"Oh, there's going to be so much stump porn in that."
I had a meltdown last night. My first since Jack moved away, in fact. It was worse than most in some ways because first of all, it was completely my own fault. I apparently do not know that I shouldn't make my roommate bleed while we're just dicking around. Social skills fail. So, that was bad.
But also: while I was having it, I couldn't, even in my own head, figure out what I need to make it stop. Usually, I know immediately what I want, which is to be left alone, but I am completely unable to communicate it. Not knowing for sure, even though I knew I wouldn't be able to speak, so it wouldn't have done any good, was new and confusing and scared me rather badly.
But it also encouraged me to start doing a lot more research on meltdowns to see if there's any information out there that would help me know what to do when I have one. Sadly, I have not yet turned up anything specific to meltdowns, but I did find an article here on something I didn't even know was an ASD related trait: scripting. It's a form of echolalia which enables one to memorize things they have heard, such as lines from movies. Or entire scripts of movies. Guys, I do this!
While I don't and can't often memorize an entire film anymore, at one point freshman year I knew the entirety of PotC by heart. And would basically shadowcast it. Unsurprisingly, people gave up watching it with me, and since I didn't feel like watching it alone, it's since faded from my memory.
What's especially interesting, especially considering that the main symptom of Asperger's is a basic inability to read paralinguistic cues, which is to say, anything beyond the actual text, i.e. intonation and body language, is that with scripting, you'll often memorize not just the text, but the tonal variation and rhythm, as one does with song lyrics. That specific point is what resonated with me the hardest, because I remember all my life, when, say, my Dad would quote a line from a movie we'd recently seen, I would always correct him. Even when he got the words exactly right, which he usually didn't, not quite, I'd have to repeat it correctly, with a delivery as accurate to the film as I could make it. It always bothered me that no one else could get it quite right, and I always corrected them, but I never commented on it because I never thought it was out of the ordinary. As with most things I do, even when I notice that no one else does them, it still doesn't always occur to me that they're not normal, since they're normal to me.
In other news, on the what-does-Ian-have-anyway front, while my therapist has reviewed the diagnostic criteria of Asperger's with me and concluded I don't meet them (which I don't) and furthermore has no idea what my nonverbal episodes could be symptomatic of, both my psychiatrist and my eternally skeptical mother are actually reasonably convinced that I do have it. I also recently discovered that I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was nine, which gives me another of the diagnoses that are frequently misdiagnosed for or comorbid with Asperger's. And I found out that mum used to have nonverbal episodes just like mine when she was in college.
So, this is both progress, in the learning more about how I work and gathering evidence sense, but it also just adds to the frustration of being unable to get my diagnosis. Not that I insist that it must be Asperger's, because I don't. But I do insist it must be something, and that the only thing I've found which all the evidence points to is something on the autistic spectrum, especially Asperger's. Alas, I may never know, but I'm probably going to be in therapy forever anyway, so maybe one day we'll figure it out.
But also: while I was having it, I couldn't, even in my own head, figure out what I need to make it stop. Usually, I know immediately what I want, which is to be left alone, but I am completely unable to communicate it. Not knowing for sure, even though I knew I wouldn't be able to speak, so it wouldn't have done any good, was new and confusing and scared me rather badly.
But it also encouraged me to start doing a lot more research on meltdowns to see if there's any information out there that would help me know what to do when I have one. Sadly, I have not yet turned up anything specific to meltdowns, but I did find an article here on something I didn't even know was an ASD related trait: scripting. It's a form of echolalia which enables one to memorize things they have heard, such as lines from movies. Or entire scripts of movies. Guys, I do this!
While I don't and can't often memorize an entire film anymore, at one point freshman year I knew the entirety of PotC by heart. And would basically shadowcast it. Unsurprisingly, people gave up watching it with me, and since I didn't feel like watching it alone, it's since faded from my memory.
What's especially interesting, especially considering that the main symptom of Asperger's is a basic inability to read paralinguistic cues, which is to say, anything beyond the actual text, i.e. intonation and body language, is that with scripting, you'll often memorize not just the text, but the tonal variation and rhythm, as one does with song lyrics. That specific point is what resonated with me the hardest, because I remember all my life, when, say, my Dad would quote a line from a movie we'd recently seen, I would always correct him. Even when he got the words exactly right, which he usually didn't, not quite, I'd have to repeat it correctly, with a delivery as accurate to the film as I could make it. It always bothered me that no one else could get it quite right, and I always corrected them, but I never commented on it because I never thought it was out of the ordinary. As with most things I do, even when I notice that no one else does them, it still doesn't always occur to me that they're not normal, since they're normal to me.
In other news, on the what-does-Ian-have-anyway front, while my therapist has reviewed the diagnostic criteria of Asperger's with me and concluded I don't meet them (which I don't) and furthermore has no idea what my nonverbal episodes could be symptomatic of, both my psychiatrist and my eternally skeptical mother are actually reasonably convinced that I do have it. I also recently discovered that I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was nine, which gives me another of the diagnoses that are frequently misdiagnosed for or comorbid with Asperger's. And I found out that mum used to have nonverbal episodes just like mine when she was in college.
So, this is both progress, in the learning more about how I work and gathering evidence sense, but it also just adds to the frustration of being unable to get my diagnosis. Not that I insist that it must be Asperger's, because I don't. But I do insist it must be something, and that the only thing I've found which all the evidence points to is something on the autistic spectrum, especially Asperger's. Alas, I may never know, but I'm probably going to be in therapy forever anyway, so maybe one day we'll figure it out.