Venting thread that still excludes eddy (2)

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Travis B.
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Re: Venting thread

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Imralu wrote:Ah, Travis, it's not a first-world problem. It's totally legit. Mental illness happens in the third world too ... we just don't hear about it. You're allowed to be frustrated and need to vent. It sounds pretty mega-fucked to be honest. That you have insight reassures me that you will pull through all of this, but damn, dude, it sounds pretty unpleasant ... big understatement.
Well aside from some low level hallucinations it is over with, thank god. I did tend to think of it as a nuisance, a bother, as if is not that significant all things considered - even if I rationally know that people are not supposed to be psychotic, even mildly so, and after all I spent a few days almost non-stop delusional. Of course I tend to think about my problems as not that significant and feel guilty for venting about them unless they involve my being suicidal or severely mixed - even though I would not view someone else's problems, were they identical to mine, the same way. I would not minimize someone else's being psychotic but with insight, even though I minimize my own. At the same time want people like my psych and therapist to take my problems seriously even if I myself do not - I feel I am allowed to take my problems seriously if they take them seriously. In this case my psych took such seriously - she specifically used psychosis to refer to this episode and that before it - while my therapist did not, when I was really wishing she would as well.
Imralu wrote:My vent ... struggling really badly with my sleeping patterns. I sleep through whole days and just when I finally manage to sleep in the night again, I wake up in the morning feeling pretty fresh and then after a couple of hours, I fall back asleep and sleep through the whole day. Yesterday, I slept for something like 14 hours. My mood's been pretty OK lately though, although a bit shakier since last waking. I nearly cried while watching video clips. Oh, and I did a poo that hurt my butt.
I used to absolutely struggle with my sleeping patterns, and what really helped was getting a 9-5 job that forced me to sleep like most other people with such jobs. The only thing that has helped is, during another period of time without a job and after my parents retired/semi-retired was them basically forcing me to get up and stay up every morning.
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Re: Venting thread

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Imralu, that's a really sucking sleeping pattern. Any clue what causes it?

Travis, glad to hear most is well (relatively speaking), and I'm also glad you have insight so you can live through it.

Minor vent: yesterday my 12yo autistic daughter caused a kind-of-a-scene in a restaurant. She has really 0 insight into her feelings and why she behaves like that and she doesn't understand why we (i.e. her parents) act like we do... Really exhausting.


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Re: Venting thread

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jal wrote:Travis, glad to hear most is well (relatively speaking), and I'm also glad you have insight so you can live through it.
Now things are relatively well; I hallucinate a bit and have occasional delusions but they are no big deal.

When I was truly psychotic things were not so good at all. It is hard to live with constant delusions, even if you know they are not real - the thoughts are rather preoccupying, anxiety-provoking, and at times overwhelming, dominating one's thoughts and forcing one to constantly assess whether one's thoughts are real or not despite feeling very much real

The thing is that it could be seen as "good"... but only when compared with other people's psychoses. Sure I was doing well when compared with many other psychotic people - I did not feel to be as out of touch with reality as some other psychotic people - but people simply should not be psychotic in the first place, regardless, and frankly the level of being preoccupied, anxious, and constantly forced to assess things' reality involved still is not good.
jal wrote:Minor vent: yesterday my 12yo autistic daughter caused a kind-of-a-scene in a restaurant. She has really 0 insight into her feelings and why she behaves like that and she doesn't understand why we (i.e. her parents) act like we do... Really exhausting.
How well does your daughter function?
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Re: Venting thread

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Travis B. wrote:How well does your daughter function?
Very well, most of the time. She has Asperger's, and was diagnosed rather late since she seems pretty normal to the outside world. She's usually an intelligent, cheerful girl, albeit quickly distracted (we suspect ADD, though it hasn't officially been diagnosed, but her brother who's also got Asperger's has ADHD), does reasonably well at school, has some friends, etc. But if you look closely she's pretty autistic, being unable to express her own feelings or understand those of others. And sometimes she has an outburst when something happens that triggers her emotionally, and being unable to deal with negative emotions, she becomes unresponsive to normal interaction, and can only growl and repeat over and over the same sentences (which are mostly at odds with reality*). When she was younger, she could have tantrums as well, spitting and scratching and biting and the like. Luckily that seems to have gone with age.

*A while ago, her favourite jeans tore, unfixable. My wife told her the jeans had to go, and for about half an hour she klinged to it and when we approached her repeated over and over "it's NOT going. it's NOT going."


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Re: Venting thread

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jal wrote:And sometimes she has an outburst when something happens that triggers her emotionally, and being unable to deal with negative emotions, she becomes unresponsive to normal interaction, and can only growl and repeat over and over the same sentences (which are mostly at odds with reality*).
I have never received an ASD diagnosis, but freezing up is one of the things I do in response to interpersonal stress, one of the few seemingly ASD-ish things that I have never grown out of, unlike most of the stuff which disappeared by the time I reached college. (ASD is in my family, for the record.)
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Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Re: Venting thread

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Sigh. I worry if the events of the last three and a half months are just the beginning of breakthrough psychosis, after my psychotic symptoms had been largely absent from 2012 through when some glimmers of psychotic thought started breaking through earlier in 2016, having been put on hold with risperidone, but now the risperidone is failing. Hopefully the cariprazine will put it on hold again for another n number of years, but that all depends on how long it takes for this to hit full force versus how quickly the cariprazine is increased until it reaches a dose capable of preventing that.
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
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Re: Venting thread

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On the topic of Asperger's, my older brother kind of upset me in a way that I can't really blame him for.

