avpdpossum

[avpdpossum]

current mental state

[avpdpossum]

after my last appointment with my psychiatrist, we decided to add ADHD meds on top of the ssri i’ve been trying, because it seems like it is helping but not with everything, and guys…

GUYS…

i made a phone call today about my testosterone prescription that i’ve been putting off for so long that i haven’t taken t in over a month, and i wasn’t anxious about it at all. i shopped in the men’s section at the store and used the men’s bathroom there and barely even spent two seconds thinking about what other people there were thinking of me. i didn’t spend the entire drive terrified of taking a wrong turn and getting lost or not seeing another car coming and getting in an accident. i touched up my hair with clippers on my own and sure, i probably spent as much time working up to it as i did actually doing it, but i still got myself to do it in the end and i’m so much happier with the way i look now.

i can’t remember the last time i felt like this. i don’t know if i ever really have. my boyfriend and i will be spending a lot of time with a big group of people tomorrow, so it’ll be interesting to see if this could make me actually capable of human interaction.

[avpdpossum]

MORE avoidant wins! after we got back from all the socializing, my boyfriend’s mom called and they put her on speaker bc she wanted to talk about our apartment search and other stuff that also had to do with me. i’ve always had a hard time with their mom bc i can tell she wishes i talked to her more and that kind of expectation tends to make my avoidance 100x worse, so in the past when the three of us have talked i mostly just talk to my boyfriend and never really directly say things to her unless she specifically asks me a question. but this time, i was actually able to jump into the conversation to explain things or just joke around a few times, and it honestly felt really good. i still held back a few times and didn’t say something i wanted to say, but it’s definitely a lot better than past conversations.

…y’all. i think the meds might be working.

[avpdpossum]

avoidant win! my boyfriend asked me to go hang out with one of their friends while they talked to a bunch of other people, and we actually had a really nice chat! at least by my standards, which are admittedly pretty low bc i never talk to people. i’ve been particularly intimidated by him in the past bc he does so much cool stuff and i’m really not involved in much so i feel like i have nothing to contribute, but it was nice to talk. AND THEN my boyfriend left me alone with a bunch of their friends for a while bc someone got locked out and they had to go help, and i mostly just sat there but there’s one person in that group that i’m a bit more comfortable with, so we also had some nice little chats. it does stress me the hell out when my boyfriend accidentally throws me into random social interactions unprepared like that, but now that i’m getting to know their friends a bit better, it’s not so bad anymore.

[avpdpossum]

my first social skills training assignment from my therapist was the smile/say hi to anyone i passed in her hallway and tell the security guard at the front desk to have a nice day on my way out. she said it like it was the easiest thing she could possibly think of to start with, and as is often my problem in therapy, i didn’t know how to put my discomfort with it into words until hours after my appointment ended.

i realize now that the problem is that for me, the act of smiling at people and the act of speaking to them are two completely different things. i don’t have much of a problem with greeting people by making eye contact and smiling — i don’t usually do it, but it doesn’t give me too much anxiety to try and it doesn’t feel like the end of the world if the other person doesn’t reciprocate.

initiating verbal interactions, on the other hand, is like…my avoidant final boss. it’s the hardest thing you could possibly ask me to do, to the point that even if i want to try, my brain will find a way to put a stop to it. i’ve spent a good ten minutes frozen in front of the bathroom because i couldn’t bring myself to ask my own dad a question through the door. i’ve repeatedly had a problem where, when i try to say thank you to someone holding a door open for me, the sound literally just doesn’t come out. even as a kid, i was afraid to wake my parents up with words so i’d just stand by their bed and stare at them until they noticed me (which my mom somehow always did). one of my biggest challenges at work is just trying to get patients’ or nurses’ attention when they’re not looking at me and i have to use my voice. asking me to tell the security guard to have a nice day might sound like the simplest, lowest-stakes interaction possible, but for me, initiating an unprompted verbal interaction is like…twenty steps ahead of where i am right now.

