I've never tried describing my problems to anyone before, because I thought they were normal until this one event that happened recently and I started to re-think my life. So I'd like to describe what that event is, and also some other things about me that I now guess are related issues. I'm leaning towards thinking I have APD, but some of these things might indicate other disorders as well and I'm curious if anyone can point out what those could be. I know it's a lot to read, but if you can think of anything to comment on after reading even part of it, even if it's only about one specific sentence in here, I'd appreciate it. I do have some sense of humor, so if you notice anything in this is a little funny, that's intentional and I hope you find this interesting, but I'm also still completely serious about it.
One morning, I woke up and started reading a book (staying in bed), and got so immersed in it that I kept reading until 2:30 PM before the hunger snapped me out of it, and I got up to eat lunch. Then I heard a door slide open, and heard the neighbor's kids stream out into the yard next to my apartment and start playing. At this point I rushed back into my room, closed the door, flattened myself against the wall, and held my breath, waiting for them to go away. I was starving and wanted to get back to reading that book, but I waited there for almost an hour until the sounds of kids playing and yelling had subsided for long enough that I felt comfortable going out again to make lunch. While I had been waiting, after only a few minutes I had thoughts like "what the f*** am I doing??" but I was so paralyzed with fear that I couldn't break out of it. I was afraid that they might see or hear me, and judge me. I listened carefully in case they made any references to me, like "what's that weirdo doing?" or "did you hear about that loser next door?", but of course they didn't. I was also (ironically?) afraid of setting a bad example for them by letting them see or hear me doing anything.
That was the most extreme incident I can think of, but it's kind of pervasive beyond that. For example, I always wear socks indoors for the sole purpose of stealth, I keep as many blinds shut as possible, and I never turn on the lights for any reason because I'm afraid of people seeing inside and judging me based on what they see, even if they don't see me specifically. One day I came back home after being out for a while and the lights were on in my room, and this really freaked me out. Nobody else should be in there and I wondered who came into my apartment or why they left on the light on. Was it someone who wanted to send me a message such as "stop being such a shut-in" or "hey look I replaced your lights"
? Or was it someone who came in to steal something but then was so horrified by what they saw that they ran out and left the light on? But I actually didn't worry about it too much because it was in the past. If someone already hates me then I don't care, I just want to stop new people from hating me. I think if someone ever robs me at gunpoint I would be at least as afraid of giving them a bad impression of myself as I would be afraid for my life.
I'm most afraid of meeting "old friends", not that I've ever had someone I would call a friend, but (for example) people I used to go to school with that knew me. Usually when that happens, they recognize me immediately, and I can't remember who they are at all, and it's awkward and I feel horribly guilty about disappointing them.
If I'm in a setting where people already know I exist and I can't avoid that (for example, at a job or a restaurant), then I'm completely comfortable being around these people and I can talk with them pretty normally... but only if there's a reason to. If I'm walking past a stranger I never say "hi" because I'm not sure what the appropriate distance to say it at would be or what the appropriate amount of eye contact is or if normal people really say "hi" to strangers or not. I have barely any sense of what my facial expression looks like at any given moment, so I'm always worried that there's some wildly inappropriate expression on my face.
Some days I will randomly cry while walking or driving somewhere, or before going to bed or after waking up. Other days I'll be happy and whistling to myself while doing the same things. Sometimes there's an obvious trigger but usually I have no idea what causes the difference.
I feel envious very often. Envious of the couple walking down the street, because I wish I had someone to love. Envious of the guy standing next to his car and leaning on it, because he looks confident and is somehow conveying through body language alone that he is standing there because he's waiting a few minutes for someone to get back. Envious of the bum sitting on the bench, because he manages to look like he belongs there and I know I would look nervous and out of place anywhere I try to sit no matter how much I concentrate.
I have never in my entire life felt angry. When I see someone get angry (such as honking in a sudden fit of road rage), especially someone that I thought I knew well enough to understand, I get confused and am not sure how to react because it's such an alien emotion to me. On two separate occasions (with different people) I have had someone get angry at me and accuse me of thinking they're an idiot, which is so far from reality that, combined with not knowing how to handle their anger, I was just dumbfounded and couldn't articulate any kind of rebuttal.
I once had a teacher pull me to the side and tell me basically to stop looking so weird. I had great difficulty convincing him that that was simply how my neck was connected to my head and it's not like I was doing it on purpose. Despite that I don't think I look weird (or at least not anymore) and I've never been fat or anything so I don't have a lot hangups about my appearance. I can't recall ever being seriously bullied, and my parents were/are pretty great people now that I think about it, so no problems there either.
