😭 😭 😭
Like am I an actual person under the onion of layers of masks I made to mirror people's personality? Or have I become the onion? And then I end up wondering if I'm NPD, and yeah I should just stop ugh
There is a nexus around neurodivergence, trauma, and the "cluster B" personality disorders. My own hypothesis is that it's all the same structural malformation, exacerbated by trauma and manifesting differently based on developmental inputs and levels of childhood trauma. I'm diagnosed BPD and in remission, my mother absolutely rejects that diagnosis and still maintains that I'm actually ASD because the borderline diagnosis to her means that she failed as a mother.
Having a weak sense of self isn't such a bad thing. Maybe individuality is an illusion, and abandoning it can give us much more life satisfaction.
theres a youtube comment about lacan that went something like "my unstable sense of self doesn’t seem so bad, if no-one can ever realise their true self" which i take heart in. only officially adhd and depressed but do with that what you will
Idk if it's helpful to you, but I kinda like to think of myself as a "black box." I don't know how I work but I know the results that I produce. I know what I like when it happens, so I try to try as many different things as I can to see what comes out.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that being hyper self-conscious of the Self is what makes us feel so mutable. I think NT thought normally terminates after "wow that sounds like me" instead of spiraling into "does that really sound like me? what defines me? am I telling myself that I have this identity to feel part of an in-group that I don't necessarily have an ethical right to access?" A way that I heard it that gave me some amount of peace was the idea that most people don't ask the question in the first place unless they're likely to be a member of such a group. If you spend a lot of time wondering if you're autistic for instance, you're probably autistic because allistic people don't do that really. I have spent a lot of time thinking about the mutability of my Self, and the conclusion I've drawn that works for me is to to identify as autistic and communist, and not worry about the rest. Which is easy to say for me I guess as someone whose deepest sense of mutable gender and sexuality is feeling incompatible with standard western masculinity but not caring enough about that to go to he/they pronouns or any of the rest.
Like am I an actual person under the onion of layers of masks I made to mirror people’s personality? Or have I become the onion? And then I end up wondering if I’m NPD, and yeah I should just stop ugh
I think everyone is the onion and you're just hyper aware of it. Everyone is really the combination of people that have influenced them at different times in their lives, with different carry over effects from the previous moment. You don't have to have the labels, and maybe accepting that labels can be pretty unhelpful is something to work on. I've just been a lot happier personally since I stopped really worrying about it as concepts that wouldn't need to exist if capitalism didn't commodify literally everything. Everything is sort of a spectrum anyway, including gender and sexuality in many ways.
Capitalism tries to turn people into widgets in the labor force. For NTs, it’s subtle and effective, but I think NDs feel it to their core more regularly.
This really hits. My experience has been that many of the "normal" insanities of late capitalism are shrugged off by NTs but to NDs are felt much more sharply. I think it's at the core of why a disproportionately large number of comrades are NDs or gender or sexual minorities or in some way made to feel the sharp sting of disintegrated communal sociality.
More so in the past, but I've come a long way in the last few years. I found it really hard to tell my sexuality, and felt like I didn't really have a personality of my own; I just copied my parents and friends.
In retrospect, I always had my own personality, but without a point of reference it is hard to tell. Being around others can act as a good guide, as it allows you to pick what you dont like first, then look for alternatives.
It took me a long time to figure myself out though, and I'm still learning.
"I was walking in your footsteps / Doing as you do / I was learning how to be like me / By being just like you."
It says the video is no longer available :( YT doesn't waste any time these days
Thank you! This isn't something I ever would have found by myself
Yes and no. (I have ASD and ADHD.) There's a few facets of myself that have always been extremely concrete, like I just woke up one morning and realized I was gay but in retrospect I'd been clearly super gay my whole life (not just like stereotype things but just clearly always thought that girls were neat in a way I'd never felt about boys), or I realized I had autism and it felt really obvious, and I realize I had adhd and that felt even more obvious than asd had.
But then other things are definitely amorphous, change with context, or change over time. I've done my best just to accept that one of the only constants about me is that I don't have a super firm sense of self outside of a few key facts and values and the fact that everything else is subject to change with no notice. I can wake up one day and suddenly stop having hobby or interest I've had for 5, 10, 15 years with no plans to go back to it. That's okay, if it sounds like a good time to me it'll still be there in some form or another. I just try to do what makes me happy in the moment, and I keep a little list of stuff I like to help me remember in case I do want to go back to it.
I'm pretty confident on my identity, but being put in and out of the spectrum by different psychologists throughout my childhood and teens really makes it difficult to understand myself, especially on bad days. So I can definitely relate. Solidarity comrade.
