(Content Warning – Mental Health naval gazing again, a bit of moaning)
I am used to my memory being bad, as in, it’s humorous, Mish forgot this that or the other. Mish ended up here and she should have been there.
I am used to thinking that the worst of a bad memory I have left in adolescence, I used to wear my housekey to ensure I had it on me, the amount of notes I’ve taken and forgotten about, hell having a fitbit in combination with a google calendar is very good for my being able to keep appointments. A little buzz on my wrist and I move on to the next thing. However, the sensation of thoughts vanishing into the void of my brain has been gently getting worse over the last three years. If it had all gone at once then I like to think I’d have noticed but the problem with stuff just gradually getting worse isn’t so easy to spot.
The way that facts vanish into my brain is completely an ADHD thing, however the getting gradually worse isn’t.
I have no suspension of disbelief, that is to say, if I watch a film or a tv show then I absolutely believe it. It has to be incredibly bad for me to actually not believe it. It makes me a very good roleplayer as well, I just ignore everything that’s outside of the story. It’s very easy to lie to me, I will just believe whatever anyone says in the moment. Now, with anyluck I get outside of the immediate siuation and realise that yeah, that person just totally lied to me. Sometimes I don’t. That sort of complete belief, that’s a CPTSD survival mechanism and I’ve been using it to work with all kinds of people, not knowingly I admit. It’s also why I get identified as a victim by certain types of abuser. Now I admit that last sentence I’m typing with a very particular curl to my lip, because I’m about to claim I have a super-power when it comes to that. My usual superpower – ASD, that ability to think in paralell, after the fact to analyse, good gods I wish I could do that in real time. The thing is, it’s just pattern recognition and if I don’t know the patten then I can’t recognise it.
In addition to being a super-power allowing me to hide in plain sight of some abusers ASD is an information processing disorder. Everyone knows about executive function problems, and everyone thinks they know about Theory of Mind meaning that if you’re autistic you don’t understand other people are real or whatever. I’m thinking about central coherance, which is not putting together all the bits and pieces of a story into a cohesive whole. I’m pretty sure I have that. Things always seem to happen all over the place but actually being able to put those things together unless it’s a pattern I know, I’m not convinced I can do that, I think I just know a lot of different patterns.
One of the things I talked to the psychiatrist about was about information processing and trauma response, information processing gets worse as your response gets more extreme and if you’re reliving trauma responses on the regular say to the extent that your emotional response gets numbed over a ten to fifteen year period and then you combo a dodgy ADHD memory with a CPTSD dodgy memory and then my super-power is fucked because I just don’t have the information or the ability to recognise any pattern.
The thing is, a lot of people in therapy have talked about their processing information getting worse, but they all seem to have started with a fully working one in the first place. I definitely didn’t. And it sucks.
