• 25 Sep, 2024
• • Dysautonomia

Maybe It's Not Autism

It’s been terrible the last couple of weeks… I feel worse than I did last December, terribly sad, lonely, hopeless. My suicidal ideations still occur, frequently. I feel drained, tired; at school this third semester I’m beginning to struggle with motivation and lack of creativity that I know once was there. The courseload is much greater than any of my past semesters—I think the trend line is clear at this point. I’m not sleeping enough, I’m missing assignments, and I feel like breaking into tears more than half the time. I began feeling better during the first months of the year when I started attending events, going places, and ‘meeting people.’ Despite those out-of-character efforts, I still failed to connect with anyone. As I began writing another post—still unpublished—I began writing about my social experiences.I really struggle with making friends, I don’t know what makes it so difficult. I feel overwhelmed with fear, it forces me to stare at the ground, make zero eye contact, and thoughts that people are out to get me flood my head. I finished my last year of high school without making a single friend; there were many days I didn’t even speak a word at school.After writing one more paragraph I decided to zoom out and read back what I’d just written. “Thoughts that people are out to get me flood my head;” In that moment my mind made the connection to schizophrenia; “That sounds like schizophrenia,” I went, internally. I don’t know where I learned that such paranoid thoughts and isolation were symptoms of schizophrenia, but I knew it. I also knew that a person with schizophrenia experiences intense psychosis, such as hearing voices, which began feeling somewhat similar to other personal experiences. I began to question why I get so intensely overwhelmed in social situations. Most of those paranoid thoughts I get occur when I’m in public without necessarily interacting with people. I feel that people are staring at me, judging my every move, and that’s when I get thoughts of them wanting to hurt me, or if I hear laughter I think they are making fun of me. It gets extremely uncomfortable and scary. Sometimes people do look at me, even though I’m not looking at them I can see their heads turn on the edge of my vision. Sometimes they are just looking in my direction, past me, and this also triggers it, but I almost never look up to confirm they are not looking at me. I first described this feeling in a past post from high school as I was debating if it was all in my head or not. Feeling that scared makes it hard to feel relaxed, I do not participate in class, I get overwhelmed at temple, I keep my head down, and miss familiar people that walk by. It is a terrible thing. Shortly after, I recalled writing about what I call a ‘delusional episode’ on the Dysautonomia symptoms page. Knowing now what a delusion is, the way I call such episodes is not really accurate. They are times when I feel numb, in trance, fatigue takes over me, and sometimes I hear voices, or have conversations with people as if it were a dream but being very much awake. That time on August 2nd I was laying in an awkward position on the couch with my head under some cushions for some 45 minutes. I began seeing the interior of a noisy shopping mall with lots of people; my perception began feeling overwhelmed by the noise and occasionally, a person, more like a black figure would appear in front of me and say something very scary which made me physically spasm. So recalling a time when I heard voices in my head and my usual paranoia made me realize that, at least with the paranoia; my daily experiences look like schizophrenia, and the auditory hallucinations, of course, very much relevant to schizophrenia. So, some learning was in order. Ideas of reference could be like I explained, when I hear laughter behind me, I immediately think it’s people making fun of me. Magical thinking; this one was interesting to learn about. So, I’ve always felt a special connection with the number 13, my favorite. As 133, it was the username Instagram assigned to me since my first choice was taken. When I glance up at the clock randomly it just so happens that it is 11:33, or 1:33, or 21:33. In the airport, Gates 1-33. My heart rate lingers at 133 bpm sometimes; I have a screenshot of an hour long workout with my current and average heart rate being 133. I began thinking of this weird but frequent occurrence as a manifestation of Hashem in my life; spotting the number makes me smile and say Toda Lecha up to the sky, but it was only recently that I discovered that the gematria of ‘echad’ is 13, and you know how the Shema goes. 1:33 am right now finishing writing this paragraph. I also talk, a lot, ‘alone.’ I don’t exactly talk to myself; I have a hallucination of a floating camera that follows me around all day and through it I broadcast to an audience of some 200 people that can interact with me. So when I talk to the camera I look at it, it commonly sits slightly to my side and points down at me, I do gestures at it, I tell the audience what is happening, engage in intense conversation, more like speech or monologue, about my day, how are things going, what I need to do, serious topics, etc. Sometimes I whisper at the camera when I cannot be loud, and when there’s people around I tell the audience I am going to transmit my voice directly to the camera, so they won’t see my mouth moving but they’ll hear me. I can switch the camera to my eyes, so the audience would see my pov. The stream layout has at the top a box reading out my every thought which I usually say aloud right away, or if the thought is too long or too complex I tell the audience “Thinkbox,” so they read the box. This feels different from being observed at all times, I