Oh my God, my brain has turned to mush over the past couple of weeks. Traveling and going right back to school has been rough on my mental health, coupled with other stuff that’s been going on. So if your looking for funny haha look at the gay girl write nonsense well. you’re still getting that but it’s not so funny haha.
Basically, I’m gonna write about being a Nuro-Divergent person and what that entails. my experiences are my own and I am in no way an authority on neuro-divergency. this is just me describing my own experiences with it.
So like there were two main things that were going on in my development. One was that I was uncomfortable with my gender without realizing it (more on that in another post) and the second was that I just didn’t think the same way my peers did. Not like “I have such unique ideas look at me I’m so smart” more like, “I don’t understand why things are the way they are and how everyone knows how things are supposed to be and I don’t”
One of the biggest signs was spelling and grammar. If you read my other post you know I’m terrible at spelling and grammar and I recently learned that I was dyslexic. Now I had no idea I was dyslexic because I was fed this pop-culture perception of it were the words you read flote around and rearrange themselves but that is not the case. My brain literally does not read, spell, sound out words the same way that most people do. It caused me a lot of anguish and embarrassment growing up where people thought I was stupid because I wasn’t able to spell.
There is also just generally being on the autism spectrum. I simply did not understand how people were supposed to act. I took on the persona of the goofy and funny friend not because I was being myself it was because I was just acting in a way that people would respond positively to. social interactions were exhausting because I was always playing a game of mental chess on how I should act and not how I wanted to be. There was also just the fact that it was impossible for me to pick up on social cues or read the room.
There were multiple instances where I noticed that my friends or peers were unhappy with me and it always took me by surprise. I was acting in the way that I thought they would act in this situation and of course, I would get a negative response. My entire social development was me trying to copy other people’s actions and then experimenting just to see what would work in social situations because i couldn’t understand what made sense in socializing. It was painful.
Well, I’m getting bored of this post so ill wrap it up with talking about ADHD and OCD. ADHD usually resulted in me having a lot of trouble completing tasks I just could not focus on anything and I would get bored easily, coupled with my OCD which made it even more difficult because I had to do things perfectly in a short time that I could focus.
OCD involves a lot of rituals that your brain just thinks it needs to do otherwise you get really anxious. I think the earliest signs of OCD for me were when I had to sleep in the same room as my parents or else the world would end. completely irrational but despite how ridiculous the scenario was I had a genuine fear that that would happen. There is also the fact that I treat everything I do for recreation as a job. I have to complete this game before moving on to the next one and if I don’t play the game perfectly I have to restart my progress. Same with writing, I have to make this essay or blog post perfect but if I find something wrong I need to delete the whole thing.
If you follow my blog this explains why I don’t write often as other bloggers because well there is a lot of mental barriers to writing for me.
With that all said, I’m trying to change the way I look at writing and gaming so that way I can actually enjoy my free time and not treat it as another job.
Ani.
The Trans-Feminine Gaze 