Yes, I often feel this way. It could be a number of things, but I think they all tie into one another in a way. For one, our anxiety can make us feel this: always being hypervigilant of everything can cause us to look at things in a different way, and eventually detach or burn out and not feel fully present. I...frequently feel as though I really have no body, or am not fully integrated with it, it is more of a puppet which I control and much of it does not come naturally. The one actor in the play who turned up at the wrong time and barely got to look at the script, and everyone acts strange about it but won't directly explain; we have to try and work it out.
From what I've heard very many of us on the spectrum feel that -- things not coming naturally -- and it could simply be to do with the different way our brains work. A greater tendency towards anxiety, being more analytical and sometimes perceptive, with tasks such as socialisation, presenting oneself, all the everyday "acting" that comes so instinctually and is so straightforward to some neurotypicals being for us more like a winding road, one that we have to consciously find for not being able to follow it without much thought. When it becomes apparent how automatically it comes to some others, it can make us feel like we're acting, detached, almost a different kind of being.
It isn't surprising that we can get stuck outside of ourselves. It can be hard to strike the balance between analysing things in order to be able to identify a correct response and actually executing that response at the appropriate time. It's overwhelming. For those of us who particularly tend towards hypervigilance, it's easy to set too high a standard for what is an appropriate response and spend too long trying to find it -- before we can do so, the appropriate time is gone. I've been having this problem all my life.
There is no perfect way to be. It's a very grey area, very complex and wide, with no absolutes. I think it's important that we try to find that balance in terms of analysis and action, but it requires much practise and experimentation, and often many mistakes.
I think I understand what you mean about the abstraction and overload. Things don't fully make sense, don't match up across everything, don't have a root or a beginning or end but seem to come out of nowhere without reason or explanation. Things like meditation have somewhat helped me with this. Observing what is, in all its senselessness, and not trying to project meaning onto it because it rarely works, and seems to leave as soon as it came whenever it does work.
How you can cope with being different is by finding and making use of your strengths while trying to understand your weaknesses as well as possible. Use the former to cope with the latter. Be open to new ideas, paths, possibilities. Try to find ways to keep moving forward -- alternative ways around those problems which are bringing you to a halt. Therapy might help with some problems, especially OCD; if you haven't tried it already they may be able to offer some very useful techniques and alternative approaches.
One of the things that helps me most is to view it all as a learning experience. Different truly does not mean bad, and there's a solution to every difficulty out there, although some are easier to find and use than others. The frustration of being unable to do certain things in the normal way, to re-tread the most well-trodden paths, can be more than balanced by the joy of finding other paths which lead to the very same, or perhaps even better places.
03 Apr 2015, 8:40 pm
