Another symptom collection

Mostly a crosspost from what I already posted in Is This Abuse?, but I figured a symptom list of (potential) brainweird is more fitting here. (But you already have the post in ITA! Yes, but it's kind of off topic there. But you need the abuse backgroung because comorbidity! If people are interested in that / think some things could also stem from abuse, they can visit my other thread. But what if you're just making mountains out of molehills and- Eff off, brain, this belongs here and if people are not interested in my issues they will just not engage with this thread.)

One of my problems, next to it all being a huge intertwined clusterfuck of abuse source, and at least 2 or 3 different mental illnesses and neither me nor my shrink currently know what's from where exactly. Hm, maybe list and make notes re: what could cause this of the things we suspect.
Another thing is, I do not know what is "normal" and what is symptomatic. I do not have a frame of reference. The family mantra was "we are normal, everyone else is strange".

• Perfectionist. Should've finished my BA a year ago, be an accomplished multi-focus artist, writer, webcomic artist, and actress, and should have a job.
• Can't focus for shit, unless my mind gets one of those clear phases in which I Understand Stuff and can focus and extrapolate and stuff. Those phases, while rare, are sorta hyperfocus-y, and my brain is too quick for me. I can't word everything before my brain is three ideas further. But they're amazing otherwise. Unless in that phase, my mind tends to drift off, regardless of how much I try to focus on something.
  It got so bad the last two last months while trying to write a term paper from inability to focus to my brain forcing me to scrap and rewrite everything already had three days to the deadline and then refusing to cooperate in rewriting it, that I just gave up.
• Corollary with lack of focus, it also veers into escapism in some regards, that I'm off in some mental place where things are not that bad, or at least I can deal with the bad things. Adults often remarked "you're in your own little fantasy world, aren't you", and I didn't catch the subtext behind THAT until years later.
• I think it was in the ADHD in Adults thread, but it would explain a lot regarding that caffeine doesn't seem to make me any more awake, or stop me from falling asleep. It sometimes helps me focus, but not always.
• Sensory issues:
  • Sounds: Loud sounds in general, I seem to either have a lower tolerance or hear things louder than other people. Loud whirry sounds (electric saws, vacuum cleaners, blenders, drills), they're nasty as fuck and I tend to flee the vicinity. Did since I was really little, too.
    Certain sounds have textures, especially the foam ones. Brr. Absolutely disgusting.
  • Textures: Certain foam materials, styrofoam (sound, too), sponge foam (developed later); Certain fabrics, satin (mom bought me satin pajamas when I was younger and I forced myself to deal with the blergh, and I'm really glad I retired my satin bedsheets even though they were pretty), certain lycra mixes (i get also get rashes from those), certain velvets, taffeta, certain other synthetic fibres (I always test clothing whether I can wear it before I buy); chewing on fat or sinew (actually makes me spit it all out because it's gross as fuck)
  • Smells: I can only sleep if I smell fresh air or water / rain. If I smell foodstuffs, flowers, another person, pets, perfume, smoke of any kind, I literally cannot fall asleep.
  • Tastes: I taste all sorts of sweeteners as somewhere between dust and fucking disgusting. Doesn't taste sweet at all, or sort of heavily plastic sweet. I also appear to taste it earlier if food is about to spoil. (One con morning, I remarked on the noodles tasting weird, while the rest of the group didn't notice any weird taste. That evening, they went fully spoiled.)
• Information processing issues. Like, I read something, or someone talks to me about something / explains something, and I have trouble understanding the concept they're trying to convey, or grasping what I need to do and keeping it in my mind. Like, it took my parents multiple attempts at a) listing the steps of operating the washing machine, and b) showing me how to operate it before I could do it myself. I still struggle with dishwashers. Sometimes I hear people talk and I know what they say makes sense but I cannot process that sense, if I can parse their words as sensible words at all. Same with reading sometimes. I end up reading and rereading the same phrase over and over and over again because it doesn't click. I remember that I didn't understand an algorithm in class and a friend explained it to me another way and I still didn't understand it, and then another friend had a go at it and explained it yet another way and suddenly click.
  Or when people talk to me and there's some kind of background noise. Can't keep em apart, it's all over the same damn channel.
  I also have trouble extracting information from text, and rephrasing things. This makes writing term papers really fucking difficult.
• Sensory overload & panic attacks happen when stuff happens in my back. (panic attack in 11th grade when I tried to open a door with a ribbon, and suddenly my teacher stood behind me and everyone was looking at me. utterly horrifying.) (overload when i was at a restaurant, with my back to the room, and there was so much noise and clatter and stuff behind me)
