I feel endlessly confused and disabled (Regression?)

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I just have this extreme feeling of confusion. Or at least what I call confusion. I don't know what this is. I suspect I have had a sort of regression or something. I don't know.
It seems that there is a very narrow bottleneck in my mind when it comes to digest the occurrences in my personal life. Or maybe I'm just living in "Lacuna".
I totally can't make any sense of my life and what has happened to me in the last years. It's like I don't have ANY sort of OVERVIEW of my life, particularly the last 15 years (when I moved to Germany with 15). It's like the memories, or their feelings, or probably both, are neither been properly saved, nor processed, nor put in a meaningful context or chronological order in any way. The only thing that reminds me that I actually HAVE had a life are flashbacks, mostly about bad situations, and even they don't feel like they are MY OWN memories. I feel completely lost in time and space. I feel like I'm a compeletely new person just born to the word every day. Or like having a damn ECT every few hours.
To clarify, let me tell how I think it should be: I think I should have at least some meaningful memories, possibly the key ones (like graduating highschool) and they should feel like they had actually happened (have meaningful feelings attached to them and have a kind of sense about when they actually have happened and again, THAT they actually have happened and don't feel like remembering bits of a damn movie!)
This confusion also renders me completely unable to do anything useful in my life like going to college or holding a job. my grades are good enough to go to medical school but I barely do my own laundry.

What is this? regression? can you relate to this? what should I do?

cheerz
Omid

Edit: I'm taking Topiramate AGAIN, only 12.5 x 2 mg. I've had topamax in the past in much higher doses and it hadn't made me demented, but maybe that's it.

When I think back to certain times in my life, all that come up are the negative memories, and I have to really think to come up with the good memories. It can feel like regression sometimes, but I don't think that is what it actually is. I think it is unrealistic to remember EVERY single day of your life down to the last minute detail, but perhaps the good memories are just deeply buried under the bad ones and need to be excavated?

Yep. It all seemed to make some sort of sense at one time but now, and for some time, I have no stable sense of self, including my past.

My advice is to keep a journal and ask people who knew you as a kid for their memories. My issue seems to be getting better since I started letting myself be who I feel like being -- uh, basically indulging in weird special interests, speaking frankly, and stimming -- for several months. My guess is, for me at least, that this came from not understanding my social environment and trying to be someone I'm not to fit in.

Obviously I am guessing here. For all I know it's dietary...or I'm crazy. It's possible.

This is a topic I'm very much interested in, because the same thing happens to me. Thus I wondered about that child disintegrative disorder but with adults? It's like I could deal with things better for a short period but the older I get the worse it gets. Like I'm getting more autistic. It's confusing because I know I used to have relationships with people. Dysfunctional, but I did interact for a time and had friends. But for the last 10 years or so, it's now seemingly impossible, even though I am still friendly and pleasant toward others, people can't wait to get away from me quick enough. I thought perhaps it was due to a forced environment - when in school/uni, you have to be friends with someone, so your choices are limited and that forced others to befriend me when in the adult world, they wouldn't. I theorised that perhaps, when I was younger, I thought I was doing ok and that others liked me and I was blending in, but I really was just too clueless to recognise I wasn't. As I've grown up I have just become more aware of the extent to which I don't fit in that was in fact always there. Similarly my bemusement with human culture - I can't understand what the hell most people think they're doing or why, but I don't remember always being confused by things like that. Again I assumed I'm just more intelligent and aware as an adult. It probably didn't seem confusing as a child because I wasn't aware I didn't understand.
A psych once told me it seemed like I had a neurological disorder, because I can't remember chunks of my life, often periods of several years, except in bits and pieces, usually negative ones because those are the times that stand out. I know I must have lived those days individually because I'm still alive, but I can't remember anything. Have you been on any medications? Topamax shouldn't cause that effect - I was on that at one stage too and it didn't seem to scramble spacetime. I had been on a sleeping drug that could cause amnesia, but not to this extent. I thought maybe it was a severe reaction so I got more of that side effect than normal, except that I've stopped taking it and the effect is still going on. But no, I can't remember graduating high school or uni or the people I must have met and things I'd done, except in fragments. Which is slightly creepy. I have no idea what I may have said or done during that time.
I don't like journaling even in private as I suspect it encourages self-obsession and I definitely don't need any more of that, but it can be an experiment - write down things that come to mind whenever you feel like it, and at the end of the year, review and delete. See how much you can piece together from the words. Similarly, that's one thing I use my phone for - I take pictures of "key" stuff, like houses or towns/cities I moved to/through, people I may have met or lived with, jobs I worked for or interviewed with, places I took courses, restaurants I went to, etc. So I have a visual map of the year and can think 'do you remember this?'
It's definitely odd. If you feel like trying to puzzle it out feel free to PM.

Hey "journaling" is what you make it. For me, it's lots of lists primarily -- systematizing elements of my life and looking for patterns. And drawing instead of using words, too. I don't do much of the "dear diary" stuff. For example, I've drawn timelines of my life and coded certain portions based on one element, then cross-referenced them to other elements from another list. (I do this on paper because it slows me down and keeps me from getting sidetracked by playing with Excel and Word formatting/macros.)

I haven't been on any pharma/recreational drugs, but the hormones involved in anxiety can be powerful. I think that is what is scrambling my brain.

I do agree with the description of your experience -- these are thoughts I've had about my experience, too. The weird things is that, if I am allowed to function with people I am comfortable with (uh, basically career academics who think like me and who are in my field and are interested primarily in intellectual pursuits instead of career advancement) then I seem to "wake up" and know who I am. When I interact with other people...I get muddled again. At least, this seems to be the pattern. I've been interacting with "other" people for a long time now primarily but recently got to spend some time with "my" kind at a conference.

Anyway, apologies if you've seen this already, but I find this essay reassures me a bit:
Help! I Seem To Be Getting More Autistic
http://archive.autistics.org/library/more-autistic.html

PMing scares the willies out of me.

I can relate to this but on a probably much milder level.

...
It's in the water! That damned fluorine...


But no, really I think that it is a social thing for me, and I would not be surprised that it's some sort of ptsd thing for you since you seem to be able to only remember bad experiences and actually gave a time when it seems to have started.
What have doctors said?

That article makes a lot of sense in a lot of ways. I was always confused about why I could seem to be very highly functional for a short time - classically 3 months, just go go go - and I could handle everything and achieve everything other people could, but then its like I'd run out of gas and end up grinding to a screaming halt and won't be able to do anything for about the same time. Like I couldn't sustain it long term. I guess burnout explains that.
Also during those times I realise I can't be 'normal' and I just embrace being autistic because its the complete opposite. It's like well, I can't pass for NT, I may as well be as autistic as I am naturally and try to see if that'd work better than pretending and giving a false impression of myself.