who are you/ do you know who you are?

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I can relate well to this, alana. I have severe difficulty with my sense of self and it disrupts my life. I have gotten deep into the practice of faking personalities for different people that I started developing from quite a young age. I remember when I was around age 8, I was confused by and discussed with a friend the fact I was changing so much with different people I was with.

Now, I have a rough idea who I appear to be around my family, but this is still streets away from who I can feel I am being when I'm by myself. The only way I cope is pretending I am someone else. Or associating myself with everything from another country that I am obssessed with at the time.

I find people and society very confusing and one thing I can not get my head round is personalities. If I pick something that I like and enjoy and try to fit myself into a category of person (which NT people seem to develop) who also likes and enjoys this thing, I cannot fit into it because of something else about myself that means I cannot be like those people. Hence the feeling of emptiness. Feeling soulless. Sometimes I feel like a robot. It means I have a dilemma about careers and my life in general so, soon I am going to be unemployed again and trying to hide myself in something else I don't want to do.

For me, it is because of Borderline Personality Disorder. But do I get diagnosed with that first or Asperger's Syndrome? Or only one? Or none? I am confused.

I can relate, especially about personalities. That confuses me so much. Sometimes it feels there is way too much inside me to even have a personality so I'm better just not having one. Trying to 'be' one way all the time like other people are wears me out. Even my handwriting is inconsistent. I get the thing about being obsessed with countries, I get obsessed with languages and I would much rather listen to music in other languages than english. I like the sounds of words and it can be like a musical instrument for me and I can sit and think forever about why languages sound one way. The other night I got off on a tangent about how there are so many similar sounds in Greek and Portuguese and had to go research why this is. I don't have a whole lot of desire to learn these languages because as soon as I get any minor bit of fluency in a language I automatically translate in my head and I lose the sounds, I am afraid of losing them permanently. Sometimes people will assume that I speak the languages of songs I listen to but even when I was studying 4 languages I didn't do the speaking part of the exercises...I really don't want to speak them, once i have a translation for the song I am good. It's more interesting just listening and not knowing for a while. Some songs I won't get translations for because I know it will ruin the song for me and make it seem smaller and less beautiful than it sounds without it. It feel like such a relief to say that I don't have a consistent personality and I don't really want one.

Another thing I am blown away by is people who can control the way they look on the outside, so they look like they fit in one group or another. I just wear clothes because they will arrest you if you don't. But I have never been able to make myself really look like one group or another on the outside, unless I have a uniform I am supposed to wear and we all match. It's also weird to me how there are so many radical looking people running around and inside they all seem so 'normal'. I am way weirder than most people even though I look completely mundane. So I don't get it.

Yeah, that sounds like me. I'll listen to hours of a foreign language talk radio station to hear the language even though I can't understand any of it. I am very good at pronouncing them too, so it's good to learn bits to show to people before they realise you don't really know the language.

I like the way you are positive about the way you are. I agree, it's a good thing too, but I would like to understand where my "hidden interests" fit in to who I am and how much they are a part of who I am. The other big thing is knowing what to do in my life. I know everybody can feel like this, but right now, I feel like I'm right at the bottom and it's now or never. And nothing is coming to me. Shame you can't borrow other peoples bodies for single days to live their lives and see what it would be like to live like them.

Also clothes, yes. A lot of people spend a lot of energy and money on how they look. My paranoia brings me to be thinking about how I look to other people but I have no idea what to wear; I just wear whatever and hope that people don't think I look stupid. In my opinion on your point about radical looking people, I think these people must feel they are too bland and uninteresting/uninterested inside and have to do that to compensate. Who knows.

as far as a career it is perfectly okay just to work. most people change careers two or three times nowadays instead of doing one thing their whole lives. I have done alot of different type of jobs. One thing I wish I'd done is stay in school part time at night, i'd have a degree many times over by now. sometimes you need practical experience before you can really decide what you want to do, some jobs seem fun but in reality they can suck. You don't have to nail anything down right now.

I also know that I'm happy with myself, and that I wouldn't change, If I was payed $1 Million Dollars, to do so.