find it relaxing and helpful for self-reflection and do not consider it a hindrance. Also relevant to schizophrenia is excessive daydreaming. I commonly get absorbed into my own thoughts which is a problem sometimes. Mom always says I’m in my own world, I fail to hear what people say to me, fail to understand instructions, and I get frequently caught during dissociation which makes me very self-conscious afterward. So, recognizing the symptoms, I looked up some questionnaires that did indicate the possibility of schizophrenia. However the questions on the tests sounded familiar to me; I realized some of them were part of my autism diagnosis. I looked up the file for the BASC-3 test I underwent and sure enough, the type of questions on the schizophrenia questionnaire were categorized as ‘atypicality’ on the BASC. The graph displaying the T-scores of each category showed my atypicality score as being the highest of all categories and it is halfway through the clinically significant range. If you look at the atypicality questions it is pretty clear that they are supposed to screen for schizophrenia spectrum symptoms.I feel like people are out to get me. I hear things others cannot hear, People think I’m strange. I see weird things. I hear voices in my head that no one else can hear. Even when alone, I feel like someone is watching me.So since my autism diagnosis I have recognized that I have those weird perceptions but didn’t know what they were related to. The result itself says that such a high score usually warrants follow-up, and that never happened. I am doubting my autism diagnosis, because even though some symptoms of schizophrenia can be similar to autism, I can’t see an autistic person getting that kind of unusual perceptions, hallucinations, and odd thinking. My next clinically significant results on the BASC were social anxiety, somatization, internalizing problems, hyperactivity, and interpersonal relations. I can immediately see how accurate those results are; social anxiety, no mystery there, somatization would be struggling with physical health symptoms, that I have described extensively on the Dysautonomia page. I guess I do internalize my problems, I hesitate to ask for help, until I realize I just can't cope. I decided to tell my doctor about all of this. I wrote a note because I knew I wouldn’t be able to get it all out without getting nervous. She read through my symptoms and the confessions I mentioned in the last post; she was very supportive and tried to understand some of my symptoms that weren’t too clear. She said I should talk to the social worker there but she was out for the day. She made sure I was not at risk of hurting myself and that I had support in the meantime. Revealing what pretty much all I’ve written here and in the Lies post was very scary, but I’m glad I did it, and now I’m going to get some help. The social worker contacted me and I am scheduled for next week. Same for counseling at school, I finally called to make an appointment, and after the intake appointment, they are probably going to provide a referral somewhere else. I had been looking forward to my appointment for more than a month. I began developing a dread sensation and had frequent thoughts that I would never make it to the appointment, that I would die before it, from lack of sleep, driving tired, not eating, due to my dedication to my assignments. I did have my appointment, but now I have to survive until next week Tuesday, and then until Thursday, and then until whatever date comes out of that Thursday meeting until I don’t have to survive anymore and instead will want to keep living again. I know deep down I do not want to die, even though at the moment my mind is partial about it. Additionally, school is becoming increasingly difficult. My third semester has just started and I'm already having to pull all-nighters to get work done. I feel that my motivation is gone, and my drawing skills are too; it is hard to come up with ideas, I spend hours just pondering on what to do for a project, and when sketching I have such a hard time getting it just right and get it done quickly. I've become terrified of what will become of me professionally when I once had such optimism and motivation that made me feel I could tackle anything. On the Industrial Design subreddit people frequently post about the lack of jobs in this field, even senior designers are struggling. People shift to other fields, newcomers get a big slap telling them to seriously reconsider getting into ID; the future seems very scary. And even if I ever get an interview, it is very likely employers are not going to want someone like me. I am beginning to think I should switch careers to something that would be stable. However, on some posts on the ID subreddit people say that if you like doing design, if you enjoy it, then it will be a great experience, hard nonetheless; you will definitely need to be willing to move to where the jobs are, and practice, practice, practice your skills. I certainly do enjoy it, I love building physical models in the shop and recreating objects in Solidworks; even though I'm having a hard time with it now, I know I would have a blast ideating concepts and later focusing excessively on details. But ID requires social skills, networking is essential, presentations, emails, and phone calls are a daily thing, and that's scary because I know I have big social issues. I'm hopeful I will make it; when I can get my sketches done they are amazing, teachers commend those skills frequently, and I've made a bit of fame for making clean sketches and models. However, I guess I do need to consider that if my mental condition doesn't improve, or develops into something worse, I should at least be working on having stable economic means. Let's see what happens...