Published on 12, July, 2020
So, today, is a crying day for me. For no reason at all, I feel tearful. I can carry on with my daily stuff, but at intervals, I stop and have a good weep. I guess it's depression and anxiety, but I wonder if it's to do with my autistic brain rather than classic depression. I feel alone and lonely, unlovable, unloved and unloving. This makes me even more prone to tears. I'm not suicidal. I never want to take my own life. I love being alive. It might be that I am overwhelmed by emotions from the previous day or thoughts and emotions about an upcoming event, and maybe this is my way of releasing tension.
**update**Since posting, I've found some useful information about a possible explanation. "Autistic people who have trouble identifying their emotions, a condition known as alexithymia, are likely to have anxiety, depression and problems with social communication, according to a new study. Roughly half of autistic people experience alexithymia, which translates to ‘no words for emotions’ and is characterised by difficulties with identifying and describing one’s own feelings." This is more complicated than it seems. It doesn't mean that I don't have a vocabulary for my emotions, for me, at least, it's about not paying proper attention to my internal emotional states until they are too strong to ignore, and then I get confused by the sensations.https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/difficulty-identifying-emotions-linked-to-poor-mental-health-in-autistic-people/I hope this can help someone else too.
I just found this link its an alexthimia test I got 155 which was high it doesn't take long either
www.alexithymia.us/.../
Definitely discovered a lot more about myself after this. It's funny how I wouldn't have said I found identifying emotions as difficult, yet it really seems obvious now. It took doing a questionnaire - which may or may not be trustworthy, it doesn't matter - for me to open up to this idea. I now I think I 'get' a lot of other things... not knowing how a conversation is going, not knowing how people feel about me... unless both of these are stated in real time and updated as needed. So many 'ah ha' moments.... May need a nap later to process what I'm realising!!
Yeah, questionnaire are only ever indicators, but they do provide food for thought. I wouldn't have ever said I had issues here either, but I'm beginning to grasp that I may have been using means other than most people to do get to knowledge about feelings. I'm not or barely using interoception, and not intuiting much, I think. I'm analysing my way through it, which takes a bit longer and if I think about the a raft of minor social glitches over my life time, the time lag to get there probably explains them.
I think, listening to my mother, the social indicators of autism were very marked in childhood (whether the assessors attribute that to autism or to something else remains to be seen), but because I didn't have a social phobia and was motivated to understand myself and others, I think I've pulled on a number of other skills to plug the gaps. And I am a linguist after all. I have studied pragmatics. That would give me the wherewithal to do consciously what others are seemingly doing subconsciously. Any difference in social behaviour is going to be quite subtle now.
Also, I can't ignore the role of my dyslexia, of course. That effects real time information processing and would slow down the ability to keep up with conversation in groups on its own.
These exercises are giving me a handle on HOW this works for me. The assessors will have to tell me WHY. I'm so happy they want a full day to get to the bottom of it properly.
I never really trust questionnaires I like doing them and also doing my own research into it and then seeing if I think the questionnaire is good or not