At the end of every period of schooling I've gone through (primary school, middle school, high school, and college), the one person who had been the closest to what could be called a "best friend" to me suddenly revealed that he despised me (yes, four separate people), and that's definitely not just me misinterpreting it (I don't know how else you can interpret it when someone says "You know, I've always hated you. You're such a f***ing idiot that I bet you didn't even know that" to my face while I'm surrounded by most of my classmates a few days before graduation). I'm not aware of anything I did to provoke that, beyond my being generally socially inept and also not noticing whatever problems they apparently had. Not all four of them were as dramatic as that one, but they still all bothered me. I wonder if perhaps this had something to do with making me prioritize preventing other people from hating me, even if it means hiding from them.
I've lost interest in doing most of the things I used to like doing, partly because I realized that I was never actually that good at them and I can only really enjoy doing something if I feel truly competent at it. But I greatly appreciate the efforts that others put into making things like movies, games, art, and music. If anything offends me, it's when someone says they don't like some genre of music, because that's disrespectful to everyone who's made that type of music and everyone who's enjoyed listening to it. I can understand not having a desire to listen to something at the moment, but I can't understand actually disliking it in its entirety.
When I'm working on something, I have no trouble concentrating. I'm supposedly amazingly great at what I do, except I've become immune to praise or something, and I simply filter out or don't believe all the positive things that others say about me. The only exception would be when an attractive woman compliments me on anything, in which case I'll take it to heart completely, but unfortunately that's been a very rare occasion so far and I'm simply too shy to have much hope of that changing. When anyone asks me why I don't have a girlfriend I think the honest reply would be "because people like me usually die bitter and alone", but all I can bring myself to say is some weak "oh, I don't know".
I'm unable to mention anything about this even to my doctor because I'm too afraid of what he might think, and I don't know how I would find an appropriate psychologist, or whether I should print this whole thing out to bring there since I'm so bad at telling stories in person. Yet another problem is that I get "decision paralysis" easily, so I actually don't have a doctor right now and the only reason for that is that I can't choose a doctor because there are so many options, and I can find something negative about every option if I research it long enough. And no matter what I tell myself, it's hard to stop pretending that everything is okay after doing it for so long.
Maybe you can tell from a few of the things I've said here, though, that I'm not completely without hope... I'm just trying to lay things out and recognize that there is a problem, and to maybe figure out what exactly to do about it. Certainly many other people have much worse problems. But I'm the sort of person who can't venture into new territory without a map of precisely where I'll be going.
One morning, I woke up and started reading a book (staying in bed), and got so immersed in it that I kept reading until 2:30 PM before the hunger snapped me out of it, and I got up to eat lunch. Then I heard a door slide open, and heard the neighbor's kids stream out into the yard next to my apartment and start playing. At this point I rushed back into my room, closed the door, flattened myself against the wall, and held my breath, waiting for them to go away. I was starving and wanted to get back to reading that book, but I waited there for almost an hour until the sounds of kids playing and yelling had subsided for long enough that I felt comfortable going out again to make lunch. While I had been waiting, after only a few minutes I had thoughts like "what the f*** am I doing??" but I was so paralyzed with fear that I couldn't break out of it. I was afraid that they might see or hear me, and judge me. I listened carefully in case they made any references to me, like "what's that weirdo doing?" or "did you hear about that loser next door?", but of course they didn't. I was also (ironically?) afraid of setting a bad example for them by letting them see or hear me doing anything.
That was the most extreme incident I can think of, but it's kind of pervasive beyond that. For example, I always wear socks indoors for the sole purpose of stealth, I keep as many blinds shut as possible, and I never turn on the lights for any reason because I'm afraid of people seeing inside and judging me based on what they see, even if they don't see me specifically. One day I came back home after being out for a while and the lights were on in my room, and this really freaked me out. Nobody else should be in there and I wondered who came into my apartment or why they left on the light on. Was it someone who wanted to send me a message such as "stop being such a shut-in" or "hey look I replaced your lights"
? Or was it someone who came in to steal something but then was so horrified by what they saw that they ran out and left the light on? But I actually didn't worry about it too much because it was in the past. If someone already hates me then I don't care, I just want to stop new people from hating me. I think if someone ever robs me at gunpoint I would be at least as afraid of giving them a bad impression of myself as I would be afraid for my life.
I'm most afraid of meeting "old friends", not that I've ever had someone I would call a friend, but (for example) people I used to go to school with that knew me. Usually when that happens, they recognize me immediately, and I can't remember who they are at all, and it's awkward and I feel horribly guilty about disappointing them.