Yesterday my mum called me via FB. It was just she and my older brother home and I talked to both of them - I guess I was on speaker phone. There was quite a delay and I could hear my own voice, so, just audiologically it was kind of stressful, but it was OK. Oh, and then there was a moment when my mum started asking if I'm still there because I'd been silent. I was like "Um, you two are talking to each other... I'm just listening to you." Bizarre people! My father had apparently gone out on his bike to pick up something for dinner (he's 76, so *tips hat*) and I guess she used that as an opportunity to call me. Then she said "Oh, your father's just getting home. I'll understand if you want to go." I had to get up and get my day going anyway.

And then my brother said "You might actually find you enjoy talking to him at a safe distance." Aargh, no! That's not how emotions work. I haven't not spoken to him for two years because I'm worried he's going to hit me or anything. Like, he hasn't hit anyone for twenty years and in the mean time I grew up to be much bigger than him, and in spite of his bike-riding prowess, he's getting pretty frail these days - has had prostate cancer and was incontinent for a long time afterwards and has apparently had Golden Staph (Staphylococcus aureus) twice in the last couple of years. And like, honestly, as if it hadn't occurred to me that I'm at a safe distance. Moving here has been a plan or a reality for my whole adult life. Ok, not that my brother knows this (probably - I did tell Mum so who knows?), but I didn't cry for hours after my Dad tried to phone me because I hadn't realised that I was far enough away to be physically safe.

So, it makes me wonder what my brother thinks of the fact that I haven't spoken to Dad for so long. And that sets off my awful tendency to have endless imaginary conversations where I try to justify me behaviour and feelings, and I'm so fucking sick of that.

Of course, there's the possibility that he doesn't think very much about it at all, but my going off the rails has triggered a lot of stuff in the family - including my mum, ruminating on the fact that she'd "lost" one son (me, who is her favourite son... she actually told me that several times, which is pretty fucking weird) and having finally had to face up to the fact that all three of her sons are messed up, finally telling my dad we'd all be better off if he just left. He didn't even argue it because it's objectively pretty obviously true, but he said he didn't have anywhere to go and my mum didn't have the heart to kick him out, but then, realising that he's on shaky ground, he then approached my mother at some point and said to her "I haven't verbally abused you for a month." She just told him she hadn't even noticed because that's how it's fucking supposed to be. That was six months ago and apparently he's been good since then. He's perfectly capable of controlling his anger and urges and being nice to people if he's got a selfish reason for it. What a fucked up old cunt! After twenty years of rape and physical abuse, she took him to court and he stopped immediately. After another twenty years of verbal abuse, she threatened to kick him out and guess who's nice as pie now. Anyway, I don't really care what my father gets up to as long as he's nice to everyone and I'm glad day-to-day life is better for my mum now ... even though I guess she's still sleeping in a chair in the living room, where everyone literally has to step around her going through the house. My dad should be the one with no room of his own. Bah. Anyway ...

So, I can't really be annoyed at my brother for not getting how I might be feeling. I mean, I am on the other side of the world, have never explained what's going on with me here and he is autistic, so... like, what is he supposed to think? All he knows I guess is what my mum's mentioned about me more or less having a breakdown and dealing with childhood issues about Dad's violence (she still hasn't really acknowledged that she was also emotionally abusive to me without ever meaning to be but I can't really push that because I'm afraid of hurting her more). To tell the truth, I don't know to what extent my brother even thinks about people's motivations for their behaviour. I know he can do it if he's prompted to but I don't know if he does it at all naturally and forms opinions about how people's brains must work. (Other than at a scientific/philosophical level of how thoughts arise in brains - I bet he's all over that, and who wouldn't be!? lol) Like, he's almost certainly not being dismissive of me or thinking I'm being a big, dramatic, sensitive drama queen, but that's how a big part of my brain is reacting to his comment (proving in a sense, that if he is thinking that, he's right). Honestly, he'd probably be surprised if he found out how much thought I'm giving to what he thinks of me. Neurotypicals are fucking weird. (Actually, since I'm mentally ill, I guess I'm not neurotypical... Apparently the word for non-autistic is allistic.)

Fuck I wish I could turn this shit off. I'm so tired of having twenty thoughts coming from every input and countless imaginary conversations justifying myself to other people. I've got this huge desire to explain to everyone how I feel and because it's often pretty complex and takes me ages to explain anything it just keeps going. I guess what's driving it is an underlying feeling that all of my thoughts and behaviour are illegitimate and I haven't experienced anything significant enough to explain why I'm such a fucking mess - which I know objectively is not true, but I guess I'm so used to feeling that way, growing up with a mother who constantly told me my life was fine while telling me over and over again about her (objectively) far tougher life. Thanks for waking me up at 3AM, brain.

Conlanging is the only thing that's making me happy at the moment.
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*she clung to them (jeans = always PL) ;-)
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Re: Venting thread

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Imralu wrote:
Jal wrote:she klinged to it
*she clung to them (jeans = always PL) ;-)
Thanks. I should've know that, it sounded fishy but was in a hurry. In fact I did I guess, but it's not a verb I use often.


