laughcries in neurodivergent
What can you do though: People are idiots and I am one of them.
High five from an ADHDer!
It’s fucking hard to explain that yes, it’s possible for me to look like I’m operating like a normal person… but choosing to live and work in a way compatible with my brain isn’t laziness. The hardest person to convince was myself. Thankfully, now that I’m enlightened, I care a lot less what other people think.
I used to have costochondritis which was an inflammation of the cartilage in my sternum. It would feel like a pressure on my chest that wouldn’t be relieved until I bent backwards to stretch and “pop” my chest. So occasionally friends and family would see me stretching and wonder wtf I was doing
ADHD+Autism
Very annoying. Most ppl already struggle to understand ADHD. Now try to explain autism or what it feels like when you have both. But then again, I also don’t fit in with the autism crowd cause my autism is just light enough that I recognize my mistakes but I can’t fix them.
I mean tbf how could someone understand autism if I don’t really understand it myself. How could I, I’ve been born with a warped brain, I have no comparison.
You can kinda understand through extensive observation, but there’s only so many comparisons you can make since every person is unique.
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A lot of people don’t understand bipolar disorder, or schizoaffective disorder specifically in my case. “Had” being incorrect, as it’s a lifelong illness.
Bipolar isn’t so bad: If you’re down or manic just be patient and you’ll be back to awesome again 👍. It’s the promise you must keep to yourself and the older you get the better you’ll get at it.
Schizoaffective disorder means that no one has power over you but you. Seriously, other much more sensitive people could off themselves because of something someone said but not you. Your emotional barrier is tough AF. You’re incredibly difficult to scam and a social engineer’s worst nightmare. You don’t fall for emotional trickery.
As somebody with schizoaffective, I don’t understand where you’re coming from saying it means I’m the only one with power over myself. In fact, I’ve found even after being well medicated I’m incredibly easy to manipulate. All you have to do is tell me somebody’s trying to control me and instantly I’ve spun a 2000 foot deep web about how they’re doing it. Then you just tell me you have the solution and suddenly I’m eating out of your hand.
And my emotional barrier is paper thin. I only look unaffected by things. In reality if I’m the slightest bit scared or upset, I’m breaking down inside and spinning another web to fill in the cracks. My whole existence is built on delusions and lies I’ve built up to keep myself together, such that even now that I’m in a place where I theoretically could start breaking them down and rebuilding properly, I won’t, because I’d fall apart, and I can’t handle that.
I’ve decided to just be happy being fucked up. Not because that’s right, but because that’s the only thing I can survive.
I’m incredibly easy to manipulate
Then let me manipulate you into being happy 👍
Dark Voodoo Intensifies
I like your positivity.
Luckily, I am happy most of the time nowadays, just, y’know, in spite of my disorder.
Chronic migraine. People think its just a headache, but that’s really just the most obvious symptom and least complex symptom. Family practice/generalized doctors know too little about it to recognize it. Everyone around you thinks you’re just being dramatic. If they can push through a headache then why cant you push through a migraine?
Migraine is a cycle that lasts days. It has phases: prodrome, aura, acute, postdrome. The acute phase (the headache part) is just one phase. Sometimes the headache isn’t even that bad, or long. Sometimes it lasts multiple days. Its a neurological disorder and, in a lot of ways, basically is like your nervous system short circuiting for a few hours or days. Triggers have a lot to do with severity, but there is also a lot of bad info about triggers too. With chronic migraine, you could avoid all triggers and still have 1-2 migraine events a month, and those events dont care about your calendar.
Because information is so badly shared and everyone (mostly unintentionally) gaslights anyone with migraine into thinking they’re not suffering from a chronic condition, many of us go a long time before discovering useful information or getting diagnosed.
There are a ton of signs during the prodrome phase which, once you know what to look for, can help you avoid (sometimes) the acute phase by taking meds soon enough and focusing on avoiding known triggers. Even standard over-the-counter stuff can short circuit a lot of migraines before the most painful part. But also, some of the prodrome stuff alone can make working or completing tasks difficult. I often start having trouble speaking, get very tired, have difficulty focusing vision. General brain fog. This can be hours or days before an attack.
After the headache phase, the postdrome is often more brain fog, speaking issues, low energy, but also sometimes a euphoric state which can make getting back into your normal schedule really difficult.
I miss family events. I miss friend events. I have to cancel stuff all the time. I worry about scheduling things for fear of being in a headache phase. I’ve been lucky with employers being understanding, esp with the work from home setup and mostly DIY hours, but i absolutely couldn’t work a job with shifts.
