I’ve been thinking a lot recently about social media and social contact in general. I give myself quite a hard time as I don’t respond to messages or initiate contact much. I can see I have an email/facebook post/message/text etc but I often avoid reading them or responding. Even when I really care about the other person. And I am hopeless at initiating contact. I exist in my own little world quite happily. It’s not that I don’t like other people or want friends, or that I don’t care, it’s just that I find socialness really hard. Other people’s emotions affect me, conversations and thinking about how to respond are hard work, and I am a real introvert, probably bordering on anti-social.
I also have a really hard time picturing people’s faces and remembering what they look like. I suspect this is related to my ASD tendency to avoid eye contact. I often look past people or in their general direction rather than at them. And because I can’t see much out of my left eye, if they sit on that side of me all I get is a general impression of them anyway unless I turn my head so my right eye sees them. But even remembering my own family, my daughter, my parents etc is hard for me. I know people’s hair colours, and I can usually pick if they’ve had a haircut. But facial features are hard for me to pull together in my head. My memory of people is usually with blank faces, sometimes with hair. General colours are there, but I can’t picture certain features. And interpreting faces and expressions is not my strong point at all. There’s some new research being done around this and the role of what’s called the fusiform face area in recognising and remembering faces. This article and this article are particularly interesting.
When I was a teenager, my dream when I grew up was to be a hermit. Preferably living on a remote property in the Coromandel where I wouldn’t have to see anyone and I was a long way from anything except a good beach so I could surf as much as I wanted. I had no desire to have anything except peace and quiet. I still have that dream, though owning a piece of property on the Coromandel anywhere near a beach is probably way above my pay grade!
I carry a lot of guilt about not responding to people and messages. Right now I am avoiding responding to two text messages, two Messenger messages, a Linkedin message and at least one email. And that’s just social stuff from the last two days. There’s other messages I haven’t responded to from weeks back. I’m also avoiding cancelling an appointment, emailing G’s teacher, emailing an invoice (that one is a must do, I want to be paid!), emailing a potential client, making a doctors appointment…. the list goes on and on. The social messages are important to me, and they are all from people I like and care about. But I have a lot of trouble thinking of how to respond. Some of them want commitments from me, like making a time to catch up. Others just require a response to a comment or question. And the general household stuff just needs doing! But communication is often beyond me.
I think that would surprise a lot of people that know me. It’s probably no secret that I am slow to respond to messages, but I feel like my level of procrastination is higher than most of my friends would guess. Maybe not my family though, they know how crap I am at communication!
One of the things that they expect you to be able to do when you are a psychiatric outpatient is talk to people and ask for help. I however am an expert at avoiding phone calls at all costs. I find it incredibly difficult even when I am not in distress to pick up the phone and ask anyone anything. Add mental distress to that and I am almost a lost cause. Because of that, when I am unwell I don’t get the support I need from my case worker and that often makes me frustrated and angry. I don’t know how to communicate in a way that will achieve what I need. If I can force myself to ring I never manage to put across what I am feeling, despite rehearsing what I could say in my head dozens of times, sometimes for days before I work up the courage to pick up the phone.
Compounding my distress, often when I am mentally unwell my ability to put words together in a way that makes sense is often diminished. Sometimes my speech is really fast, or really slow and hesitant. Sometimes I stutter and stumble over words. Sometimes I get them mixed up and say day when I mean night, or yesterday when I mean tomorrow. Or I can’t remember the words at all. Sitting there, knowing what you want to say but being unable to find the words to communicate so that you are understood, is really difficult.
When you have BPD and you get frustrated or angry the emotions often come on suddenly, and very strongly. I can go from upset to intolerably angry in about 2 seconds flat, and that will make me do things I regret later. I have shouted at various mental health professionals, been rude and snarky to people, become mute when things haven’t gone my way, point blank refused to do certain things asked of me, argued with people, stormed out of meetings, been fired as a patient by a psychologist and 2 psychiatrists, and generally thrown temper tantrums. I am not an easy patient to deal with and I’m not proud of that. All of these things are tied up in my inability to communicate with people, and my extreme sensitivity to anything that could be perceived as an insult or criticism. And once I am angry I tend to give in the the fury and it takes a while to come down from that.
I think my social behavior, my difficulty in communicating and my inability to remember faces or read them very well are all tied in to ASD. My current theory is that my ASD produced many situations that I did not have the ability to cope with and caused me confusion and overwhelm. I didn’t have a diagnosis, didn’t understand why I was different and thought there must be major flaws in my personality. On top of that I was overwhelmed and confused much of the time. This, along with some less than ideal circumstances and trauma in my childhood and teens, caused me to develop dysfunctional coping skills which in tern has led to BPD. I also wonder whether the fact that I strongly believed my personality was flawed led me to try and suppress it or get rid of it, leading to the unstable sense of self that is so central to a BPD diagnosis.
I am not sure why it matters to me how I have ended up with the conditions I have. On reflection tonight I feel like if I can somehow find the connection between all of these things, these odd bits of me, then I can get a handle on “how to be me”. Like trying to unravel a complex knot, where you feel like if you can loosen it enough you’ll be able to find the end of the string and it will all just fall undone. I think I have this hope that one day that will happen and I will magically just know how to cope with my life.
ASD, BPD and Me 