• My brain is fond of raging against strawmen. How things could've gone differently, what arguments I could've brought forth instead of those I used, it picks a random face from the masses and starts raging against it. It's really annoying.
• Tactile hallucinations, more specifically the feeling of having horns and wings.
• I usually don't catch subtext. I usually catch sarcasm, especially if the tone melody for sarcasm is used. Social interactions are difficult. I don't know how to deal with people (appropriate topics, when it's appropriate to talk about own experiences, showing empathy, etc), and people don't know how to deal with me
• Boundary issues. (Such as calling a friend of mine by the nicknames her boyfriend used for her. Whoops. Not that anyone told me.)
• I'm like, really fidgety. So much my teachers remarked on it. People remark on the fact that I use my hands a lot while talking. I need to keep them busy, by typing, doodling, writing, kneading eraser, folding origami - I started doing tribal drawings on the margins of my notepads because of that.
  It also plays into a destructive tendency - when I take things apart into their separate parts. I'm usually not able to put them back together, (I took something apart once that my mother made, after she had berated and berated me that she didn't want me touching it because I'd obviously destroy it.) even if I try. It's a bad mix of restlessness & trying to challenge myself, because hey, things are puzzles. This behavior has subsided ever since I moved away, even though I still rip apart tissues before chewing on them. (my mother likes to accuse me of ridiculous things. i remember her taking some kind of medicine via syringe and she was constantly accusing me of taking the syringes, i think. i didn't even look at them.)
• Corollary to fidgety hands: Chewing on stuff is a Thing I Do. My Signless/Cancer pendant, tissues, paper, wood, plastics, fabric, pens, pencils, styluses...
• Sensory stuff #2: Pleasant things: Earthware, rain, snow, renforcé cotton, wild silk, linen, old books, leather, fur, delicate chains. Pressure on my upper arms.
• Whenever I get angry, my first impulse is to try and hurt people physically. I do not want to hurt people. (Although I once hit an asshole in the temple who harassed me on the subway). Yay for normalized violence while growing up ::/
• Mentally rehearsing elaborate justifications for completely innocuous actions just in case some hypothetical interlocutor demands an explanation.
• General spoonlessness. brain filled with mush, staring blankly at the ceiling/wall for hours, dissociating for various amounts of time
• Some kind of sensitivity to light. similarily to loud sounds, i seem to perceive light as brighter than others.
• General people-pleasing tendencies (abuse/adhd/female socialisation comorbidity? probably.). It's Bad if people are angry or upset, and I need to make sure that they aren't angry or upset anymore.
• Eye contact is a thing i have to conciously do. teachers have admonished me for not making eye contact while talking to them. (I have, however, at once point questioned another person's sincerity because they would look away when they talked to me. This happened over ten years ago, I don't know if I picked up on that it was only then that they wouldn't look at me, or that everyone else looked at me, or if the information "looks away while talking to you = insincerity" had been introduced to my mind recently)
• I learned most of my body language & facial expressions via manga. (...No wonder my expressions were hard to parse, I learned a lot from mimicing Oda's work).
• People have asked if I was upset, when I thought my expression was neutral. (Or sat with my forehead on my arms, because fucking tired, and were then taken aback when I told them to go away because I'm too fucking tired to deal with anyone rn)
• I apparently had such problems socializing in kindergarten that the kindergarteners kept me in kindergarten for a year longer, "to help my social interaction along" - my mother is firmly of the opinion that I didn't mesh well with them because I was "too bright for them" (yes, thank you mom, I realize that in your head I am so bright and clever that you do not need to do anything because i can do everything for myself, and whenever I voice something that could make you question that I'm just being silly OR trying to aggravate you.)
• Memory issues holy fucking shit on a stick. I forget large swatches of time to the point of dissociation, can't keep information inside my head, but then I sometimes remember the weirdest details. wtf, brain
• Personality quizzes are so fucking weird. Like, 1) my preferred answer is not there 50% of the time; 2) how am i supposed to rate this if i don't have a frame of reference, 3) how the fuck am i supposed to know what other people think about/of me I'M NOT PSYCHIC DAMNIT
• Emotions are weird. Half the time I'm sitting in my head going "body, cut that shit out we have stuff to do" while my body is doing things like shaking and crying and not being able to produce words. There's this weird disconnect going on.
• I'm kind of scatterbrained and unorganized and I can't for the life of me stay organized. I keep trying, but it doesn't work. My history teacher made me come to his desk after each lesson and sign that I had written down what the homework was because I kept forgetting it. (I also kept forgetting my school bag at my father's shop when I had dropped by for lunch). The whole "try to remember" thing is downright impossible for me. (Putting a cassette back after I had finished listening to it was a success, not that my parents cared)
