Hey there.
So, guess I'll just make this short and sweet: I'm from Germany, I'm twenty-six, and I'm currently awaiting my autism diagnosis next month.
Okay, now for the less short part.
The thread title warned you, so don't blame me.
Kinda had trouble with this stuff my whole life, but funny thing is that it was initially always misdiagnosed. When I was a kid and the ADHD "hype" went through Germany, of course I was diagnosed with that and stuffed full of Ritalin.
That lasted until my mum was fed up with it and stopped giving me the Ritalin, and that was when I instead started going from one therapist to the next.
Around that time I also underwent some IQ testing, which came out as "congrats, your kid has an IQ of 136" (which fit together well with my trouble with understanding conventional learning and problem solving methods in subjects like math - y'know, my results were right, but I didn't use the methods that were asked of me by the teacher or the sheet of paper).
Ultimately I landed in a psychiatry for six months at age eleven (I was twelve when I got out), this time diagnosed with social phobia - which, y'know, closer shot, but still just trying to treat a symptom as if it was the cause. Good luck with that one, eh.
Needless to say that didn't do much, and to cut a long story short - my mental health deteriorated something fierce over my teenage years, peaking in outright delusions and loss of my sense for what's real and what not (I did some really awful things to the people around me)...
... until that all sorta came crashing down around age eighteen and I "woke up", so to speak. "Sometimes you gotta hit rock bottom to notice something is very wrong" and all that.
Well, I say I "woke up", but I basically lost everything at that point, and spent some time in a deep depression.
As cheesy as it sounds, though, around age nineteen I read a visual novel that - well, it kind of changed my life. It and its messages and ideas spoke to me on a level nothing and no one else (except for one person to be mentioned later) had before, and from that point on I made a change for the better, and "buried" my old self, as I like to say today.
That's not the end of the story though - see, in the past, my mental health issues were about not being able to handle social interaction, to degrees of being very afraid of it... that, and I always had some weird tics and an extremely overactive and vivid imagination.
But around age twenty, something happened - basically, over time, I started losing my feelings for people. Today, there is only a single person (that mentioned friend of mine, whom I love immensely) left who is mysteriously excluded from that, but aside from that I have no sense of sympathy or empathy left, not even for my own parents or so.
Needless to say the process of losing my sympathy and empathy for people was quite horrifying for a time while it happened, and other things started going on, like how real life social interaction changed from scaring me to heavily exhausting me, or how my strange tics became much more highly specific and pronounced...
... but, as surprising as it might sound, I found ways to deal with that quite well.
I looked at the issue rationally - y'know, if I can't understand or come off as caring to people anymore, then I needed to find ways to substitute the former and... well, fake the latter.
So what I did was to get into psychology a lot, studying, observing and learning about behavioral patterns and how to precisely read and analyze them, and I "trained" with that one mentioned friend, with assistance from her (then-girlfriend, now-)wife and her sister.
Also, probably as a reaction to losing my feelings for people, my feelings for and about art became more and more intense and pronounced over the years (these days I am extremely into all kinds of art, and into deep analysis of it - especially stories, be it written word or on-screen).
Aaand that's all she wrote, that brings us to today - I overcame my fear of real life social interaction, it now just exhausts me a lot to be around people (which can arguably become very troublesome), and I overcame my loss of empathy and sympathy by learning to read and analyze people and how to (semi-)believably act as if I care - and I do still have that one person my feelings for whom somehow remain unaffected and unchanged...
... and the weird tics are something I can live with. They're nothing debilitating. Bleh.
Currently I'm waiting for my diagnosis, that will be kicked into gear next month - reason I'm getting it done now is because I also went through severe medical health issues for most of my life (still ongoing), and combined with my mental health issues, this means I never actually got into work for any extended period of time.
I am now on my way to getting my physical health to a place where it's "fine enough" and thus am working on getting into work... and people with diagnosed autism can get quite the substantial help and assistance here in Germany - so yeah, that's the reason I am getting that done now.
And why I'm on this forum? ... Sheer curiosity, to be honest. I just want to see what other people like me are like and what their experiences are. There's bound to be interesting comparisons to be drawn and stories to be read.
So yeah! Hi and all that.
Hope you have fun with this insane wall of text.
Can't exactly introduce myself any more thoroughly than this, eh.
... I might also mention that I love writing and am a wordy person. Never could've figured that one out, huh?