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Re: Venting thread

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I am used to neurotypical being used to refer specifically to people who are not ASD, even when said individuals are mentally ill.

All this reminds of how I was as a child. I certainly did not understand how other people felt, felt very stressed by anything unexpected, and felt I had an invisible wall around myself, until some point in high school. These days I cannot really relate to how I thought then, which seems rather alien now, as these days I think much more like a normal person, albeit one with a mood and a psychotic disorder, aside from a few things like how I respond to interpersonal stress reminding me of it.
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Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
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Re: Venting thread

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Personally, I find it's distance combined with time that helps. I'd rather not go into the details of ancient history, but other people in similar situations have forgiven less easy than I have with the distance and time. Maybe more than two years though.

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Re: Venting thread

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I hate having that kind of anxiety attack that makes me think all my friends hate me, when actually they're just not reliable at replying to texts...

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Re: Venting thread

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It does not feel good feeling like one is tottering not far from the edge where being relatively sane ends and being thoroughly psychotic begins.
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Re: Venting thread

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Travis B. wrote:It does not feel good feeling like one is tottering not far from the edge where being relatively sane ends and being thoroughly psychotic begins.
:( Do you see your psyc soon?


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Re: Venting thread

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jal wrote::( Do you see your psyc soon?
On Monday afternoon. I think I'll be able to wait until then.
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Re: Venting thread

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I don't know if anyone else knows what I'm talking about but 4 years ago, I started writing in a journal what my life would've been like if I had made different choices, and then it turned into a long list of regrets going all the way back to childhood. Soon, I began writing 'alternative history'-esque stories of what my life could've been like. For example, I wrote about a story where I beat up this one kid who bullied me in middle school and got expelled. Then another story where I ran away from home and lived in the woods for a while. Then, I made a timeline of my 'alternative' life, and then it turned into pretty much an alt-autobiography of my life that didn't actually happen. I was so heavily invested in writing these fun stories, that I think it was a huge escape for me. I started writing stories of my future too, even the way in which I would die. I didn't realize this until now, but a year after writing this biography, something significant happened. Somehow, this fantasy world mixed with reality and I 'became' this person. For every choice I made, I would ask myself "Is this what he (alternative me) would do?". Like, when I had to choose classes for college, I didn't choose the ones that I was interested in, but what HE would be interested in. I think this put less pressure on me, because I felt like everything in my life was already predetermined. But I was so, so heavily invested in whatever this is, that it got a little too ridiculous. I would write in my diary every night, but then I started exaggerating my stories--writing as if I had an audience of 200 people reading this. Writing as if I were writing a screenplay of my life. For example, my dad was one of my teachers in high school, but wouldn't show up half the time because he had a more important job. There were no more classrooms, so we got the chemistry lab. When you leave a bunch of kids alone in a chemistry lab with no supervision, you know they will start fucking with chemicals. So they did, but I just watched from afar. But in my diary, I wrote that I did it and it caused the fire alarm to go off. It's a fucking lie.
Then another significant thing happened, I changed the name of alternative-me. So he wasn't me, he was somebody else. I changed his birthday too. However, I started telling people that that was my name and birthday. Mostly to people who I think I would never see again. Like in Starbucks, I would never use my real name, but my alias. In fact, I never used my real name unless I had to, or if people knew what my real name was. It got to the point where I wouldn't even look at my student ID when swiping in the door because it showed my real name. I told myself, that I was only doing this for my own protection, because I don't really trust Facebook and Twitter etc. But then I would make a Facebook and Twitter of my fake self and I still act like that's me, except I can't add people I know. I pretty much just tweet to myself but act like all my friends are reading it.

Nobody is reading it. That is the creepy part, and I never really had this epiphany until today, because something happened today that really shook me. So I moved to DC recently, and started hooking up with this one guy. I usually only do one night stands, but that was because of transportation issues of living in the middle of nowhere. Now that I'm here, I can see him almost every day and don't necessarily have that buffer zone of living in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. We are what you would call "friends with benefits". I've never had this with someone before, and I really really like him. Obviously, when I moved to DC, I knew I was on a clean slate so I could act like alternative-me all I want. He only likes me because he thinks I am alternative me, and this validates my alternative-me to existence. But then I realized, that I've never acted like alternative-me for more than a couple hours. I was acting like alternative-me for days on end, and then I realized that my alternative-reality has a lot of oxymorons and things that contradict each other. The bullshit finally caught up today, because I was showing him some keyboard feature on my smartphone and he saw one of my contacts on my phone and playfully pretended to be jealous that I was talking to some other guy. The truth is, the real me does have a boyfriend and we are in an 'open relationship'. He is also in an open relationship, so it wouldn't be a big deal to him if he knew that from the start, and yet I told him I was single. I told him the truth, and he was fine with it but then wondered why I would even lie about that knowing that he was in an open relationship. I tried to explain but I couldn't even talk. It was so weird. Like I just kept stuttering and laughing awkwardly. Then I told him my real name, and other really petty things like I told him I had German heritage but I don't. He had no idea how to even respond to that, because why would someone even lie about that? It's like I lie so much, that I don't do it like a normal person does when they did something wrong. I lie for no reason. I don't even do it to make myself look more interesting anymore, because who cares that my birthday is actually in December and not February? Who cares that I have Irish heritage and not German? Who cares that I didn't actually watch that movie?
And this guy is the biggest Hillary supporter ever. He has bobble-heads and collectible dolls of her all throughout his apartment. So after spilling the beans to him tonight, I also hinted that I was a Trump supporter, even though I don't like him anymore, even though I do like him, but think he is going to destroy the country(???) He hasn't responded yet, so now I think I lost a friend who I was really attracted to, and actually liked as a person even though we had nothing in common, neither real-me or alternative-me. I just admired his openness, and honesty this entire time and he has told me things that he said would never told anyone else. And I just told him fake secrets. It feels like I fucking violated him. It's like I've become the kind of person who I've always feared: a shady, cognitively dissonant,histrionic, manipulative, selfish psychopath and pathological liar. My bubble has been popped and I feel completely naked and dysphoric.

