Feeling like I don't have a self.

Post Reply New Topic

I have moments when I do not feel like I am anyone. Which is paradoxical.. One must be someone to even have notions like this.

ruveyn.

I often feel like this. I don't think I even have a true "personality". I'd be surprised if anyone thinks I even have an opinion because I can't really express it IRL. I have a personality inside my head and online. In real life I can't be f***ed to have a personality because I don't really relate to anyone and don't want people to know what I really think. I also find myself pretending to agree with people when I don't or pretending to laugh at jokes I don't find funny.

You've got to understand that individuals with AS, like people, have a variety of interest. I'm horrible at geometry, yet I assume another Aspie who is in the same class with me aces it. It's a fact of nature.



Same here. One time, in elementary school, I was listening in on some girls talking to me. They said AS was "a disease". Chalk it up to neurotypical ignorance. Self is more of a philosophical idea, to me. Individuals come into the world, expected by others and the circumstances surrounding them to fit within a certain "type". It is up to the individual to determine their personal identity for themselves.

What you need is a means of meaning. For me, it's writing science fiction stories and novels (I'm currently working on my first book, Redesigning Eva). It all leads back to my reply to the first quote: every person is a penguin of different color.

I would get this way a lot , but for the first time now ,I feel truly human or comfortable with my self .
In my past , especially when younger in school, I didnt know what everyone was doing , what the interaction was all about, I couldn't predict what was going to happen next or how I was supposed to act.
Everything for me had to be learnt by trial and error , I was a hacker.

Whether or not this is a feature of aspergers in me remains unknown , but I'm definitely neuro-atypical , and I bet I would show anomalies in a MRI due to the many other diverse symptoms in me i.e. agnosia's etc.

When I first thought I had AS, I was really happy too, but when my doctor told me I just have "some autistic traits" I felt awful, like my whole life was lie and that I'm different than everyone. I just don't feel like a person anymore.

Yea, this could be the case for me also but I really don't know. I'm pretty that the doctors thought that I had AS as a child, I remember getting two MRIs and a CT scan when I was 10, then the doctors told my mother something she didn't like. She still won't tell me exactly what it was, I don't know if she ever really understood anyway. I think that she thought they were trying to tell her I was "ret*d"(her word) in some way and they asked her if she did any drugs while she was pregnant with me, so she freaked out about that and I think they either dropped the issue or just decided to settle on ADHD.

Anyway, for me it comes and goes. I could just be an introverted person with a lot of Aspie traits, or I could just have AS to a very mild degree. I say very mild because it's been something that I've always been able to work with (since I've been a teenager, anyway) and I can pass for NT if I try hard enough but it definitely does come and go. Sometimes I really can't pass for NT and I don't look normal to other people, they've even told me this, but it usually only lasts a few months. It's just a matter of me finding my comfort zone.

Long rant, sorry. At this point I'm not really seeking out a diagnosis. I think I would be let down if I found out that I didn't have it but if I find out that I DID it might consume me completely. That probably sounds dramatic but I have to deal with things on my own terms, I could deal with an AS diagnosis but not at this time in my life and I really don't want to be screened or analyzed anytime soon.

MotownDangerPants posted: So, when I first realized I may have AS I didn't freak out or anything, it just seemed natural to me. I could relate SO much with everyone's stories and so many of the descriptions I see are so ME, I just thought that those things WERE me, not a disorder. Now, I'm really starting to think about it and even without a diagnosis I feel pretty crappy because I'm about 90% sure I'm an Aspie. Even if I'm not, I have something very similar that's always mad me feel like an outsider. I've never truly felt like I had a "self". I'm chameleon like and I always have a facade of some sort. Learning that this is part of AS makes me wonder if I'll ever have a true self. I don't really want to become the person that I'm projecting all the time, that changes constantly anyway. Not so psyched about this anymore. - Motown - Some persons can tell a difference between the two words I am vs a word like strong. What is self-talk? What is self-definition? Old saying - Let the weak say, I am strong. (Source: B) - There is some evidence that what is known as personality is linked to the right hemisphere of the brain/the right frontal cortex/how the right hemisphere and left hemisphere work together (ideally). Authors like Maxwell Maltz, Emile Coue, Jose Silva, and Earl Nightingale have written about the general idea of positive affirmations. - pgd

No it is not the opposite. It is an incredibly common coping mechanism for all kinds of autistic people, possibly more common in women but I have talked to men who did it too. Sometimes is actually related to echolalia and echopraxia, both relatively common among autistic people.

RE: "Feeling as if I don't have a self." Hesitant about dead equine flogging - but ... (1) The "chameleon" thing - well, one watches the various styles in a particular NT interaction, and then one co-opts what appears to work [so as not to risk weirdness]; (2) AS people are sometimes misdiagnosed as Dissociative Identity Disorder; (3) A buddhist-type might regard your "feeling" of emptiness as verging on Enlightenment; (4) I missed my last Zyprexa.

I honestly think that this is true of the vast majority of people in the world, Asperger's or not. I think the rare people who truly know themselves and are in touch with themselves have basically achieved enlightenment or self-actualisation, the highest level of Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs. It's something that people search for their entire lives, and not everyone achieves.

The best way to go about it in my opinion is to try to be as genuine as possible, but also try new things as often as possible. Read up on philosophy and ponder the nature of the self.