and knowing how avpd works, i think that makes sense. of course initiating an interaction is harder than working on the social skills you use within an interaction that someone else initiated — if they already initiated the conversation, that means you have at least one indicator that they want to talk to you, whereas doing the initiating means being open to flat-out rejection. that’s something that needs to be worked up to when you’re dealing with avpd, where your brain processes any and all rejection as A Fate Worse Than Death.

i think it would make much more sense to start with building experience and confidence in social interactions by practicing social skills like the nonverbal cues that indicate openness to being approached and maintaining a conversation that someone else initiated, while also doing work in therapy to deconstruct the thought processes that make rejection feel to world-ending and learn ways to manage the intense emotions that being rejected brings up. then, with that experience, we could ease into things like initiating polite-social-script interactions or interactions with a specific purpose (like asking someone a question), before finally moving into initiating actual conversations where you just…talk to someone and hope they want to chat too.

but of course, most therapists don’t actually know shit about avpd and just think of it as social anxiety with a special name to emphasize how bad it is, so they don’t understand how their usual approaches for dealing with social issues could be super harmful to someone with avpd.

[avpdpossum]

meeting with my therapist of ten years after getting my diagnosis was wild. she didn’t even acknowledge the avpd diagnosis and i was just sitting there thinking about how i told her years ago that i thought i might’ve been developing a personality disorder and she just brushed it off. imagine if my avpd had been caught back then instead of just letting it get worse and worse throughout college…

like i know that personality disorders are famously hard to treat but people have had some success with things like dbt and schema therapy and certain medications and i feel like it’s going to be so much harder now than it ever needed to be because, in my neuropsych’s words, i’ve been isolating myself for so long that i lost the social skills i used to have (which were already limited) and now it’s not just about gaining to confidence to interact with people, i literally have to learn the skills all over again.

and now, it seems like she wants to just go for a skills training/exposure therapy kind of approach for improving my social interactions, but i feel like that’s not going to work. maybe it would for social anxiety, but if she just pushes me into interacting with people more and we don’t to any work on the reason they’re so hard for me or the thoughts i have when i feel like i’ve done something wrong, i feel like it’ll just make things worse.

[avpdpossum]

just got back from my feedback session with the neuropsychologist. apparently her assessment of me painted a “complicated clinical picture” and she had to step away from it for a while before she could figure out what was going on, which i think is a professional way of saying “wow, there’s a lot wrong with you.”

she officially diagnosed me with avpd (!!!) along with five other things, and said that while she’s not comfortable diagnosing me with autism since it was hard for her to get a picture of what i was like before the avpd and social anxiety developed, i do meet a lot of the criteria. i’m still going to keep calling myself autistic because i suspect she sees autism as a Big Diagnosis that should only be given if absolutely necessary and was being extra conservative because of that.

i honestly wasn’t expecting her to give me the avpd diagnosis at all. i did try to bring it up once, but she didn’t seem to think i was right so i let it go and it never came up again. i’m surprised she ended up changing her mind, but i’m glad she did — it’s the best explanation i’ve ever found, and it’s good to know an expert agrees.

[avpdpossum]

genuinely insane how difficult it is to participate in your own life

[avpdpossum]

i saw a psychiatrist today for the first time in…three years, i think? she’s definitely much nicer than my old psychiatrist, who was quite possibly the most judgmental person i’ve ever met. she decided to start me on viibryd, so i’m probably going to be taking my first dose of that tomorrow (i want to wait until i don’t have work for a couple days in case of side effects).

i always feel like the second i tell a doctor “i’ve been suicidal in the past and sometimes still am” or “sometimes my anxiety is so bad that i hit or scratch myself”, they just go “ah, i see, suicidality and self harm, this is clearly just depression and nothing else matters until the depression is fixed”, so i’m hoping this actually helps with the things i went in for and isn’t just more of that. i was very careful about only saying i was there for anxiety and not bringing up depression right off the bat to try to avoid the issue, but the fact that she ended up prescribing a med that’s specifically only proven to help major depressive disorder is making me nervous.

i guess we’ll see how it goes. maybe once the results of my neuropsych evaluation are in and i can give them to her, we’ll be able to target my specific issues better (especially getting on adhd meds…god knows i need them bad), but in the meantime i’m just hoping for the best. i’ve seen a lot of people say that the first few days/weeks on viibryd can be rough as far as side effects go so i’m just trying to prepare myself.

