According to the local mental health hospital, I am a high-functioning autistic savant. To be fair, the local mental health hospital is demonstrably incapable of diagnosing me properly. Their ultimate diagnosis displayed a severe misunderstanding of at least one of my fundamental beliefs, and even if their diagnoses were all correct, this is probably attributable as much to luck as it is to their actual medical expertise. I'm not sure how common this sort of thing is for hospitals in general, but the lack of oversight and tendency of people not to question the authority of doctors leads me to believe it might be fairly common.
That's not the point, though. The point is that I am 90% their diagnosis of autism was accurate, at least in that I am somewhere on the spectrum. That being said, I don't think I've ever had a meltdown before recently. I'm not even sure if I'm having one now, since I'm not completely clear on what they are. If I am, though, my sudden loss of capability in multiple different areas has seriously freaked me out and I'd like to know what can be done to restore my ability in important areas.
So, for reference, my previous capabilities: I was an extremely prolific writer throughout high school, and the quality of my writing was generally pretty high. I never struggled to come up with something for my creative writing classes, although I was not always pleased with the result (in one case in particular, I can remember turning in something I thought was absolutely awful, but I was on a deadline and the fact that it had no likeable characters at all wouldn't affect my grade). I was anxious about meeting or interacting with strangers, but was typically able to cover it up pretty well. At one point, I went to a high school to distribute fliers on way the American education system is broken and could use some reforms, and for three hours straight interacted with strangers, and while it left me exhausted afterwards, I wasn't slowed down by the anxiety it caused me. Plus, all my friends were convinced I was some kind of activist superhero for the next few days, and although that made my lack of any kind of follow-up plan painfully obvious, it was overall a positive experience.
That's where I was. Last November, my prolific writing had hit absurd levels. I was working on a project with three other writers which updates once every day except Sundays. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays it updated a chapter of the ongoing story, and Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays it updated with little poems, short stories, and other filler pieces. I contributed 90% of the filler pieces, and usually edited the other writers' work heavily to make sure certain characters were acting right or we weren't opening up any plot holes or inconsistencies. I spent nearly as much time editing other people's work as I did writing my own. For two weeks in the middle, two writers flaked out completely (one was replaced, the other we just had to wait on), which led to a solid two weeks of filler pretty much completely from me. In November I tried to pile NaNoWriMo on top of this, figuring I could just abandon NaNo and pull back to just the main project if it proved too much, but instead I ended up crashing completely. I have made several attempts at reviving the original writing project or starting others, but I cannot seem to maintain creativity for longer than a week anymore.
Further, a recent attempt at interactions with strangers at a mall, very similar to my interactions with strangers at a high school about two and a half years ago, left me paralyzed with anxiety, to the point where I nearly collapsed. This was just about a week ago, five months after the crash in early November. I haven't really been able to get anything done in the time since. This is not only a problem financially, in that I really need to start getting things done within a month or so if I don't want to start wracking up some really impressive debt (and this is without having to pay any rent and already receiving monthly government aid), but emotionally. I used to be able to do things, and while I was expecting the rate at which I could produce creative works to decline as I got older, I didn't expect it to spontaneously cease after a single spectacular burnout.
Now, an important note: I have arranged for all of my college classes this semester (which, incidentally, I am most definitely going to fail since I have been unable to consistently produce anything for their entire duration) to be taken online, and thus haven't had any real reason to leave my home, which I share only with my father, with whom I rarely interact and whom I don't feel at all comfortable opening up to emotionally. As you might expect, I have very few friends, all of whom live some ways away and are very rarely available to meet with me (they have explicitly and immediately denied trying to avoid me when I asked them, and I seriously doubt they would lie about this), so I'm meeting with human beings who I actually like to talk with approximately once every month. I think this might be a contributor to the social anxiety aspect, and may have even worsened the creative burnout. I know I'm definitely feeling increasingly desperate desire for regular human interaction, but I'm not really sure where to get it. I want actual interaction, not just being in the same room as someone, and only with a very small amount of friendly people, which is not at all what the world's social scene is built to facilitate. Normally I can work around it, but right now I'm very slim on resources and willpower.
So, does this sort of thing happen to autistic people, or is it something else? If the former, what do you do about it? I wasn't diagnosed until late in my life and the hospital didn't tell me much of anything about it except that it was linked to social problems, so I really don't know many details.
12 Apr 2011, 9:42 pm
