bughuntercat

bughuntercat , 1 month ago to ActuallyAutistic group

@actuallyautistic
Do not complain. If you never lived on the street for a while, if you weren't admitted to a psychiatric hospital for a while. If you didn't spend some years living in boarding houses, eating little and badly. If you didn't have a year of your life that you barely remember what happened or what you did and you ate every 3 or 4 days. If you didn't spend 6 or 7 long hours suffering from extreme anxiety attacks before going to the hospital to get an injection. If you didn't spend years of your life without sleeping more than 3 hours a day. If you did not experience dangerous situations because you got involved in affairs and jobs without thinking about the risks. If you didn't travel to other countries in a precarious way because you didn't realize it was dangerous.
That's all part of being bipolar, autistic, and gifted without knowing it, without having a diagnosis for many years of your life. It is part of having tried to be what one cannot be and not being what by nature one cannot help being.
All of these things and many more that I don't like to tell are part of this neurodivergent inner world that gave me a deep major depression when I couldn't take it anymore and from which it took me almost 10 years to recover. Although I can't really talk about recovery because the person I was before that has already died and what I can be now remains.
It's not fun to live like this, it's not funny, cool or an adventure. It's a complete shit life. The only thing that sustained me was that as compensation, nature granted me a high intellectual capacity and great resilience, without which I would not have survived even early childhood.
The wisdom that one accumulates by learning from suffering goes hand in hand with the need for solitude and silence and is the mother of low sociability and a strong awareness of the absurdity of life in general and human life in particular.
Don't get caught up in the alienation that rages in the world. My plans for my future years are to move further and further away from social life. And once I can retire, dedicate myself to what I like for the rest of the trip.
If the world and its herds run in one direction, go the opposite way.

#neurodivergent #autism #autistic #actuallyautistic #bipolar #gifted #twiceexceptional #depression #zen #meditation #herdmentality

pathfinder , 1 month ago to ActuallyAutistic group

@actuallyautistic

Autistic brains be stupid. Well, obviously not stupid, they just seem to work, or not work, in mysterious ways.

The main one that has always got me, about mine, is that I have no memory for sound, absolutely none. I can't remember a song, or a sound. I can't remember what my parents sounded like and none of my memories carry, for want of a better word, a soundtrack. I can remember what I was thinking and what others were saying, but not hearing them say it, nor any other sound. I also don't dream in sound, at least as far as I know. All my dreams are silent.

And yet, and it's a big yet. I have an excellent memory for voices and sounds. Like many autistics I have near perfect pitch, at least when I'm hearing others sing, or music playing. Just don't ask me to reproduce it, because I can't. If I meet someone I haven't met for a while, then I will almost certainly not recognise their face, or remember their name, but there is a very good chance that I will recognise them from their voice. I am also very good at detecting accents. Even the slightest hint of one in, say, an actor pretending to be an american, will get me searching Wikipedian to see if I am right about their actual nationality.

So, if I can tell the sound of a Honda CBR engine two blocks away, or a voice, or an accent buried deep, I must have the memories to compare against. And yet... nope.

So, as I said, autistic brains be stupid.

#Autism
#ActuallyAutistic