Hey all,
Just curious about something. I’m in my 30s and it took me until my early to mid 20s to realize that the cartoon thought bubbles or echoy voiceover thinking in shows and movies was kind of a real thing.
I almost never can visualize, and when I do it’s not something I can control. I can’t just summon the image of an apple in my head, but apparently everyone else around me can. Even when I can visualize, it’s like a thin mist that’s hard to pinpoint details and easily blown away.
Similarly, I almost never have an internal monologue. The times I do are short-lived and conversational, like “Wow, you should really wake up, it’s past noon”. or something.
However, I’m pretty good at playing songs in my head and quietly jamming out to sounds that don’t exist.
When I have a puzzle or something I need to think about, my subconscious handles it and just tells me the answer most of the time, without me having to do anything but look at the problem and wait. That’s super helpful for most day-to-day stuff, and people think I’m smart. But it means I’m terrible at doing math in my head, and can’t think through any kind of complicated issue in my head.
It also doesn’t help that my short term and long term memory are both terrible. Any memories older than a couple of weeks are just gone, or they are emotionless fuzzy snapshots with no before or after. If I know something, it comes to mind without effort. If I don’t know something, it’s probably just gone forever unless I have some kind of visual reminder and get lucky.
Basically, I can’t do anything in my head. I have to write it down, or have some other way to externalize the information in order to go over it. This make people think I’m stupid.
Add in the classic “bad at social-anything” and every interaction feels like a disaster.
And don’t get me started on how often I forget what I’m doing or how badly I fail to multitask. Makes finding a job I can live on very hard, and the one time I had a decent job, I felt like I constantly had to prove myself. I was always making seemingly basic mistakes and letting everyone down.
Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. I wanted to give kind of an overview of how my head works. I was wondering what kinds of brains everyone else is dealing with.
Does anyone else deal with things like visualization, or poor memory, or anything like that? How do you cope with the day-to-day?
I seem to have a harder time than others imagining the future. Which means it’s hard to prepare adequately for anything. I can imagine whole stories in my head and make myself cry when I get too involved, but I don’t think the images that come with it are very detailed. I’ve sort of made myself stop imagining conversations with existing people, because making up an imagined version of someone inside of my head seems unfair towards the person and counterproductive for the relationship.
I’m over 40 now and my disaster/success rate in social interactions is a solid 50% - it was fairly bad during the last three years of burnout recovery, but is improving again, and I found getting more decent at it came with age and the approach of solving the problem of social interactions like I’d solve a technical problem: finding out the rules of social interaction and then just applying them. So it turns out people love to talk about themselves, so with just one small question from my side I can have others talking at me for hours, they are really happy, and I just have to nod.
Memory, ugh. Random facts yes. Names no. Schedule no. I probably remember things I’ve read a lot better than things I’ve heard, because my reading has always been good while my auditory processing is rotten to begin with even on a good day. I only figured that out this year or so, but then I just figured I was on the spectrum at 37 … knowing what’s going on is really helpful so one can look actively for hacks to have an easier life.
Any tips for a slightly younger generation struggling with some of the same things?
Not sure if my undiagnosed approach is of use. I’ve ended up doing pretty much whatever I liked fairly early in life. Dropped out of school by 16, lived in a community by 17, travelled Europe with a backpack by 19. It was reckless, unwise, and I wouldn’t want to miss it. By 23 I was a surprised young mother in a slightly dysfuctional family. Now my kid is coming to terms with being an ND weirdo, and he at least has a terminology he can use.
Ultimately this apparent randomness of direction in my life is about my social skills being non-existent when younger (drifting along, accepting all sorts of people, being easily groomed …), and my sensory needs being what they are, namely I like it silent. So I moved out of the city to the countryside with 17, and later twice to some even more remote places, each time finding a slightly better natural and social environment for figuring myself out, and slowly learning how to function on my own terms. Because I was navigating blind for most of the way it took me all the 44 years of my life so far, but I’d say I’m fairly content with where I am, and obviously continue learning how to function in public and how in private, and how to make sure I have enough quiet time.
I’d just have taken a systematic approach earlier had I known that my ‘weirdness’ is just a differently wired brain. To a point, one can adapt one’s life to one’s brain wirings. To a point, one can learn to create different brain wirings. Both methods have their limits.