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Re: Venting thread

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cunningham wrote:I feel completely naked and dysphoric.
Maybe the start of something good?


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Re: Venting thread

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Damn, Cunningham! Well, to be honest, it sounds like you're at a vital stage of recognising what you've been doing. Probably a very good thing, as Jal said. Doesn't make it any easier. It also sounds like you've probably got a whole lot of habits that are going to be hard to break.

When I was a teenager, I went through a phase of lying quite a bit simply because I was basically incapable of talking about my real life. It was nearing the end of high school and we had to make plans for our futures and people's conversations switched to deeper things about what they really wanted out of life, work, relationships and stuff. I hated myself for being gay and had a load of abuse-related psychological issues and I couldn't see a future for me. I was really fucked up but thought I had no reason to be and had nothing to talk about in regards to how I was going, even though I was cutting and thinking of suicide a fair bit. It wasn't to the extent that I made up a different persona, but, the most extreme lie was that I made up a back story that I thought would explain why I'm fucked up - let me talk about being fucked up and make it understandable (because I genuinely thought I had no real reason). So, I told my two best friends, on separate occasions, this wild story about how I had had a best friend when I was younger, a girl who lived in my street, and I had watched her get murdered by her father while hiding in a cupboard. I cried all the way through telling both of my friends and they were really supportive and gave me the sympathy that I was apparently craving but I realised I didn't want it. Sympathy for a made up story felt worse than no sympathy and then I just started to hate myself more and felt even more isolated.

Underlying it was, I think, a huge feeling of not being valid as a person, not being good enough to be liked or understood for who I am. I acted so weird in my final year of high school, because I couldn't be real, that I lost almost all of my friends... my former friends were still more or less nice to me but made excuses not to hang out with me and also did nothing when I was bullied by other kids. At one point, I literally basically had one friend and he had this crazy idea of my back story that I had told him and I honestly thought, if he didn't "know" that made-up story, he wouldn't have had the needed compassion to like me or tolerate me, and I thought he'd hate me for lying to him and I couldn't have ever even explained why. I lost touch with him after high school but bumped into him on the street seven years later and we caught up and I told him that I had lied to him all those years ago and... It was no big deal. Turns out he had just liked me, the real me, because I was nice and intellectually interesting and he never needed an explanation for why I acted so weirdly.

It took me years to understand why I told that lie at all, and the associated bullshit that I spread at that time.

If you have access to it, it'd probably be a good idea to talk to a professional about what's going on with you. If not, maybe sit and write down a real story about you. Like, like what you've written above, or anything really. I don't know if you'll get this guy to start speaking to you again, but honestly, if I were him and I read something like your post above, I'd have a lot more understanding for you than if all I knew was that nothing you told me was true.

(The Trump stuff is the only stumbling block for me because, like, since he got voted in, I've been having really intense apocalyptic dreams and then waking up with huge anxiety (which I've finally acknowledged that I have) but since you don't seem disgustingly or consistently pro-Trump, even that... you just seem like a messed-up silly-head.)

I was going to ramble at you more but I have to go to a doctor's appointment. Be kind to yourself and try to ground yourself in reality as much as you can. Baby steps are OK if it's all a bit hard to confront.
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Re: Venting thread

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Imralu wrote:Damn, Cunningham! Well, to be honest, it sounds like you're at a vital stage of recognising what you've been doing. Probably a very good thing, as Jal said. Doesn't make it any easier. It also sounds like you've probably got a whole lot of habits that are going to be hard to break.

When I was a teenager, I went through a phase of lying quite a bit simply because I was basically incapable of talking about my real life. It was nearing the end of high school and we had to make plans for our futures and people's conversations switched to deeper things about what they really wanted out of life, work, relationships and stuff. I hated myself for being gay and had a load of abuse-related psychological issues and I couldn't see a future for me. I was really fucked up but thought I had no reason to be and had nothing to talk about in regards to how I was going, even though I was cutting and thinking of suicide a fair bit. It wasn't to the extent that I made up a different persona, but, the most extreme lie was that I made up a back story that I thought would explain why I'm fucked up - let me talk about being fucked up and make it understandable (because I genuinely thought I had no real reason). So, I told my two best friends, on separate occasions, this wild story about how I had had a best friend when I was younger, a girl who lived in my street, and I had watched her get murdered by her father while hiding in a cupboard. I cried all the way through telling both of my friends and they were really supportive and gave me the sympathy that I was apparently craving but I realised I didn't want it. Sympathy for a made up story felt worse than no sympathy and then I just started to hate myself more and felt even more isolated.

