| date: | 2011–2021 |
| preliminary remark: | A selection of my Facebook posts and personal notes demonstrating the pathology I suffer from. |
8 July 2021 (about getting a medical diagnosis as an adult and whether it helps)
Two years ago when I was 32, a second psychiatrist to whom I was sent for an anxiety therapy suggested that I might be an Asperger and recommended getting a thorough testing (I don’t know what I said during the in-person assessment made him think so; it was just as out of nowhere as my primary psychiatrist’s diagnosis of OCD, social phobia, and alexithymia when I was referred to him for sleep disturbance in my early 20’s). Then my primary psychiatrist let me fill out 2 questionnaires on which I got very high autistic quotients, hence he confirmed me being autistic.
However, the tricky thing about getting a diagnosis as an adult (at least in the province of Quebec in Canada) is that, to get a formal diagnosis in autism, the usual protocol requires my psychiatrist to interview my parent(s) or care-taker(s) to know how I performed in my early childhood. However this is not an option for me (I am from a dysfunctional family, I haven’t spoken to my mother for more than 10 years, and my father had barely spent time living with me), so my diagnosis kind of stops here, being semi-formal.
My psychiatrist told me that he is confident in his diagnosis, but I am not entirely sure (this is what I told my school’s counselor) if I am allowed to proclaim myself having a formal diagnosis. I think I will ask my psychiatrist to write a letter that includes this diagnosis of autism to back me up whenever someone raises doubt.
As to the question of whether this diagnosis helps me — well, sort of, it does help, but with limitation. I have always been considered an unusual person throughout my life, a diagnosis does make my eccentricity easier to comprehend by common folks. However, I don’t feel that it has helped me as much as my diagnosis in OCD that came in my early 20’s. My diagnosis with OCD was truly eye-opening. Upon being diagnosed, I was thinking: ‘Oh WOW! There is a name to what I have been living with since memory serves! Now everything makes sense!’ And to this day, I still baffle more with OCD symptoms than my social ineptness attributable to autism. I think regardless of whether I had gotten a diagnosis of autism or not, my (social) life wouldn’t change that much: my friends will keep loving me, while some others keep hating me.
11 June 2019 (addressing to my CEGEP chemistry teacher)
Today I unearthed my chemistry comprehensive assessment module done in 2005, which consists of written and oral components. I got full mark for my paper, but 0 for the oral part. My teacher commented:
Scientists do communicate with each other, even if you want to become mathematician […] Your writing is very good, I am really impressed, but you have to speak.
In my diaries, I wrote in response:
Well. Who cares. As long as I can write beautifully.
Just kidding. Communication has always been a problem for me, I know.
Oh and B., you are the only science teacher at Abbott who didn’t complain about my writing style (‘You should try to write short sentences’, one told me), but also the only one who has complained about my penmanship: ‘Write bigger or use a darker pen!’
I know my penmanship is unusually tiny but I can’t help — if I change the way I write, I would feel that it’s wrong and it’s not my writing. I am not sure whether this is an OCD symptom or autistic trait. I have always been sorry for torturing my teachers, I was ready to accept any penalty that comes with their difficulty to decipher my handwriting.
I am not sure if mathematicians are more solitary — most of my maths colleagues are quite sociable actually — or if the art of doing mathematics is still a more solitary pursuit, as nowadays most academics collaborate with one another. […] It’s funny, I had always thought that if I survived my 30th birthday, I would become a cloistered nun. I am deeply drawn to the life of seclusion because I am not just an introvert, I am a high-functionning autist (recently diagnosed). I tend to misunderstand facial expressions and social cuts. For example, I interacted a few times with a girl who would turn aside her head while I spoke to her. I have always thought that she didn’t like me and that she didn’t want to listen to me, but I recently realised that she was just shy. But between in-person conversation and phone call or Skype / FaceTime chat, I would prefer the first, because there is no frequencies being cut off in the transmission, nor video that is out of sync with the audio. I rely heavily on lips reading to hear people’s utterance properly.
It’s common to say art expresses feelings and emotions, but I find my art express none of these. In my animation class I was at a loss when the teacher asks what emotion we want to provoke in a given scene, while I am only interested in logical coherence between events. I dislike fiction, which is generally not relevant to our scientific career, and would prefer our language courses focusing more on essays and other logic-oriented writings.
