Who has a "Self?"

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I am a series of intensities and special interests. i feel quite fragmented. i have never really felt that i could be summarily categorised as anything. this extends to everything in my life...every area from my career through to sexuality and through to the roles i am required to partake in. i feel like a series of intense complexities.
do others with autism feel this way? i am interested to know if it is a common experience.


and by the way it is not a problem - it is quite a fascinating thing.

uh -oh - -- maybe nobody...... i am weirder than i thought.....

goodie.

the title drew my attention..., not so much the post itself...

Millie, in my (from within) view of autism:

autism is a certain lack of self which informs a lack of social identity, a lack of imagination; the combination of which leads to a poor 'awareness of othermind'
(rather than ToM)

this lack of self would be, in my view again, a lack of 'synthesized' self, due to the 6 sensorial channels' unsynthesized processing

language constitutes, in my view, a meta 7th sense (and must be seen as a sense: all linguistic autiproblems can be explained in terms comparable with sensorial processing)

in the auti-case, this meta sense is not built on full 6channelled input

thus leaving the language tool for communication rather voidish

i strongly believe this is the alexithymia that is essential to autism

{sorry other things to do}

i have alway experienced my life as fragmented, i am an eclectic put-together, but all in a combination, tone, and selection that is totally, and ironically mine.

Well your wording seems a bit unclear. But I know that I've always felt like I am contradictory to myself. If people ask me a simple question about myself, there isn't a simple answer. There's a whole story starting with "Well it depends...."

oblio thank you. this actually means a lot and i really find your post right in keeping with how i am.

you just gave the teckie bent to what i am trying to communicate.
you're cool man. i relate.

Maybe, but I'm not sure what you're asking, sorry.

Millie and Oblio,

This is exactly how I feel. Nobody has ever put it into words before--I thought everybody felt this way. I do feel like I am a bunch of different people. I feel sometimes that I should have been born in another era. Sometimes I feel like I am a kid and will never feel grown-up. Other times, I feel like I am the most mature person I know. I love my profession and would like to take it further/ I hate my profession and want to retire early and pursue another interest. I do have intense interests. I do somehow feel disjointed and compartmentalize the different facets of my life--not to an extreme, though.

Like you said, Millie, it is fascinating and enjoyable because the interests are so diverse and intense.

I learn so much on this site. I am learning a lot about myself. Like I said, I thought everyone was like this. It is a revelation to me.

Not sure if it'd the same. But that reminds me of how I feel.

I could never associate my whole self with common labels that supposedly describe a self. Not my likes, dislikes, even my mood is never just one nor defining me and neither do I have many opinions as they're complicated to form as though I always stand by my thoughts.

I'm always several things at once, never just one dimensional and never is my whole being striving with one purpose into one single direction.

I think maybe I know what you’re talking about... maybe. I’m not positive.

From my own point of view my self and my personality aren’t exactly the same thing. The only consistent thing about my self is the fact that I’m always thinking. My self is really just the stuff that I’m thinking and experiencing through my senses and emotions at the current moment. It’s the Cartesian sense of self, the “I think therefore I am” sense of self. It’s one piece in a sense, but in another sense it’s always changing.

My personality seems kind of fragmented though. If I try to think about what other people see in me, what role I’m playing in their world, then I don’t really know what I am. My personality will be different depending on who I’m with and what I think they expect of me. I also feel this thing where acting ‘grown up’ doesn’t feel natural. Ever since I hit puberty I increasingly felt this way. Like everyone else changed on both the outside and inside, yet I only changed on the outside. Inside I’m still very like I was as a child, but I don’t show it to the world. I feel like I only show the flat boring side of me. I also relate to having this sense of being simultaneously more mature and less mature than my peers - all my life.

I also have a set of interests that don’t seem completely connected. I only feel like sharing certain interests with certain groups of people. I can’t share my whole self since I like a bunch of different things. I don’t fit any simple archetype. I dress very conservatively mainly because I’m so apathetic about my appearance. I probably appear really boring to people, like a geeky square, but I don’t think I’m boring or conservative at all in the way I think.

Hopefully something I’ve said here actually hit on the intended topic. Please tell. When I write I have this tendency to go off in many directions at once.

I have a self; it's dealing with other people that gets me in trouble... My own self is about the only person I know anything about...

I understand the feeling of fragmentation or compartmentalization of the different parts of my life. Different situations require different reactions, depending on the role I have. I am not always the leader, or the follower, or the antagonist, or the peacemaker.

I feel the compartmentalization because the people I know rarely if ever cross over from one part of my life to another. I don't feel it shatters my vision of "self" because when I do manage to share different parts of my life with someone, I don't feel uncomfortable with the different roles I play. They are simply different sides of my one personality.

that is interesting pakled. so you have a sense of self that is not relational. iknow the most effective way for me to connect with some part of me that feels like a me, is when i am alone.

i have asked the initial question because i have talked with other people who are not on the spectrum and they have a very distinct and homegenous centre and personal view of who they are.
i do not have this. they also seem to describe a comfortable fusion of their physical, intellectual and their emotional and sensory realms - as if these areas of themselves seem to function together and synonymously like a well oiled machine. i do not have this either. i have a sense of jarring...although the closest i come to it all operating together is when i am alone.

when i partake in my main special interest, i do feel very close to having a fusion of all these parts of myself IN THE MOMENT, but from one moment to the next - or say one day to the next - or one project to the next, the same sense of disjointedness and jarring ends up occurring.

the overwhelm happens for me when i have to engage all these aspects at once......so, it feels as if i might physically flit in one direction (eg. stimming,) while my intellect continues to think - it NEVER stops , and then the emotional realm is just slightly out of kilter from the first two mentioned and so on and so on. and well, the sensory realm just blows my mind continually and the only time i have really met with other people who have these strange tendencies is here on WP.

it is not a problem, save for the fact others don;t get it.
what is cool is that there seems to be a bunch of you who are kind of comprehending what i am trying to express. this is really good relating. thanks.

So did I completely miss the point?

I like to discuss these kinds of topics and get feedback. I never come across this kind of thing in real life. I also want to know that I’m not alone – that I’m not living in the matrix surrounded by an imagined world of sentience. I want to know how other people experience their ‘being’. I guess I can never really know because damned language always gets in the way. There just aren’t words for this stuff. I wish I had an ability to express the things in my head artistically, but I don’t have the talent to do that through any kind of physical medium.

I’ve heard NT’s claim before that they think they know a person they love as well as they know themselves. Are they just deluding themselves? How’s that really possible? I don’t think I’m that simple that someone could understand me no matter how close they felt.

Anyways, I want to get back to the point but I need more input. I want to know if anything I say makes sense. I’m not sure if I know whether I can relate to what you say until I find some common point to start.