a bewliderment

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Hmm. My first Haven thread I'm a bit nervous.

I seem to have compeletely bewilderd myself .

Well first; I'm not in the deptths of despair or any danger, or anything; not drunk or drugs.
Dont panic!

I did some writing earlier in this evening, on one of the Brit autism forums,; I wrote myself into a crner that's turned my head in to jelly. I'm not really sure why. All thouhts welcomed.

I'll do a littlke introduction, and t copy what I wrote . It was about memory and ahpantasia;; no minds eye. The first are just about that, I think the're fine, but maybe you see something.The tangent s after that are where I started a bit weird. Maybe there's nothing much in tthe words and I just I poked my brain in the wrong place. Sorry ifor scribbling, its abit harder than susual, just prses post"!

[quote
The odd thing is that my brain must somehow encode visual information, and I'm sure it doesn't do it by converting images into, say, a verbal description; though I am primarily a word thinker. I have been a painter, a photographer, and a product designer. I can pass intelligence tests which involve mentally rotating 3D shapes. I have no problem recognising people or my favourite flowers. All of this is normal for aphantasic people from what I can gather, and in fact it seems very common for us to be visual artists. As I said in the thread about dreaming, I can only assume that I do have a "mind's eye", but that it isn't available to my conscious awareness; only to some kind of image processing sub-system which hands me answers without showing its workings out.

When asked what colour our family car was when I was a kid, I know it was orange, but I cannot tell to what extent an image of an orange car is generated inside my head somewhere that I can't directly reach, or whether this is just an individual factual memory to which the answer is "orange" (it's hard to believe that this could be the case for every single detail that I would be able to recall about the car).

Describing how it affects my autobiographical memory is even more difficult, because I think my recall is very strongly affected by my alexithymia. It's not just that my autobiographical memories don't have pictures; I don't really feel that I "relive" anything at all, in the way that other people describe (I cannot really tell how metaphorical this description is meant to be).To a large extent I live in a kind of permanent "now" - my past is very vague to me, and it doesn't feel much like something that I actually lived through. I know plenty of things about it, but I'm not sure they're what most people would call "reminiscences".

I may add to this later. I feel that I have taken a tangent into things which I have never tried to put into words before, and I'm finding it quite difficult. Although my direct recall of emotional states is very poor, they come to me when I try to translate my thoughts into words - I worry that if I'm not careful, I may be rewriting who I am. Maybe I need to. I need to think.[/quote]

I have difficulty articulating the inner workings of my mind too, it may be because descriptions are over generalized and should instead be fine tuned to specific situations or criteria. Maybe the right words will come to you eventually or you may come across someone else whose words describe how you feel who you can adapt to get across what you are trying to say.

This seems to be a common result of autistic social masking. We play a role our whole lives - until we can't anymore, and are left trying to figure out who we actually are. It can be a confusing journey, but ultimately a necessary one, when it gets to the point where you can no longer pretend to be the person you've always tried to be.

I think 'who you are' is fairly authentic though. You come across as intelligent, quirky, passionate, charming - and that's the 'real you', not an attempt to be average or normal. But there's probably a 'wounded' side as well, that resides in the land of vague/absent memories, and that can be hard to come to terms with.

That's interesting about having aphantasia, yet still having artistic and spatial ability. I am hopeless at those 3D tests, and don't seem to understand art or photography the way other people do. Ah well

I have been rummaging through the topic of remembering personal history at the back of my mind. I'm not at all sure this is what you are talking about, but your words remind me of this little niggling thought pattern.

I live almost entirely in the present. Reading people's experiences here on WP got me to thinking about my personal history and whether reviewing it is a worthwhile activity, or not. I suspect not.

When I do put the effort into remembering, I can "see" it in my brain, ie, I know what happened and/or my perspective on what happened, but it's like remembering details of a movie I have forgotten. None of my past really seems to have happened to me, the person I am now. I have no real feelings about it. I can see the tragic things, the abuse, the neglect, etc., etc., but it is like, so what? It has no impact on my life today, at least an impact that I am aware of. I cannot dredge up even a bit of resentment or hurt or feelings of betrayal about any state of this personal history that seems to belong to me.

There is virtually no one alive who knew me in the various stages of my life. So I am freed of having to deal with anyone whose impression of me is colored by my past. I am happy and content in my life as it is.

Thankyou all for your responses. Having posted in the heat of the moment (most unlike me usually), I was nervous of logging back in; unsure quite what I'd posted, never mind what anyone's responses might be. I think now that the emotional explosion that left me floundering and shutting-down was an intense wave of loneliness; writing about the disconnection I feel from my memories throwing into stark relief the disconnection I feel from the other people who populate them. It means a lot to me to have been understood; I am glad now that I posted.

Yes, that is often how it is for me, and one of the reasons that I value forums like this one so much. Throughout my life, I have had everyone from parents to counsellors prompting me with hypotheses for why I seemed unhappy or had trouble connecting with people, none of which ever rang true. The "eureka" moments that I have when speaking with other autistic people are priceless to me.


Thankyou. It is heartwarming to receive some compliments about the unmasked me that I allow out to play when I'm on the forums. In real life, most compliments mean very little to me; I can't escape the thought that it's just the character that I'm playing, or my acting ability, that is being complimented. I think that this in itself is probably one of the 'wounds' that I'm licking; a lifetime of being like a type-cast actor who's real personality is assumed to be that of the character that they play.


This rings very true to me. When I recount the less savoury moments of my life, including in therapy, I often get responses like; "Oh, that must have made you really sad/angry/etc.". Maybe at the time they did, but I don't recall them that way at all. When I think back to times when I have been bullied, I can recall being bewildered by yet another human behaviour that I didn't comprehend, but not a jot of resentment. I would attribute this to repression of painful experiences, except that my memories of events which one might expect to have elicited positive emotions are little different. I can access the screenplay for my masked alter-ego easily enough, but not any visceral reaction from the "me" beneath the surface. I suspect that you are right; raking over the past trying to work out what emotions the "real me" experienced is probably a fool's errand. I need to learn how to look forwards rather than back.

^^^^^ you have articulated for me that sense of bewilderment experienced as a child being bullied. I just didn't get it.

When I was younger, I was all torn up about the horrible things that had happened to me. But at some point it slipped away. It was such a waste of emotional energy. Not that I thought of it that way, I simply grew and accumulated more memories so that the distant past is just that...distant. Probably just a by-product of getting older.