Cauliflour
I'm the doodler, I make terrible doodles.
- Mar 24, 2025
- 736
I am so fucking sick and tired of not being able to read my own emotions. Any little nuance is gone and any strong emotions just become an annoying mix of body doing random things against my will and a stress that likes to linger. Neurotypicals really don't understand how lucky they are. They can just look into their heart and figure it all out! They learned how to identify and regulate their emotions while in nappies and I'm a grown adult that can't even tell if I'm hungry or if my stomach is just fucking with me again. Emotion blindness really needs to be talked about more in relation to autism because everybody knows about lack of social cues, stimming etc but so little seem to know about this. It's a right pain in the ass: not because it's painful like overstimulation, but because it forces your mind to be in a constant state of "greige" that sometimes fluctuates but your body is still producing the physical signs of certain emotions even if you don't feel their intensity. It's like you're a fairly calm and collected pilot, but your co-pilot keeps slapping all the buttons and switches on the dashboard while your boss judges you;
and there's nothing you can do about it!
If you look up articles relating to "alixithmya", you'll see a very sugarcoated and softened version where children are taught to identify their emotions based on bodily functions, like if they're eyes are crying or something, and they always seem to treat that like it's subtitles on a TV show in regards to it being an adjustment that makes it easier forever once learned. No, no it isn't. For starters, I wasn't really helped in that regard because not being emotional was always seen as a plus. "Oh, you don't flap your arms and squeal when someone insults you? That's a great thing! Anger is overrated anyway" which makes me wonder if there was a misogynist angle towards that, if you see what I mean. Also it's a condition that's just not that well known, and doesn't show up externally (unless you bitch about it) so I didn't know what was wrong for years.
This also makes it pretty much impossible to do any substantial help in the mental health department because I'm essentially locked out of my emotional state and have to guess based on scraps. This means therapy is pointless because I physically can't express my inner feelings, and most mental health advice is pointless because it's all designed for a different operating system (and most of my autistic symptoms aren't the typical ones you can find on social media anyway so the advice for autistic people mostly can't apply to me either). I feel so jealous seeing all of you on here being able to so elegantly lay out your thoughts and feelings regarding your mental health and yet I can't even tell if I classify as "mentally ill" because I have no sense of what's normal. Hell, my throat has been hurting the entire time I'm writing this, which is giving off a "I want to force you to break down and cry" signal, even though there's nothing I've seen prior to me that would trigger that. I don't know just how far down I've fallen which is a bit scary as I could be one bad day away from kicking the bucket and I wouldn't know.
Also I'm constantly paranoid about getting burnt out because I can't easily see the symptoms so for all I know it could be lurking in the background right now, leeching off my mental state, and I wouldn't be able to do anything about it because I wouldn't be able to recognise that it's there or gone.
and there's nothing you can do about it!
If you look up articles relating to "alixithmya", you'll see a very sugarcoated and softened version where children are taught to identify their emotions based on bodily functions, like if they're eyes are crying or something, and they always seem to treat that like it's subtitles on a TV show in regards to it being an adjustment that makes it easier forever once learned. No, no it isn't. For starters, I wasn't really helped in that regard because not being emotional was always seen as a plus. "Oh, you don't flap your arms and squeal when someone insults you? That's a great thing! Anger is overrated anyway" which makes me wonder if there was a misogynist angle towards that, if you see what I mean. Also it's a condition that's just not that well known, and doesn't show up externally (unless you bitch about it) so I didn't know what was wrong for years.
This also makes it pretty much impossible to do any substantial help in the mental health department because I'm essentially locked out of my emotional state and have to guess based on scraps. This means therapy is pointless because I physically can't express my inner feelings, and most mental health advice is pointless because it's all designed for a different operating system (and most of my autistic symptoms aren't the typical ones you can find on social media anyway so the advice for autistic people mostly can't apply to me either). I feel so jealous seeing all of you on here being able to so elegantly lay out your thoughts and feelings regarding your mental health and yet I can't even tell if I classify as "mentally ill" because I have no sense of what's normal. Hell, my throat has been hurting the entire time I'm writing this, which is giving off a "I want to force you to break down and cry" signal, even though there's nothing I've seen prior to me that would trigger that. I don't know just how far down I've fallen which is a bit scary as I could be one bad day away from kicking the bucket and I wouldn't know.
Also I'm constantly paranoid about getting burnt out because I can't easily see the symptoms so for all I know it could be lurking in the background right now, leeching off my mental state, and I wouldn't be able to do anything about it because I wouldn't be able to recognise that it's there or gone.