Underlying it was, I think, a huge feeling of not being valid as a person, not being good enough to be liked or understood for who I am. I acted so weird in my final year of high school, because I couldn't be real, that I lost almost all of my friends... my former friends were still more or less nice to me but made excuses not to hang out with me and also did nothing when I was bullied by other kids. At one point, I literally basically had one friend and he had this crazy idea of my back story that I had told him and I honestly thought, if he didn't "know" that made-up story, he wouldn't have had the needed compassion to like me or tolerate me, and I thought he'd hate me for lying to him and I couldn't have ever even explained why. I lost touch with him after high school but bumped into him on the street seven years later and we caught up and I told him that I had lied to him all those years ago and... It was no big deal. Turns out he had just liked me, the real me, because I was nice and intellectually interesting and he never needed an explanation for why I acted so weirdly.

It took me years to understand why I told that lie at all, and the associated bullshit that I spread at that time.

If you have access to it, it'd probably be a good idea to talk to a professional about what's going on with you. If not, maybe sit and write down a real story about you. Like, like what you've written above, or anything really. I don't know if you'll get this guy to start speaking to you again, but honestly, if I were him and I read something like your post above, I'd have a lot more understanding for you than if all I knew was that nothing you told me was true.

(The Trump stuff is the only stumbling block for me because, like, since he got voted in, I've been having really intense apocalyptic dreams and then waking up with huge anxiety (which I've finally acknowledged that I have) but since you don't seem disgustingly or consistently pro-Trump, even that... you just seem like a messed-up silly-head.)

I was going to ramble at you more but I have to go to a doctor's appointment. Be kind to yourself and try to ground yourself in reality as much as you can. Baby steps are OK if it's all a bit hard to confront.
Thank you Imralu for sharing, I think I can emphasize with you because I would tell people that I was from Russia, and was put in an orphanage and adopted to the United States. I really don't know why I would lie about that, except that it hides the fact that I'm just a spoiled privileged kid who doesn't think much of himself, and I felt that being American, it's hard to find a culture that I can identify with because it's so multicultural. I just really like Russia as much as weeaboos like Japan, and even for the first three months of my first relationship, I pretended to have a Russian accent. Makes me cringe when I think about it now ugh.
I just want people to like me, or think about me whether it's positive or negative because I'm one of those wallflowers that people overlook. I want people to think I'm exotic and have an interesting backstory that I can talk to people about it. And like you, I ended up with only one friend who just liked being around me. I guess it was because I was willing to do crazy shit to be more interesting to people, like jump in a drainage pond or try some weird substance. Basically, I was a clown to entertain her and her friends, but I got exhausted from it and burned bridges with her. I'm going to try to love my real self now.

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Re: Venting thread

Post by Imralu »

To be an armchair psychologist for a moment, it really sounds like it's a self-esteem thing.

I've known other people who will do virtually anything and clown around just to get people to like them. One of them was a guy from Seattle who I knew here in Berlin and he fell in with a group of people who clearly weren't real friends. They used to dare him to do stuff like run behind the bar in a club and steal a bottle of vodka, which he did, but a lot of the time they'd laugh and then pretend they didn't know him. (I'd feel sorry for him but he kind made life hell for one of my best friends. I don't want to draw too close a comparison to you.)

To bring up another unsavoury person (not intentional, I swear) who I used to know, I knew a girl who lied about everything. She had a relationship with one of my best friends. She was articulate and interesting. She and I talked about languages until we got to the point where I knew she was just being competitive and talking out her arse. (She said she could understand quite a bit of Finnish because she allegedly had a good passive knowledge of Dutch. Um, because of the double vowels? At this point, I started smiling and nodding.) She also had a fake name that she used for herself. Towards the end of her relationship with my friend, it emerged that she had lied about virtually everything, what her native language is, her age, right at the end she claimed she had had cancer and had it operated on that very day, that she was homeless, and then she did a big histrionic fall in the gutter trying to get my friend's sympathy to let her stay rather than drive home. When my friend ignored her, she just got up and left. She faked an email that was allegedly from me to her and tried to warn my friend that I'm dangerous. She lied about having given her copy of my friend's key back, and when they had well and truly broken up, she torched my friend's car.

Wait a minute. I'm just rambling and I had no point with that. For a nicer example, my oldest friend, who I've known for 29 years, was also quite a habitual liar. It was mostly stuff that he thought would make him seem cooler. We all knew about it. At his 21st birthday, another friend of mine and I got drunk and made a speech in which we mentioned that he's a compulsive liar but we love him anyway and everyone was in hysterics because no one had dared to say it. I walked in on him telling a lie a couple of times and I just gave him a smile and said nothing. Like, one time, we were out partying and a friend of mine brought along a b-list Australian celebrity (who's now a bit more famous for being a racist bitch) because they went to school together. A few days later, I walked in on him telling a bunch of people how he had made out with her and he froze as I walked in because I knew it wasn't true. I guess I understood, from my own lying days, and he's grown out of it now, as did I. It wasn't to the point where he made up a whole identity or anything, but he made himself cooler and more interesting, I suppose so people would like him. I did a bit of that and also tried to gain people's sympathy that I desperately wanted, just for other things.