Greets,
AG
So, guess I'll just make this short and sweet: I'm from Germany, I'm twenty-six, and I'm currently awaiting my autism diagnosis next month.
Okay, now for the less short part.
The thread title warned you, so don't blame me.
Kinda had trouble with this stuff my whole life, but funny thing is that it was initially always misdiagnosed. When I was a kid and the ADHD "hype" went through Germany, of course I was diagnosed with that and stuffed full of Ritalin.
That lasted until my mum was fed up with it and stopped giving me the Ritalin, and that was when I instead started going from one therapist to the next.
Around that time I also underwent some IQ testing, which came out as "congrats, your kid has an IQ of 136" (which fit together well with my trouble with understanding conventional learning and problem solving methods in subjects like math - y'know, my results were right, but I didn't use the methods that were asked of me by the teacher or the sheet of paper).
Ultimately I landed in a psychiatry for six months at age eleven (I was twelve when I got out), this time diagnosed with social phobia - which, y'know, closer shot, but still just trying to treat a symptom as if it was the cause. Good luck with that one, eh.
Needless to say that didn't do much, and to cut a long story short - my mental health deteriorated something fierce over my teenage years, peaking in outright delusions and loss of my sense for what's real and what not (I did some really awful things to the people around me)...
... until that all sorta came crashing down around age eighteen and I "woke up", so to speak. "Sometimes you gotta hit rock bottom to notice something is very wrong" and all that.
Well, I say I "woke up", but I basically lost everything at that point, and spent some time in a deep depression.
As cheesy as it sounds, though, around age nineteen I read a visual novel that - well, it kind of changed my life. It and its messages and ideas spoke to me on a level nothing and no one else (except for one person to be mentioned later) had before, and from that point on I made a change for the better, and "buried" my old self, as I like to say today.
That's not the end of the story though - see, in the past, my mental health issues were about not being able to handle social interaction, to degrees of being very afraid of it... that, and I always had some weird tics and an extremely overactive and vivid imagination.
But around age twenty, something happened - basically, over time, I started losing my feelings for people. Today, there is only a single person (that mentioned friend of mine, whom I love immensely) left who is mysteriously excluded from that, but aside from that I have no sense of sympathy or empathy left, not even for my own parents or so.
Needless to say the process of losing my sympathy and empathy for people was quite horrifying for a time while it happened, and other things started going on, like how real life social interaction changed from scaring me to heavily exhausting me, or how my strange tics became much more highly specific and pronounced...
... but, as surprising as it might sound, I found ways to deal with that quite well.
I looked at the issue rationally - y'know, if I can't understand or come off as caring to people anymore, then I needed to find ways to substitute the former and... well, fake the latter.
So what I did was to get into psychology a lot, studying, observing and learning about behavioral patterns and how to precisely read and analyze them, and I "trained" with that one mentioned friend, with assistance from her (then-girlfriend, now-)wife and her sister.
Also, probably as a reaction to losing my feelings for people, my feelings for and about art became more and more intense and pronounced over the years (these days I am extremely into all kinds of art, and into deep analysis of it - especially stories, be it written word or on-screen).
Aaand that's all she wrote, that brings us to today - I overcame my fear of real life social interaction, it now just exhausts me a lot to be around people (which can arguably become very troublesome), and I overcame my loss of empathy and sympathy by learning to read and analyze people and how to (semi-)believably act as if I care - and I do still have that one person my feelings for whom somehow remain unaffected and unchanged...
... and the weird tics are something I can live with. They're nothing debilitating. Bleh.
Currently I'm waiting for my diagnosis, that will be kicked into gear next month - reason I'm getting it done now is because I also went through severe medical health issues for most of my life (still ongoing), and combined with my mental health issues, this means I never actually got into work for any extended period of time.
I am now on my way to getting my physical health to a place where it's "fine enough" and thus am working on getting into work... and people with diagnosed autism can get quite the substantial help and assistance here in Germany - so yeah, that's the reason I am getting that done now.
And why I'm on this forum? ... Sheer curiosity, to be honest. I just want to see what other people like me are like and what their experiences are. There's bound to be interesting comparisons to be drawn and stories to be read.
So yeah! Hi and all that.
Hope you have fun with this insane wall of text.
Can't exactly introduce myself any more thoroughly than this, eh.
... I might also mention that I love writing and am a wordy person. Never could've figured that one out, huh?
Greets,
AG
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