assuming I'm socially inept instead of robotic. I will often respond to the content of a joke while ignoring the delivery. Some doctors seem to think this means I don't understand jokes. No, I got it. I understood that it was a joke. I could probably go ahead and explain why it was humorous if it would make anyone feel better. I'm also perfectly aware of the range of expected responses. I chose to do something else, because apparently I prioritize conversational expectations differently than most people do. I'm aware that that makes people uncomfortable and will have factored it into my response decision. I can totally imagine some equally unfortunate misunderstanding happening with ASPD. It's why I wanted to ask. Thanks to @ASPD Anon and @chaoticArbiter for answering, as well as @raybot for pointing out the possible trauma link. I hadn't considered that.
The same thing happens to me with jokes! People seem to think that my literal-minded, deadpan response comes from not understanding, but in truth I'm playing along with their bit. It just so happens that my natural role in comedy is the straight man/repository of botany factoids.
Same here a lot of the time actually, though I do it by complete accident cause it takes me a hot second to process that something was a joke, especially if it's random in what was previously a normal conversation. That's probably an autistic thing for me though now that I think about it XD
So I'm not professionally diagnosed yet but almost certain that I have szpd. On the other hand, i know i have traits of aspd as well... and reading through this thread makes me wonder if they're not a lot stronger than I'd thought. (Fully doubt I'd be diagnosable with the full thing, but... same hat on a Lot of things. I answered yes to almost everything on shitborderlinesdo's aspd checklist. Looked up the dsm criteria for shits and giggles, and the only nos there were basically the legal issues and conduct disorder requirements. I don't really get into fights either, just fantasise a lot about it -- though come to think of it my sibling and I got pretty violent with each other into my late teens, so possibly the mitigating factor there was me having zero other personal relationships rather than not being a fighty bastard lmfao. I definitely was not ever diagnosed with conduct disorder (have got a retrospective ADHD diagnosis tho) and I'm pretty sure this was correct. then again most of my childhood and all of my teenage years was when the schizoid stuff reared its head, so idk. I had that gifted kid thing going on and that+daydreaming all day erry day kinda took up most people's attention. I've felt... disconnected from people pretty much as far back as I can remember. I sort of feel like I have a core identity, but every time I try to define it the damn thing sidles out from underneath me and suddenly I feel like I wanna claw my own skin off bc it should be walkin around on someone else. It might not really be an identity so much as my consciousness tbh, it's made up of my thoughts and whatever mental singularity they stem from rather than anything else. There's a stable feeling to it, but that stable feeling is 'I don't know shit'. I don't really like thinking about it, bc it pisses me off, I feel sure I ought to be able to define myself really strongly but,,,, Nope lmao (I guess subclinical aspd is an option. It's pretty common to have multiple personality disorders, right?)
I was back reading this thread and now I'm wondering, is it atypical to not have an idea of how others see you? When I answer questions such as "others would describe me as x" I literally don't know how to answer and have to ask someone "do you think I'm x?" It never occurred to me that I should have an idea how others see me.
Same. I can sorta bullshit it if I gotta, but it's uncomfortable and I'm always pretty sure it's inaccurate. I thought everyone was like tho xD
it also feels weird when someone tells me how they see me, even if i ask. because it sounds completely inaccurate. the embodiment of 'sounds fake, but ok'
i feel this. like... i get a horrible feeling when i feel like someone has seen me in a way i think is incorrect, but i have no idea what "correct" would even be in this sense.
I asked some IRL friends in a chat, and most of them said they have some idea, though they figure it may be colored by their own opinions. I don't even have a skewed idea lol, it just comes up blank. It was suggested that it may have to do with my lower than average empathy. Sample size of who answered was about 6 at this time.