• Phonecalls are awful and I need to psych myself up and follow a script before I can do them.
• Sometimes words don't work. Like, I can't put things into words, or I can't speak, or only speak in English (my native tongue is German)
• Can't remember faces for shit. Late teen-early tween girl with brown hair? Maybe glasses? THEY ALL LOOK (AND SOUND) THE SAME. And I don't recognize people I've talked to.
• I've got troubles with my voice volume. I sometimes speak too loudly and don't notice it.
• Trouble in discussions. I need time to sort what people have said and how to respond to it, and when I've got that the discussion has already ambled along. And when someone starts talking the same moment or shortly after I tried to say something, I automatically stop talking. (That's my mother's fault - she always barged into any discussion I had with my dad or anyone with something off-topic, cut me off, and expected everyone to pay attention to her)
• Difficulties with functional adult - outside world interactions, like applying for an internship, or taking care of bank account stuff.
• Difficulties with functional adult stuff like getting out of bed, making food, and grocery shopping for specific recipes for which I need to prep stuff (decide what to make, identify what to get, identify where to get it (some of our grocery stores don't carry everything all the time, like shallots), go and buy it, store it appropriately, then preparation); keeping my place clean and not-messy (sweeping and mopping the floor once a month tends to be a tad much)....
• Unless I have a high energy day, which I use to do laundry, change sheets, mop floor, do dishes, clean up stuff, and shower afterwards
• There are days on which I can do little more than just stare at the ceiling or wall for hours because my brain just fizzes out on everything, even reading. Those have been getting rarer, however.
• There are days when not even the ADHD pills can help me focus. Had a couple of those this week (Monday & Wednesday). Took me until 2 am to get my brain to focus on the thing I wanted done by Thursday.
• Sensory issues seem to be exarcerbated by:
  1. lack of sleep
  2. being woken up by the concrete saws / building noise outside
  3. street musicians on the commuter train. THERE ARE TOO MANY PEOPLE TOO CLOSE TO ME TO HAVE TO DEAL WITH YOUR PITIFUL EXCUSE FOR MUSIC FUCK OFF (item: which fucking ever train i take in the morning, it's always that same fucking band with the same fucking song, unless the train is hella crowded, but i've head street musicians play when the train was a sardine can. i have since opted to take a different, slightly longer route.)
• I seem to be random people's go-to if they have a question or can't find their way (or want to sell something). It's draining.
• I try to keep an hourly energy level chart (physical, social, creative, mental, functioning adult, focus). Emphasis on try, because I usually can do that (with a few hours delay on some) until Thursday, and then I have to reconstruct everything after that next Tuesday.
• Corollary to the brain-raging-against-strawmen thing: Turns out it's not just arguments, but general conversations. I notice the arguments easier, because they hog more braincycles, require more attention, and make me feel irritated
• Disconnect regarding emotions. My default emotion tends to be "neutral", and I have since identified "happiness" and "irritation", "uneasiness", and "excitement". My body itself seems to be experiencing a great deal more of them, and expresses them without the conscious part of me being aware of them before my body expresses them (tears and voice modulation, mostly). Other people tend to read irritation or my mind being occupied/bothered by something (in-between nuance, b/c of reasons I can't quite word atm) as anger.
• Trouble wording things because (phrasing) could be misinterpreted with an accusing subtext or sth which I do not want but it could be construed this way.
• Need to justify my actions, even if they don't need justification. Less pathological than 7-ish years ago, but still present.
• Difficulties identifying rhetorical questions as such. They either confuse me, because something is off about them, or I just right-out answer them because I couldn't identify them as rhetorical. (I have, however, since identified a certain intonation that signals the wanted response to a question is "yes")
• Sometimes answering questions in a way I think people want to hear. Usually does not have the effect I was going for, regardless of it working for other people. More information needed.
• But usually I don't even think of telling something that is not the truth.
• Trouble recognizing when something does not need to be elaborated further, or if a technical falsehood works for the situation in question.
• Trouble interpreting works. Might be slowly learning how to do it, but it's still insanely difficult. Took years for me to understand why you even do it (because stuff doesn't exist in a vacuum, stuff that doesn't have a meaning is just filler and can be cut, and putting layers upon layers of cross-connections and symbolism on stuff is really funny), and I still need the historical context and a list of symbols to remotely get anywhere.