If I'm in a setting where people already know I exist and I can't avoid that (for example, at a job or a restaurant), then I'm completely comfortable being around these people and I can talk with them pretty normally... but only if there's a reason to. If I'm walking past a stranger I never say "hi" because I'm not sure what the appropriate distance to say it at would be or what the appropriate amount of eye contact is or if normal people really say "hi" to strangers or not. I have barely any sense of what my facial expression looks like at any given moment, so I'm always worried that there's some wildly inappropriate expression on my face.
Some days I will randomly cry while walking or driving somewhere, or before going to bed or after waking up. Other days I'll be happy and whistling to myself while doing the same things. Sometimes there's an obvious trigger but usually I have no idea what causes the difference.
I feel envious very often. Envious of the couple walking down the street, because I wish I had someone to love. Envious of the guy standing next to his car and leaning on it, because he looks confident and is somehow conveying through body language alone that he is standing there because he's waiting a few minutes for someone to get back. Envious of the bum sitting on the bench, because he manages to look like he belongs there and I know I would look nervous and out of place anywhere I try to sit no matter how much I concentrate.
I have never in my entire life felt angry. When I see someone get angry (such as honking in a sudden fit of road rage), especially someone that I thought I knew well enough to understand, I get confused and am not sure how to react because it's such an alien emotion to me. On two separate occasions (with different people) I have had someone get angry at me and accuse me of thinking they're an idiot, which is so far from reality that, combined with not knowing how to handle their anger, I was just dumbfounded and couldn't articulate any kind of rebuttal.
I once had a teacher pull me to the side and tell me basically to stop looking so weird. I had great difficulty convincing him that that was simply how my neck was connected to my head and it's not like I was doing it on purpose. Despite that I don't think I look weird (or at least not anymore) and I've never been fat or anything so I don't have a lot hangups about my appearance. I can't recall ever being seriously bullied, and my parents were/are pretty great people now that I think about it, so no problems there either.
At the end of every period of schooling I've gone through (primary school, middle school, high school, and college), the one person who had been the closest to what could be called a "best friend" to me suddenly revealed that he despised me (yes, four separate people), and that's definitely not just me misinterpreting it (I don't know how else you can interpret it when someone says "You know, I've always hated you. You're such a f***ing idiot that I bet you didn't even know that" to my face while I'm surrounded by most of my classmates a few days before graduation). I'm not aware of anything I did to provoke that, beyond my being generally socially inept and also not noticing whatever problems they apparently had. Not all four of them were as dramatic as that one, but they still all bothered me. I wonder if perhaps this had something to do with making me prioritize preventing other people from hating me, even if it means hiding from them.
I've lost interest in doing most of the things I used to like doing, partly because I realized that I was never actually that good at them and I can only really enjoy doing something if I feel truly competent at it. But I greatly appreciate the efforts that others put into making things like movies, games, art, and music. If anything offends me, it's when someone says they don't like some genre of music, because that's disrespectful to everyone who's made that type of music and everyone who's enjoyed listening to it. I can understand not having a desire to listen to something at the moment, but I can't understand actually disliking it in its entirety.
When I'm working on something, I have no trouble concentrating. I'm supposedly amazingly great at what I do, except I've become immune to praise or something, and I simply filter out or don't believe all the positive things that others say about me. The only exception would be when an attractive woman compliments me on anything, in which case I'll take it to heart completely, but unfortunately that's been a very rare occasion so far and I'm simply too shy to have much hope of that changing. When anyone asks me why I don't have a girlfriend I think the honest reply would be "because people like me usually die bitter and alone", but all I can bring myself to say is some weak "oh, I don't know".
I'm unable to mention anything about this even to my doctor because I'm too afraid of what he might think, and I don't know how I would find an appropriate psychologist, or whether I should print this whole thing out to bring there since I'm so bad at telling stories in person. Yet another problem is that I get "decision paralysis" easily, so I actually don't have a doctor right now and the only reason for that is that I can't choose a doctor because there are so many options, and I can find something negative about every option if I research it long enough. And no matter what I tell myself, it's hard to stop pretending that everything is okay after doing it for so long.
Maybe you can tell from a few of the things I've said here, though, that I'm not completely without hope... I'm just trying to lay things out and recognize that there is a problem, and to maybe figure out what exactly to do about it. Certainly many other people have much worse problems. But I'm the sort of person who can't venture into new territory without a map of precisely where I'll be going.
