Memory and time frames?
I wondered if this was an aspie thing, or just yet another weird thing of mine.
So recently, I'm stuck back in a psychiatrist's office. NOT because I need help - indeed, I despite psychiatry and would have nothing whatsoever to do with it if the medical profession in my country wasn't so blatantly transphobic. They are, so require a psychiatrist's report to be given before they will allow gender variant people the power to alter their own bodies as they see fit. Don't get me started. Anyways, to my surprise and later annoyance, he didn't seem interested in talking about gender. Instead, he insisted on mapping out every other random thing that had ever happened in life - what jobs I'd worked, courses I had studied, relationships I had, etc. And when all these things happened - how long had I lived where I am, when did I finish what job, how long since I was in a sexual relationship. And I had no idea. I honestly don't keep a running tally of what day, month and year I moved house, quit a job, met a partner, whatever. He insisted that the inability to recall an accurate timeline of events in one's past indicated a neurological problem, which apparently translates in his opinion to getting in my way with transition. Now me, past is past and I try to keep it that way. Especially if something has gone badly, I try to dismiss it from my mind and move forward. Apparently, so effectively that I get accused of neurological disorders.
Anyone else run into this before? Is this yet another quirk to blame on autism? Do NT people routinely recall the times and dates things occurred in the last which are irrelevant to the future? I don't believe there is anything wrong with me at all - another thing which prompted him to get in my way. Clues, anyone?
Yes! I know exactly what you mean. I often feel that:
1. I can't recall what year an event took place in that I have memory of
2. How I felt around a certain time
3. Everything that has happened in the past twelve years was all shortly after 2000, and I still use that year as a reference when I need to calculate time (which, obviously, goes wrong most of the time).
Sometimes I get frustrated when I realise that my time frames are off. It makes me feel like I am stuck in a vacuum where no time exists. Five years ago I was struggling to get into a community college, I was in a bad relationship and I wasn't feeling well. Now, I am in the top 5% in my major in university, am happily engaged to a new man and I have never felt better. It is incredibly hard for me to realise that, even as I write the words in the previous sentence, what it means when I say 'I wasn't feeling well'. It is like I am summarising a film plot.
So, while I can link what I was doing to when I was doing it (usually because I incorporate worldly events like 9/11 to create a time frame), I can hardly if never recall what was going on inside of me at times that I now wouldn't consider traumatic (family breakup, auto-mutilation).
Now, thinking about whether or not this is an aspie thing, I would say, based on what I and people around me experience, that neurological structures and deficits might trigger faulty memory. My fiancé is epileptic, and he can hardly recall how old he was when his first relationship ended (he is 44). He has suffered many attacks when he was younger, and we often talk about not knowing what was going on at a certain time or how we were feeling. Other than this information, I wouldn't be able to answer the question. So don't take what I say for the truth.
While your experience with the psychiatrist was annoying - because he might have made you feel inadequate - I wouldn't say it's actually a problem in getting by in life. However, I can totally understand how it might put a person in a mental vacuum. I don't think you're alone in this!
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