Sorry everything I write is the worst kind of venting monologue, something brainworms. Why am I awake at 4am.
I really wish that the desire for socialisation was not a natural part of being human because socialisation causes me brain damage now and has done for a long time. I’m a serial message deleter, I will comb back over messages and conversations and wondering what subtexts and implied meanings I have missed, in what ways I have unknowingly jammed my foot in my mouth. If I’m lucky it becomes obvious days or weeks or months, or even years later, and I get to feel fucking mortified about it. I refuse to keep putting myself through that.
So I wish my brain would stop feeling lonely and shitty and sad and desiring to talk to people about stuff. I barely even have the means now anyway, I have no idea where to find servers or groups or whatever else to talk in, and no I will not try to go out into the real world and talk to people. That seems like a really atrocious idea, I can barely manage speaking any of what pops into my brain irl, it just becomes painful and stilted script following. Plus, where do you even find opportunities like that? Fuck putting myself into new and scary situations that might not even benefit me.
In many ways I actually really regret doing the digging-around about autism. I miss the blissful unawareness I had; I used to just think things were fine, or if they obviously weren’t people were just being weird, people were just weird sometimes. That’s the correct mindset, because fuck neurotypical social rules obviously. I knew (know? idk) someone who told me just that, but since the NT rules are the assumed ground rules, I always find myself checking for what I missed. Sitting with the vague and unhelpful notion that I said or did something wrong. This is the part of being a person that I despise.
Also using semicolons is cringe, I’m pretty sure I don’t even use them right.
This is probably the single most unhinged thing I’ve ever put on this website, but people have told me not to self censor and delete shit instead of posting it. I’m always losing that battle but I still have to try.
BONUS POINTS EDIT:
This is so stupid it’s embarrassing but also as I started leaning all the way left I’ve basically alienated everybody I know. I’ve leaned pretty far left for my entire adult life and longer, but I didn’t have a coherent framework or lens through which to view the world and make anything make sense.
My wife introduced me to hexbear and the discovery of political theory, of coherent leftist politics, basically busted my brain. There were a good few weeks where I was literally incapable of seeing people removed about rising prices or rent or stuff and not going “workers of the world death to the bourgeousie” etc etc etc, infantile disorder. My favourite place to do it was in and around that one stupid lib-ass queer discord I talked in, which was fun, they had to make a rule against it.
The worst part was when I did it in a group chat I’d been invited to by two girls who apparently thought I was okay. For a few months it was cool and it almost seemed like I had friends for a bit. But 1) I made the mistake of going on an insane rant when one of them did a “haha korea great leader” joke, and I left that chat afterword. 2) After that I realised that I’d been putting in the majority of the relationship effort, i.e. was always the one starting conversations with people, and having to bug people to follow up so we could talk again. I decided right then that I was gonna start leaving people on read, and wait for them to message me, just once.
The majority never did, and the few times anyone did I flipped out and went on more rants which honestly was probably some kind of defense mechanism. But the other girl from that chat, not the dumb korea jokes one but the other one, who was really into internet fic, she literally just has never messaged me again which honestly still kind of hurts. She’s also disappeared completely from that server and I wonder if I did something so wrong somewhere that she just quit discord. Obviously all that has caused a decent bunch of psychic damage regarding talking to people, yay. I also haven’t even really talked to my family since I became the most unhinged & useless online commie. I suspect it will go poorly, Idk.
I was actually prescribed Abilify (aripiprazole) for OCD and it made me anhedonic, emotionally blunt etc on a really small dose. I had the same reaction to Prozac so I thought that maybe the dopamine lowering (if I have to describe it in a vulgar way) meds have a bad effect on me due to the ADHD (stimulants fucked my OCD on the other hand). Do you have any experience with those? I am curious because you are a fellow AuDHD
I’ve taken aripiprazole as an adult and I definitely noticed a reduction in my experience of agitation due to sensory overload and similar autism-related stuff.
I tolerate antipsychotics well so I didn’t notice any significant emotional blunting and, unfortunately, I struggle with anhedonia in a major way so I didn’t notice it affecting my anhedonia significantly in a positive or a negative way.
Aripiprazole is a complicated drug with regards to dopamine as it’s a partial agonist so at low doses it increases dopamine in the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, but not in the nucleus accumbens. At a moderate dose it reduces dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens but not the prefrontal cortex. At a high dose it reduces dopamine in both regions.
To add to the complexity, it’s an antagonist for one serotonin receptor and it’s a partial agonist for a different serotonin receptor and to put it in simple terms serotonin sorta competes with dopamine in the brain so if the partial agonist effect is increasing serotonin at a particular place in the brain then it could be negatively impacting upon the dopamine levels there too.
Because of all that I think it would be really hard to figure out exactly what the cause of the emotional blunting and anhedonia was without having a better understanding of the dosage range that you were at and also looking at how you have responded to other meds that affect dopamine/serotonin in similar/opposite ways, particularly in the regions of the brain mentioned above, but in short this is something that’s way above my paygrade and you’d need the supervision of a psychiatrist who is attentive to this stuff to start to puzzle out exactly what caused tjese effects in you. You could say that it’s very common for antipsychotics to come with side effects of anhedonia and emotional blunting but that feels a little bit of a dismissive response tbh.
Yeah, I should probably talk to my shrink in detail about this. Thanks for responding