Plus probably some more I've forgotten or do not recognize as weird.

Current list of likely suspects is Schizotypal Personality Disorder (although my onset on symptoms is really fucking early for that in some regards), Depression, ADHD, and stuff that came from my parent's abuse and neglect mix.
Autism was suggested by Seebs, but there's stuff that speaks against it.

EDIT 07/10: Added stuff. A different thread and some correlating matters would put the strawman thing under anxiety. Additions marked in blue.

 

Heh. I checked the DSM-IV for both Autism and STPD, and I while I do match the diagnostic criteria for Asperger's (the factor speaking against full-blown Autism from DSM-IV perspective being that I did not do the speech regression thing - at last as far as my parents are concerned, and, well, you know that story already), but I also match the diagnostic criteria for STPD, and the Schizophrenia spectrum trumps the Autism spectrum in that regard - mutually exclusive, too, and there's a large overlap of symptoms.
The whole strawmen thing my brain does would actually speak for STPD and against Autism, IIRC. What would speak for Autism and not also be possibly symptomatic of STPD would be, what? Me getting along good with most Autistic folks I come across? (Autistics are usually easy to understand. It's a wavelength I can deal with)
I need to run this list along the diagnostics criteria....

One of the things that make it hard is that the onset of symptoms from what I can remember (I can't ask my parents in that regard because they will not acknowledge that anything might've gone wrong that early without me slapping a diagnosis into their faces) is somewhere between usual onset of Autism symptoms (too late for those) and STPD symptoms (too early for those).

Hell, maybe it's something else entirely. Wouldn't that be a hoot.

(I wonder, would my dad's difficulties with teaching/explaining me stuff/communicating with me also happen if it weren't autistic - notautistic communication, but also autistic - sufficiently differently autistic?)

 

I'm fuzzy on what onset is here because sometimes some things I don't realize are happening until at some point it just clicks that 'hey I'm doing that thing' and then looking at memories can be kind of hard because human brain is inclined to retroactively alter memory to include thing-I-just-realized sooooooo onset could be earlier than realization, or not. maybe?

 

(Stupid nitpick: we're on the DSM 5 now, if you want to be current about your brainweird.)

Personality disorders are fucking weird (as I've mentioned in another thread). I would not take onset information as anything stronger than "this is what we usually see, if we run a study, of people who actually show up to be studied" when it comes to those. If things that happen to you in life are shaping your habits and methods of coping, then those things can happen at different times to different people. Life will fuck you over on its own schedule. On the other hand, age of onset with autism is a pretty settled thing; it's almost certainly not an autistic trait if it wasn't there when you were four or so.

Sensory issues are most strongly connected to autism but are not rare in allistics with ADHD either. (I suspect autism and ADHD are brainweird cousins somehow.) What happens with ADHD is that your brain doesn't know what stimulus is important and so it determines that the important stimulus must be the seam in the toe of your socks.

Growing up, people with ADHD tend to be a couple years behind their peers socially because they miss the social cues people are giving off. Your abuse history would complicate this further because abusive individuals often use body language and facial expression deliberately as a manipulation tactic, or their problems mean that their own signalling is atypical--you'd be learning the "wrong" cues. It might help to decide if you feel like you're struggling to catch up with others and/or having to unlearn and relearn stuff, or if there's something other people seem to get that you fundamentally do not grok.

I personally advocate trying solutions from people who have the same problem as you and not worrying whether or not they have ALL the same problems as you, so if you run into some of the same difficulties as autistics, then their solutions for those difficulties might help you whether or not you're actually autistic.

 

So!
I had a psychiatrist appointment earlier today
And he was like, you 'sound adhd. did they try methylphenidate? no? let's try those.' Soooo I'll be picking up my adhd medication tomorrow morning I AM SO HYPED ABOUT THIS
also he said i dont strike him as schizotypal, but autism would fit
-does happy dance-

 

That's great :) How's the medication working out so far?

 

My head stops pulling into 20 different directions all the time, for about 4-5 hours after I take it. I can actually focus on stuff, it's neat (tho I sometimes do not have control over what exactly I focus on).
It's not perfect, which might be related to the dosage, but it's overall easier to pay attention to lectures and homework and stuff.