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GhostsInTheWallpaper's Blog
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post whore blues...
posted at 05:50 pm on 01-12-2007
I'm probably better off not being active on message boards, as I suspected before.
I spiral into excesses of infatuation with my ideas and greed for responses that often lead to feelings of shame when my responses hit me the wrong way.
I'm starting to feel a desire for yet another of my "fresh starts." I've gotten some ideas lately, and rather than shouting them from whatever mountaintop I impulsively feel like shouting them from, maybe I could explore, implement, and integrate them on my own.
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Inspiring Perspectives
posted at 08:32 pm on 12-01-2005
Some thoughts that hanging out on an AS forum has helped to stir up:
1.) Envying others probably doesn't do much for my value to the world. It may detract from it. The thought of contributing by being accepting and supportive may make me squirm for how non-intellectual and unglorified it is, but rejecting myself and spreading that animosity towards others that I perceive to be more valuable doesn't particularly feel good, nevermind that it makes one of my fears, having nothing to offer the world, more likely to come true.
2.) All people really are planets unto themselves. Normal vs. weird, with normal being inferior and weird being superior, is quite the limiting delusion. My imagination can come up with much better scenarios than that. Like anyone else, I have strengths, weaknesses, and a mind that is mine and mine alone, a recipe that is not identical to any other. There almost is no normal and weird, just a bunch of little worlds that are in classes all their own.
3.) I do not have to let the limits of my neuropsychological profile define me. I can work around the weaknesses and utilize and cultivate my strengths. Sustaining focus and interest may not always be easy for me, but instead of envying the Aspies for their effortless and extended focus, I can use my flexibility of behavior (a strength often associated with being non-autistic) and my imagination to re-light my fire as it goes out.
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everywhere and nowhere
posted at 10:05 am on 11-26-2005
I have another blog...but I figure I'll use this place to ramble primarily about neurological and psychological stuff. There's a good bit of that on my other blog too, but, well, it was the appeal of discussing neuro-psychology that brought me here. Lots of other people who love to talk about themselves and how their brains work, with potential for focus on sensation, perception, and other exotic stuff. I get to do a fair amount of that on the personality boards too, but chiefly through the lenses of the personality systems used...and discussion there hasn't been capturing my fancy that much as of the last couple days. I think I've kind of exhausted it...but experience tells me probably not. And I'm just getting started here...burn brain burn.
This place said it was for people with Asperger's, HFA, ADHD, and other PDDs. I do have an inattentive ADD diagnosis from 1993, so in some sense I'm not a total alien invader here, but I also am because this place is in practice chiefly an Aspie hideout. But...well...AD/HD is a funny one. It's lumped with everything - learning disabilities, PDDs, behavioral disorders - but really belongs with nothing. It's not a PDD because there's no mindblindness or specific social impairments or anything else that goes with PDDs. It's not a learning disability because the impairments are not specific. In my case, assuming the diagnosis is correct (and nothing else seems to have ever quite fit), it seems to have messed primarily with social stuff, making me a sort of pseudo-PDDer. It's not a behavioral disorder because, although I had some tantrums and stuff when I didn't do as well as I wanted to at a game or on my schoolwork, there are plenty of ADD cases that aren't misbehavied - specifically, the classic pure-inattentive types without hyperactivity or impulsivity, the daydreamy hypoactive little girls who are nice and quiet but scatterbrained and out-of-sync. I was an in-betweener - inattentive and impulsive but not hyperactive, although from the stories of my toddlerhood it sounds like I could have been hyper. The turbo charge just went away by about 4 years old. And there are people who aren't Scientologists who think that ADD is a non-entity. And whether it's a clinically significant condition or just one of the many variations on "normality" is a matter of personal and cultural definition, really...and in some cultures ADD-ish traits may even be the norm. (Thinking of Hartmann's Hunter-Farmer theory here.) I suspect there may well be something to it if my mother saw my father so clearly in the pages of the classic text "Driven to Distraction" though.
There were clearly ways that I stand out from a lot of people. I'm not your stereotypical non-autistic, that's for sure...but I'm not a geek either 'cause I don't do sci-fi, gaming, or computers. I don't score very high on the geek tests because of that. I have a "geek" personality though...analytical, introverted (offline anyway), unsentimental. But I don't seem to stand out in any really exotic ways. Nothing with a name. ADD isn't standing out - it's estimated to affect some 5-20% of the population, and in many places is overdiagnosed. Everyone is "different" in some way, which in a way is equivalent to nobody being different. All people are planets unto themselves. But a lot of people are more similar than different in a lot of ways. I easily envy people who are smarter, are more different, or both...but as I think about it and rethink it, the "value" that I look for and that I envy seems, if not a tenuous concept, certainly something not worth putting my stakes in so long as I find it so easy to devalue myself.
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