Better to be "just weird" or to have something?

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Well, I could be happy only being a weirdo. I just get really, really withdrawn if I'm too separate from people for too long. I mean, so withdrawn that I don't even have conversations online anymore. At best, I'll end up lurking in a forum like this one. So even though I find people incredibly annoying 99% of the time, I realize that I need contact just to bring me back to Earth.

I guess at its core, what I'm wondering about is if there's anything that this system can offer me. Officially, I have OCD, and it seems that it has a milder stigma than other things. I also can get certain disability help with school and so forth. I rarely use them unless I have to do something like take some test at some way early time. Anything that causes a change in my routine is a nightmare for me. If my routine is broken, I tend to just find ways of relieving stress until I can 'reset' the next day.

I've always thought of my OCD stuff--the checking, usually--as just this weird thing I have where I don't trust my own perceptions. I'm so stuck in my own thoughts that I can be very, very absent minded at times: my head is almost always in the clouds, unless it's a clear day. So then I worry about things like leaving the stove on. However, I have made that mistake before. I do leave ovens on, and I do forget to lock doors. The second half of my supposed OCD seems just like mysophobia to me. For instance, I don't just wash and wash my hands as a kind of empty ritual: I want to kill germs. I wash my hands regularly, and in line with hand hygiene recommendations from the CDC.

Whenever I've been obsessed with subjects, it's been ego syntonic. I enjoy being able to recognize appliances in the background of movies: "I have that lamp!" Spending a weekend with a box of old floppy disks and data recovery software is what I call a good time. I can show extreme obsessiveness, but it's not usually as destructive and hollow as the obsessiveness of people with OCD. For example, I got really fascinated with induction cooking technology last year, so I spent weeks doing almost nothing but talking and reading about on induction cooking. My parents wanted to kill me, but no matter: they eventually embraced the technology.

Just recently I read a bunch of articles I found online about an animal called the tuatara, so I spent about two days trying to make my brother as excited about this creature I was. It didn't work.

Right now I'm probably babbling on about crap no-one cares about. I'm really knocked out of my usual routine, so I'm acting incredibly stupid--more stupid than I actually am.

Nothing seems to fit completely, so naturally I'm skeptical. What I really believe is that these things are really just common clusters of certain traits, and it isn't a stretch for me to imagine a different combination of these traits where you get them in different proportions. One day, I believe that there won't even be syndromes and disorders, but an almost laser-like profile that can be addressed in a very individual manner.

What I'm most likely to trust are things based in hard science such as brain scanning, and genetics. Given the opportunity, I'd probably submit to a brain scan and/or genetic test. I have a broken relationship with the mental health profession.

Normal is an abstract term. It is very subjective, the best thing is to be is yourself. I prefer to be me than Society's abstract imagination of what is normal and what I should be.

Hugo, it's best to just be yourself
Be comfortable with who you are, as it is our differences that make us special.
I also have OCD, and ADHD along with Bi-polar, and HFA. The list goes on as for past tense when doctors would just toss diagnosis' at me.
I'm sure there are some NTs out there that have it hard, and those of us on the spectrum who do also.

Hugo, it you can only be happy being a "weirdo" as you put it, it shows that you have developed your own person, your character. There is no need to change for anyone, as long as you are happy with you =)

Haha. I would probably have an inch-thick pile of paper to list all the crap I could probably be diagnosed with. Now it seems sort of cliched to rattle on a pile of diagnoses--it's like hypochondria gone mad. I'm not big on psychology stuff, even though I did take a class on it--more because I wanted to understand how to deal with the profession. However, if I can find out that have a brain that's just wired differently, and they could even show me a scan of it, I would feel like I had some explanation for why my childhood was so damn rough that didn't just seem like whining. You know, because my childhood really wasn't that bad, in material terms. I was never abused, technically, although at the time I perceived it as abuse. My parents tried desperately to get me to make friends, get on better with people--and I really, really wanted to make friends, I just never knew if people liked me or not.

I think I've been considered as a friend by people I don't consider friends. That kind of troubles me. I used to think I just had social anxiety, but I still run into the same issues even if I'm not anxious. True story: a kid I thought had forgotten all about me shows up one day, an adult, and invites me to his wedding of all things. Hell, I'm a groomsman at this wedding. It's bizarre for something to come out of the nowhere like that. I get this weird guilt sometimes because I know haven't treated some people as well and they deserved. An explanation, a good one, could change a moral failure into a perceptual one.

Of course, it isn't just a matter of change or no change. Sometimes I find myself needing a framework to explain certain things to people. You don't have to change anything about yourself to change some of your interactions.

When you make so many mental disorders that normal people get put in the minority, they're the ones that are pathological. I mean, what exactly is the normal, well-adjusted person? Is it having a bunch of friends, a well-connected social support network? Additionally, does it mean having the ability to deal with difficult emotions, and handle uncomfortable truths? Also, does it mean being happy and well-adjusted everywhere you go? I can't speak generally, but in my experience the closer people seem to the idealized normal person, the worse they were, at least to me. You don't learn to have empathy for the odd man out unless you've been in his shoes at least once or twice.

If everyone, NT or not is different then it's hard to see what is "normal"
Then we have people who are brainwashed by social norms and are "fake" to try and fit in the latest trends. Yet we don't know all that goes on behind their clothes doors since they want that hidden.

So maybe nobody is normal. Normal is a concept created by those who want people to conform to their wishes. As those who conform for society are easily manipulatible and they question less.

They thought Einstein was nuts, obviously he's a genius.

Society just tries to program people to fit different stereotypes. They do it through mass media. It's so ridiculous...

I veto that comment ^ ...

Well, I suppose we could have some numbers such as how many friends people have, on average, how quickly the average human recognizes faces, and a bunch of other metrics. However, you end up with an average which describes no living human being. It's like having a statistic that says the average U.S. household population is 2.5, which is a number describing exactly zero real-world households! (Except, of course, for the one where they shoot "Two and a Half Men.")*

Likewise, we have this psychiatric ideal human, which ought to be someone who has simply acknowledged those things that cannot be changed, and those that can. I wish I could make people understand that some of the weird things I do aren't truly crazy, and that's about it. I wasted so much damn time trying to force myself to be something I couldn't, and then wasted more time castigating myself for that failure. Only when I finally came to accept the things I couldn't change, did I start to make progress on the things that I can change.

There's a way of thinking about this stuff that is neither conformist nor fatalist: you simply approach your problems as yourself, because you can't make somehow becoming a totally different person into a workable solution to your life's problems. You have to fix your own problems, not some imaginary alternate universe version of you. That's why wishing for "normalcy" is a red herring that helps absolutely no-one.

*I don't watch "Two and a Half Men," or any modern sitcom, but I do make jokes about the name at every opportunity. I got distracted halfway through writing this and had to look up the actual 2010 census information, which is actually 2.58 for that year according to one brief I looked at, but some sources give 2.59, which suggest rounding errors. I guess it's not important enough to actually dig through the .csv files for to get the "real deal" info. Trying to post links gave me some trouble here before, I guess I can't be all that accurate.

If you have the power to, then great. If you don't, then what does it matter what you think?