Clinical depression, ptsd/c-ptsd. I'm sure there's probably several other things wrong with me as well, but I don't feel like I have the luxury to pursue it anymore than I feel like I have the luxury to be able to afford marriage and kids. So as such, I kind of treat the spectrum all the same for myself: I'll handle it when I can afford to handle it. (Which is most likely never).
Despite that, I actually get by pretty well. I've spent the last couple of years healing, and working on plans and fallback plans. I try to remain optimistic, despite my natural predisposition to be a pessimist...
I have rather underdeveloped social skills. Likely due to me being both introverted, and misanthropic. I also have social anxiety as such. And it is for these reasons, why I do not mingle more often with people. When you're an introverted artist, you get the extra option to be totally lost in your own conceptual, creative thought processes. So, I usually choose that option, because it doesn't launch me into social anxiety Hell.
I was also born with a meta-cognitive learning disability. I very rarely ever mention this anymore. It's also not legally recognized by colleges in my state. Though, there are several other reasons why I don't mention it. Namely because it made my childhood social life Hell. I've also been told that it doesn't really show. In fact, I typically seem rather eccentric to people. Probably because I have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, and due to my ptsd and whatnot I have a tendency to get lost in my own thoughts (with music theory, for example) and talk to myself a bit, playing with conceptual ideas in my head.
Whatever is wrong with me, I've become more comfortable with my thoughts than I am with my feelings. There are times where when depression hits me that it can seem like a blessing, that is, when I go from feeling ****ty to feeling nothing at all. Aandd there are also times where if triggered it seems like a sudden blackout after a night of heavy drinking. Only with an alcoholic blackout, you get to spend the next day trying to reconstruct the night before. With clinical depression, you get to spend about a week trying to reconstruct the last two months.
I've kind of 180-ed in the last decade. I used to be naive and really emotional. Now I'm more heavily guarded than the IRS, and no longer trust my emotional spectrum as a central stance for my judgment because I am cognitively aware of my own biases. Or to put that in plain English: I'm so guarded that I'm even guarded against myself...depending on how you look at that, it can be a good thing or a bad thing. It covers my ass a lot, yes, but at the cost of limiting my ability to connect and bond in the sense that it's not that I cannot connect or bond, but that the amount of connectivity and bonding that I will allow myself to do is rather, on a controlled limiter.
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"Like whispers in the dark..."
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