[avpdpossum]

it’s good to be challenged it’s good to be scared it’s good to be challenged it’s good to be scared it’s good to be challenged it’s good to be scared

[avpdpossum]

chanting “i am allowed to do this” out loud over and over while ordering delivery from a place i’ve never ordered from before. because i’m mentally well and am a normal amount of scared of doing things. now if you’ll excuse me, i have to get back to stewing in anxiety for the next 30-40 minutes while they make my food. like any normal person would.

[avpdpossum]

avpd question: do you also get fear tics? im not entirely sure what my muscles are *trying* to do but my head and eyes start moving on their own when im talking to someone im anxious around. im pretty sure its avpiding looking at the person but im too busy trying to stop it from happening to really know

i do, but i think mine are a little different. for me it’s like, if something happens in an interaction that makes me anxious/embarrassed or if i think of something in the past that makes me feel that way, i’ll do little things like jerking my head back or making a fist or squeezing my eyes shut or clamping my teeth together that i’m not fully in control of. in my case, i suspect it’s because i used to (and sometimes still do) move my body in really aggressive ways on purpose because it felt like it offered some kind of relief from feelings like that, and eventually i tried to stop myself from doing it so much because i knew it could hurt me but i never really found an alternative so now my brain just…forces me to keep doing the one thing that sort of worked.

[avpdpossum]

(sorry sorry sorry i accidentally rbed ur vent post cuz i scrolled too fast and didnt realize. im sorry that the rules got changed in ur campaign like that cuz i have similar things happen and its always disappointing.)

it’s all good! i don’t mind people reblogging my vent posts if they relate

[avpdpossum]

update from the pathfinder game: the group decided to do leveling by awarding each other xp for cool moments and, as expected, i was the only one who ended the game without enough to level up because no one thought anything i did was worth rewarding. i knew that was going to happen as soon as the gm said that’s how we’re doing xp but of course i’m the only one who’s clinically bad at having fun so everyone else likes it and even if i did say something, i’d just be overruled. i try really hard to commit to a social thing for once, and this is what i get.

[avpdpossum]

having a safe person who’s much more social and active in their community than i am is great a lot of the time bc it means i can follow them around to do fun things and pretend to have friends by hanging out with their friends…

but sometimes it’s also really fucking hard. it’s hard to have a lot of friends that are just Their Friends and one friend that’s Our Friend but no one who’s just My Friend. it’s hard to have every social interaction reinforce what i already feel about myself bc it’s clear that i don’t fit in with the rest of the group, that they don’t really know me and my presence doesn’t mean all that much to them. it’s hard to hear them get frustrated with people who aren’t as politically active as them and not know how to explain that i’m one of those people they’re talking about who never shows up to things despite saying i care about them — to wonder, if you met me now and i didn’t have you as my gateway into those things, would you even like me? or would you think i’m just as bad as all the other people that you say don’t care enough? it’s hard to count on doing social things together and feeling safer that way, only to have them back out at the last minute bc they have too much to do so i have to figure out if i should be a flaky asshole and back out too without a good reason or force myself to go alone to something that terrifies me.

sometimes it feels a lot like being slowly left behind by one person who didn’t leave me behind a long time ago. and i know that’s probably just the avoidance talking, but i also that even if it was true know they’d be too nice and care about me too much to actually admit it, so how can i really be sure?

and then i hate myself for thinking that way bc i know it’s not fair to them and i’m making myself more upset at them than they deserve. avpd is SO cool guys i’m having a GREAT time.

[avpdpossum]

[avpdpossum]

being self aware suuuucks like yeah this thought pattern/behavior is stupid and pointless and a symptom. i know this. [does it anyways