I still have this thing in my head where I imagine really horrible, dramatic situations happening to me and then I simulate conversations I would have with people. Calling them "fantasies" is a bit weird, because they're things I definitely don't want to happen, but I guess I still want the sympathy that would go with them. I used to do this virtually every night as I fell asleep. Like, that can't be good, right? I hardly do this anymore ... I get enough sympathy about my real story these days and I've seen that even though that's what I've always craved (thanks to my mum, I guess, who established this "feeling sorry for" = "love" thing in my head). I've seen friends of mine start crying when I've told them my real story and that's kind of overwhelmingly strange and I kind of don't know how to feel about that. Coincidentally, I did this last night after a long time of not doing it ... going back to one of my darker dysfantasies where I get raped (!? trying to compete with my mum?)... I didn't imagine the rape at all, but I imagined, in detail, the process of going to the police about it, medical exams, talking to people about it. Like, it's so stupid that my brain does this rather than, like, fantasising about nice things. In any case, I don't let it out and make it reality like I did as a teenager, I don't tell people that things happened that didn't, because I know it brings me nothing and only makes big problems.

This idea that who you are and your real story is not interesting enough... Like, in hindsight it's interesting in itself really. Not quite a fun thing to tell people to get them to be interested in you more ("Hey, I used to lie and make up virtually everything!" "Oh wow, so cool!") but facing up to something like this, over time, gives you depth as a person and does actually make you more interesting. That is, however, just a side effect of being much happier and not sabotaging yourself with things that can make you unhappy. (Like, you should be taking classes at college that interest or will be useful to YOU!) I'm sure my own partial rejection of the real world is what got me interested in conlangs... although I think languages were also an interest of mine because they offer me the privacy I didnt otherwise ever have as a child. I used to keep a diary in German just because I had nowhere I could hide anything at home that wouldn't be found.

Anyway you've caught me waking up from a nap, which is apparently when I'm at my rambliest. In my head, I kind of planned to be supportive and give advice or something and I thought it would be brief, but all I have are anecdotes that link to other anecdotes so... yeah. Anyway, writing is probably a good outlet - both real stuff, like what you're going through now, and also, if you still get the urge, you don't have to cut yourself off the fiction cold turkey ... just as long as you're very clear with yourself what it is.
Glossing Abbreviations: COMP = comparative, C = complementiser, ACS / ICS = accessible / inaccessible, GDV = gerundive, SPEC / NSPC = specific / non-specific
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Re: Venting thread

Post by Imralu »

And my vent for tonight. Today I went to see a new doctor and ended up in tears talking about my situation, which I guess was to be expected. I had a blood test to check things like thyroid activity, kidneys and liver etc because I've been taking this medication basically unsupervised for a long time. We're also going to trial upping my dose and see how it goes.

On my way home, I ended up crying on the street, partly out of the relief of finally having a doctor who listens to me and who is interested in helping me. It was raining though, so I didn't feel too weird about it. My beard is back to about level homeless, so even if people did realise I was crying, they probably would have simply looked away.

Anyway, when I got home, I was so drained I couldn't even sit and look at stuff on the computer and I fell asleep... and had a dream about my ex and woke up feeling sad and missing him even though we've now been apart as long as we were together. There's a little part of me that wants to go back to Australia to see if it could work. Like, a big part of me can't imagine anyone ever loving me in spite of all my fucked upness... but HE SOMEHOW MANAGED TO, and other parts that never want to go back to Australia again, that, if I do ever manage to have a relationship again, it needs to be with someone else to prove that it wasn't a fluke, that I am actually lovable, and then the rest of me is like "just stay here and fix your life and get therapy so you exist within yourself before you look for happiness with others" ...
Glossing Abbreviations: COMP = comparative, C = complementiser, ACS / ICS = accessible / inaccessible, GDV = gerundive, SPEC / NSPC = specific / non-specific
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Re: Venting thread

Post by din »

Imralu wrote:
To bring up another unsavoury person (not intentional, I swear) who I used to know, I knew a girl who lied about everything. She had a relationship with one of my best friends. She was articulate and interesting. She and I talked about languages until we got to the point where I knew she was just being competitive and talking out her arse. (She said she could understand quite a bit of Finnish because she allegedly had a good passive knowledge of Dutch. Um, because of the double vowels? At this point, I started smiling and nodding.) She also had a fake name that she used for herself. Towards the end of her relationship with my friend, it emerged that she had lied about virtually everything, what her native language is, her age, right at the end she claimed she had had cancer and had it operated on that very day, that she was homeless, and then she did a big histrionic fall in the gutter trying to get my friend's sympathy to let her stay rather than drive home. When my friend ignored her, she just got up and left. She faked an email that was allegedly from me to her and tried to warn my friend that I'm dangerous. She lied about having given her copy of my friend's key back, and when they had well and truly broken up, she torched my friend's car.
Damn, this sounds just like a girl I knew. I hope she didn't move to Berlin and turned out this bad. Once, I told her I'd recently started playing the piano, and she told me that she loved the piano. I knew she was lying 30 seconds into the conversation, but I never called her out on it. After having told me that her parents were abusive and had taken away her bed, which caused her to change her name and move in with a cousin who didn't have space for her, the piano story didn't seem like much of an issue. The fact that she had friends who had been to her house in the same school was apparently not an issue. She still enjoyed telling the stories, even if people knew they weren't true.