A condition related to ASD is alexithymia, which is characterised by one’s inability or difficulty in recognising one’s emotions and that of others. An alexithymic tends to describe emotions in terms of bodily sensations — heart beating very fast, palms sweating, short of breath, etc — and have rather impoverished narrative styles and dream pattern.
I was originally diagnosed with this personality construct a few years ago before my autistic traits being confirmed. I would describe to my doctor some highly stressful events (e.g. oral presentation) and the bodily sensations they incurred in a calm way, as if it meant nothing to me. To my doctor these descriptions suggests clearly an emotional response which I failed to be aware of or to verbalise. Most educators and psycho-educators have never heard of this term; my being a non-native speaker of English / French language further deters a proper diagnosis because every time I ask ‘What is [an emotion, e.g. anxiety]?’, people would think it is a language problem, and not a problem with emotional awareness. It takes an experienced psychiatrist to detect the symptoms.
Alexithymics do have emotions, but fail to recognise them. I have experienced to a varying degree of intensity outbursts of crying and laughing out of no particular reason. People often confuse this with depression or panic attack.
My lifelong problem is the existence of other minds, as I have no empathy to process affective information in others. It may sound ironic that I grew up as one of the triplets but have always felt alone ever since I have memory. Everyone feels like a philosophical zombie to me and I have always considered myself a solipsist.
I love tilings, but not when I have to walk on them.
17 August 2011
I am an one-dimensional person: beside living up to my ideal, I have known no other purpose in life.
[Linda] is rude; she points at people with her index finger.
(The following is my reply to the subsequent question: ‘Serious?’)
I did mean to be serious in writing my original claim down: that I tend to point at people/objects/directions/etc. with my index finger when referring to them in direct speech is a fact; that my gesture has always been described as ‘rude’ (since my childhood?) is another fact, grounded on the first one. Whether people meant to be serious in so describing me, or they simply meant to make fun of my bizarre penchant, I who have grave difficulty in reading other’s emotions am not well-placed to judge.
I also write words in the air, make shapes with my hands as a kind of visual aids during the painful task of articulating language, but none of these has induced more vehement reaction than my pointing at people (I constantly point at myself too) or anything that can be visually spatially located, for reasons unknown to me (I am guessing that by pointing at people I have breached certain unspoken social convention of eminent importance). It probably has no salient effect on my actual performance, yet somehow I feel it enhances the effectiveness of my verbal communication and makes my utterance more intelligible — even though in reality, it may make my utterance all the more confusing — whence my aversion for speaking on the phone when labelling things as ‘this’ or ‘that’ is virtually impossible.
I have been thinking for a long while how it is that phonological processing of auditory information for me involves heavy reliance on visual representation. I seem to have acquired that peculiar habit subconsciously, remembering not when nor how it occurred. Maybe my brain is utterly incapable of rapid word-object association; or maybe my memory for linguistic expression is too weak that I cannot easily recall a string of phonemes, however familiar it is; or maybe my visual sense is too strong that phonological knowledge of a certain linguistic expression must compound with some sort of graphic information in order to be used … hmm, I don’t have a fixed answer, honestly.
As to my apparent rudeness — well, I gather that label is inevitable, and yes, I may be rude, so what? I am fine with people so criticising me or making fun of my impoverished vocabulary. As a misanthrope, I don’t have trouble with their having trouble with a different sort of verbal communication. Unless upon me be proved otherwise, I shall stand in need of no self-vindication.
15 March 2011 (about why have I accumulated so many unfinished emails)
A hypothesis can be formulated on the ground of my strong aversion for imprecision and lack of rigour leading to this obsessive insistence on completing everything in verbal or epistolary exchange. Incompleteness in thoughts, which bothers very few ordinary folks, always triggers a thorny annoyance in some arcane corner of my mind. It is not unusual for my acquaintances to receive, two months after a conversation took place, a long detailed elaboration of what was discussed and moreover, of what was left undiscussed. Despite of my general dissatisfaction with my literary output, I am still trying to respond, as thoroughly as possible, to a question that was posed to me nearly three years ago.
LINDA’S ARTWORLD 