Hey all,
Just curious about something. I’m in my 30s and it took me until my early to mid 20s to realize that the cartoon thought bubbles or echoy voiceover thinking in shows and movies was kind of a real thing.
I almost never can visualize, and when I do it’s not something I can control. I can’t just summon the image of an apple in my head, but apparently everyone else around me can. Even when I can visualize, it’s like a thin mist that’s hard to pinpoint details and easily blown away.
Similarly, I almost never have an internal monologue. The times I do are short-lived and conversational, like “Wow, you should really wake up, it’s past noon”. or something.
However, I’m pretty good at playing songs in my head and quietly jamming out to sounds that don’t exist.
When I have a puzzle or something I need to think about, my subconscious handles it and just tells me the answer most of the time, without me having to do anything but look at the problem and wait. That’s super helpful for most day-to-day stuff, and people think I’m smart. But it means I’m terrible at doing math in my head, and can’t think through any kind of complicated issue in my head.
It also doesn’t help that my short term and long term memory are both terrible. Any memories older than a couple of weeks are just gone, or they are emotionless fuzzy snapshots with no before or after. If I know something, it comes to mind without effort. If I don’t know something, it’s probably just gone forever unless I have some kind of visual reminder and get lucky.
Basically, I can’t do anything in my head. I have to write it down, or have some other way to externalize the information in order to go over it. This make people think I’m stupid.
Add in the classic “bad at social-anything” and every interaction feels like a disaster.
And don’t get me started on how often I forget what I’m doing or how badly I fail to multitask. Makes finding a job I can live on very hard, and the one time I had a decent job, I felt like I constantly had to prove myself. I was always making seemingly basic mistakes and letting everyone down.
Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. I wanted to give kind of an overview of how my head works. I was wondering what kinds of brains everyone else is dealing with.
Does anyone else deal with things like visualization, or poor memory, or anything like that? How do you cope with the day-to-day?
I wish my internal monologue would shut the fuck up. It’s almost always rehearsing arguments. Like for a whole day all I’ll think about is why someone I spoke to in a forum 20 years ago was wrong. I listen to podcasts or loud music to get a break from hearing my thoughts.
Music is my escape as well. I consider myself an audiophile and listen to music very technically as it’s one of the only things which distracts my inner monologue. Gives me a chance to visualize the sound stage and appreciate every little production decision. Also, great username! Glassware was one I used for the longest time.
I constantly have several streams going at the same time that I cannot control. One is like you said: rehearsing arguments. Another is reviewing recent social interactions trying to make sense of them because, to me, NT and autistic culture are quite different. So, I’m always trying to figure out what an NT meant by something they did and what an NT could presume I meant by something I did. The next stream is a song or drum beat. I am 24/7 playing a song or drum beat in my head. Right now, it’s Pretty Young Thing by MJ. The final and faintest stream is my bodily needs such as hunger, thirst, tired, having to go to the bathroom, etc. This last one can start demanding more attention and disrupting the others if the need is considerable enough. For example, I’m pretty dumb after eating a large meal because the bloating just takes up too much of my attention.