I mean, I understand the urge. I make up stories in my head all the time. Usually when I'm supposed to be sleeping. I've had 'alter egos' in my head for as long as I remember, and their 'actions' have actually inspired me to make decisions in my life that I would have otherwise not made, so some good has come of it. But mostly they are just stories involving a person who substitutes me. He's nothing like me: he doesn't look like me, think like me, do the things I do, feel the way I feel, or live where I live, but since he's supposed to be an alternative version of what I'd like myself to be, I still identify with him.

He generally doesn't come to the surface, though. I'm actually content with my life and who I am (or have become), so I'm happy to share the 'true me' with people I talk to. I think I'm pretty interesting, overall, so I don't feel the need to lie. I've been using it more as a way to live a second life, just for the entertainment value. Kind of like playing The Sims, but with more freedom. The only character I'd ever play with in The Sims would be a version of my alter-ego, by the way...

But I guess the desire comes from the same place.

(My alter-ego does have an email address, by the way. But I only use it for spammy websites and newsletters I have to sign up for in order to get access to something, haha. )
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Re: Venting thread

Post by Imralu »

din wrote:Damn, this sounds just like a girl I knew. I hope she didn't move to Berlin and turned out this bad.
Nah, this was in Australia and I'm pretty sure she'd never been out of Australia. She claimed that Irish was her first language and that she was born there in the Gaeltacht, but, like, towards the end of the relationship with my friend, she got two pet rats and named the one with the conspicuous spot on its head /laɪˈθeə/ which she said was Irish for "spot". I looked it up and found láthair, which does indeed mean "spot" ... as in "place", "location" ... and is pronounced something like [ˈlˠɒːhəɾʲ], because, you know, Irish doesn't have any dental fricatives at all and that's why in Irish English, there are a lot of places where people say "tink" instead of "think".
Once, I told her I'd recently started playing the piano, and she told me that she loved the piano. I knew she was lying 30 seconds into the conversation, but I never called her out on it.
It's weird ... out of all of this weird human behaviour we're talking about here, that's the hardest one for me to understand. Unless you're hitting on someone and want to make them like you by being interested in what they're into, what do you get out of pretending to be interested in something that you're not ... all that happens is that it prolongs conversations about a topic that you're not interested in.
I mean, I understand the urge. I make up stories in my head all the time. Usually when I'm supposed to be sleeping. I've had 'alter egos' in my head for as long as I remember, and their 'actions' have actually inspired me to make decisions in my life that I would have otherwise not made, so some good has come of it. But mostly they are just stories involving a person who substitutes me. He's nothing like me: he doesn't look like me, think like me, do the things I do, feel the way I feel, or live where I live, but since he's supposed to be an alternative version of what I'd like myself to be, I still identify with him.
I do this subconsciously to a lesser extent and I've only realised it recently ... a lot of my fantasies, my good fantasies, a few and far between as they are, don't actually have me as the main character. Like, I'm in the role of the main character but it's not really me. It's not a character with another name, it's just kind of, like, how I wish I were ... so when I end up in situations that are similar, it's kind of like "This is not how it was in my head. I was much cooler." Like, I've always had a lot of fantasies about intimacy with people (not really sexual, but romantic ... just cuddling in bed kind of stuff), but when I'm in that situation, I'm kind of overwhelmed by how much I don't like myself, which is obviously really great. *sarcastic double thumbs up* Like, last year, I met a guy who was, in a lot of ways, my dream guy ... but I fucking hated who I was around him and how I felt and I felt really uncomfortable and kind of crushed between my urge to get to know him better and make him like me and my urge to just get the hell away and avoid people forever. And then I went way beyond what I'm comfortable doing in the bedroom because I wanted him to like me and after the second time this resulted in me crying in his bed, I went into his "too hard" basket ... and I left hating myself and to top it off, for about the next week, while falling asleep, I kept getting woken up by these kind of flashbacks to what we did (not even really sex), and I felt really bothered by it ... like, apparently when I'm in that vulnerable pre-sleep state I don't want to think about any kind of sexual situation, especially not one involving me, and the suddenness of these flashes felt like an attack, which was really weird.

I remember it was this way with my ex too, but I was kind of holding everything together a bit more then and in denial about a lot of stuff, but he didn't have high expectations of me and I didn't end up in his too-hard basket, so I just kind of gradually got used to being in bed with someone and not being nervous as fuck ... and I mean really gradually. It was six-months to a year before he could touch me all over, and even though it was obviously completely obvious to him that I was pretty messed up, he was never like "Dude! What the fuck is up with you? Why are you like this?" which is great as I didn't have the answers back then.