I can’t imagine in a million years any mindset that would be behind gaslighting someone over something like migraines, unless they were actively trying out of free will. My first and even last instinct is to treat it as a hypothetical, especially considering we’re talking about the most important/fragile organ. I’ve had friends/classmates who almost had to drop out of school due to them.
I have BPPV. Fuck this shit. Whoever has it, my condolences, it is the worst issue you could have while not having any life threatening illness.
Also, 93% ND on Aspie Quiz, with social and relationship parts taking all the hits. Fixing it is hellish, maybe not even fully possible.
I have a few, but the most commonly misunderstood of these… I don’t even know if it has a name. I’m just socially slow and people assume I’m an introvert because of it.
Made worse because schools put people in special education classes for social issues, they can’t comprehend for some reason that people just don’t all socialize the same way.
It’s not all that uncommon either if you believe in the statistic that the average person lies a hundred times a day. WHY do they lie a hundred times a day? Because of exchanges like this.
“Hello.”
“Hi.”
“Hey, how are you today?”
“Good, just finished washing the dishes.” (lie to keep the conversation alive)
Which means our society, by training people to value sociability more than friendliness, are breeding its own compulsive liars. And on a side note, that brings us to another ill people don’t understand, because people think compulsive lying is a “bad seed” kind of thing when our environment (and sometimes the rebound after being 100% honest for a long time) can make us that way.
It is completely 100% ridiculous to try to ‘diagnose’ you from this short of a description, but it could be that you’re autistic to some degree.
Us autistic folks like to take moral issues a lot more personal, like having to lie. We’re often at odds with societal standards. We may feel like we’re socially slow, even though in my experience, it’s usually just that we socialize differently. And we definitely overanalyze things.
You wouldn’t be the first to suggest it’s autism (and I thank you for your hoping to help), though I’ve asked doctors about that before and they say they themselves see little going for the theory I have autism (as opposed to, say, dyspraxia, dyslexia, and this which all are equally possible/probable/improbable as causes except the last one). I can relate to the societal standards part though, it was one of the thought processes behind a recent post of mine that seemed to have gotten a mixed response.
I do also have anhedonia, but I never 100% could confirm how much of a connection it has because of how differently it manifested based on the time of my childhood.
What? Are you saying your illness is lying? I’m not really following…
No, I’m saying it can lead to lying in other people, because people begin to realize it’s easier to come up with little conversational lies than it is to think of what things in one’s own life are relevant enough to mention in order to keep a conversation alive. I’m saying me being socially slow is the illness. One person I know likened it to dyslexia but for charisma instead of literacy.
Chroma disease, people don’t get that when I’m burned out for the day it won’t help to take a short break. Immunosuppressants are a bitch.
Edit: shitty Phone. Yes Crohn’s
A collection of autoimmune diseases
I have agoraphobia related anxiety. It causes me a great deal of stress and discomfort when I’m outdoors and away from a “safe” zone like my car or my house. I get panic attacks. You will never see me decide to go for a 30 minute walk outside.
It’s such a difficult thing to explain to people that it’s not social anxiety that keeps me from going to certain places, it’s the fact that I have to physically move away from my comfort zones.
I’m not severely agoraphobic to the point of not leaving my house. I go to work everyday and go to stores and such. But my car is always nearby.
I have a few chronic illnesses. Individually I think they’re at least easy to explain, if not something people already understand, but trying to communicate the combination is hard.
None of them are usually that bad by themselves. Together the issues compound and make it extremely hard to attribute symptoms to something specific. Like, are the migraines a rare symptom from a condition, a result of them interacting, one of the medications I’m taking or a new issue? I don’t know.
And when you’re vague (as in, don’t pull out your entire medical record and attribute each symptom to a specific condition) or the issues sound too severe for what people already understand, you get some pretty… negative reactions. “My uncle had X and he was fine, you’re milking it for sympathy!” but did he have Y and Z as well? Did he have the same variant of X? Was he actually fine, or did you never really talk to him about it? It’s rarely apples to apples comparing disabilities but that’s how people a primed to react.
I’ve learned to deflect and fall back behind medically privacy in professional settings, but it can be stressful.
Had mono as a kid. Parents got mad that I was being lazy because I didn’t get out of bed for two weeks.
Had mono in uni, for 7 fucking months. Like any good idiot, I wrote it off as my period first, then just needing to chill a bit. Then I got worried and saw a doctor, who said “mono almost never lasts 2 months, we’ll run some tests”. And meanwhile I should work on my stamina and keep training.
After half a year I got a different doctor, who did the mono test and tadaa. Told me to sit and do nothing, doctors orders. 6 weeks later it was gone.