Fan-fucking-tastic! Now I'm thinking about how great he was to me and how I don't deserve anyone to be that nice or patient with me and how I've messed up the one chance to be with anyone who'll ever tolerate me by moving to the other side of the world. And now I'm fucking crying ... I'm in a pretty bad headspace right now I guess. I haven't been thinking about my difficulties with love-life stuff much lately, but I had to kind of explain my whole situation to the doctor today. Based on the fact that I basically only have extreme anxiety about job applications and love-life stuff, I don't have generalised anxiety disorder ... although maybe I should have mentioned that I used to have a lot of days where I couldn't even leave my room ... although that mostly seems to be over now ... and I did also forget to mention anxiety around domestic activities when other people are around ... fuck I need to stop writing and stop thinking and just go to bed.
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Re: Venting thread

Post by Travis B. »

Yesterday, the delusions had mostly gone away, and even the delusion about people poisoning my food or drink if I looked away was fading. So it was a good day, even considering that I felt like shit, both mood-wise and something else I could not quite put my finger on (side effects from having just started valproate?), and I smacked my head on my car's tailgate and gave myself a good cut.

Now, today, I am paranoid again and I am depressed. Yay. One step forward, two steps back.
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Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
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Re: Venting thread

Post by cunningham »

Imralu wrote:To be an armchair psychologist for a moment, it really sounds like it's a self-esteem thing.

I've known other people who will do virtually anything and clown around just to get people to like them. One of them was a guy from Seattle who I knew here in Berlin and he fell in with a group of people who clearly weren't real friends. They used to dare him to do stuff like run behind the bar in a club and steal a bottle of vodka, which he did, but a lot of the time they'd laugh and then pretend they didn't know him. (I'd feel sorry for him but he kind made life hell for one of my best friends. I don't want to draw too close a comparison to you.)
You're probably right. I don't think too highly of myself, even though I carry myself as the most pompous of douchebags (as that's what is considered attractive these days). I guess being a clown to entertain my sociopathic friend not only made me feel adored, but it also gave me some good stories to tell: like how I got alcohol poisoning,, or got tied to a wheelchair and had to untie myself before she rolled me down a flight of stairs (which she did but i was ok). So I'm glad it happened in a way, because it made me more "interesting", but goddamn was I stupid. Maybe this is normal for people my age to do stupid things like this? I can't tell because I don't really have any friends. Not trying to get sympathy, but I'm more of a lone wolf.
Imralu wrote:I still have this thing in my head where I imagine really horrible, dramatic situations happening to me and then I simulate conversations I would have with people. Calling them "fantasies" is a bit weird, because they're things I definitely don't want to happen, but I guess I still want the sympathy that would go with them. I used to do this virtually every night as I fell asleep. Like, that can't be good, right? I hardly do this anymore ... I get enough sympathy about my real story these days and I've seen that even though that's what I've always craved (thanks to my mum, I guess, who established this "feeling sorry for" = "love" thing in my head). I've seen friends of mine start crying when I've told them my real story and that's kind of overwhelmingly strange and I kind of don't know how to feel about that. Coincidentally, I did this last night after a long time of not doing it ... going back to one of my darker dysfantasies where I get raped (!? trying to compete with my mum?)... I didn't imagine the rape at all, but I imagined, in detail, the process of going to the police about it, medical exams, talking to people about it. Like, it's so stupid that my brain does this rather than, like, fantasising about nice things. In any case, I don't let it out and make it reality like I did as a teenager, I don't tell people that things happened that didn't, because I know it brings me nothing and only makes big problems.
(this probably belongs in the Dream thread but whatever)
That's really interesting you say that, because I keep having a recurring daydream of getting HIV and going through the whole process like getting blood tests, going to counseling, trying to explain to my parents, trying to find the person who gave it to me and trying to befriend him just to keep him from slipping away. And then when I'm sleeping, I have nightmares that I didn't get tested in time, and the disease progresses to AIDS and I get sarcoma sores on my face and then my body starts disintegrating into this black liquid. It's really fucking scary and I keep having this nightmare happen over and over again. In real life, I actually got another HIV blood test yesterday. The second one this month. I test myself way too much because I'm so paranoid. I think I'm a hypochondriac.
But I also have conversations with myself too. Maybe this is normal? I actually have the conversations out loud when I'm walking to school or in my room alone, which can be awkward when someone overhears me. It really helps me though, because I always have this stutter(?) where I can't really form coherent sentences. It makes me feel stupid, but it's good for me to be proactive and memorize things to say when those conversations happen in the future.
Imralu wrote:I'm sure my own partial rejection of the real world is what got me interested in conlangs
Interesting, maybe this could be why people make conworlds and conlangs. We are dissatisfied with the real world and want to make it cooler and more interesting. It's therapeutic.


But anyway, time for some venting.
I hate group projects.
I hate them so so much.
In my demography class, the professor picks out two countries for us to do a demographic report on (one developed, one developing), and it is a collaborative effort. I don't know why every educational institute in America has to require this commie bullshit in their curriculum. I could probably do all of this by myself, because I think I would actually enjoy this, since I do it in my free time anyway. I hate group projects, because at community college, I did a similar project in a geography class and was grouped together with this long hair hippie who works at an organic farm and always rambles to me about gardening, how root vegetables are the most aesthetic vegetables, etc. Nice guy, really interesting. Easy to work with. However, he was supposed to talk about Japan's physiological density (people per productive land) and a bunch of other stuff, but he only made 3 slides, and they all had to do with fruits and vegetables in Japan. Each 2-person team in the class had to give a 20-minute presentation. He managed to ramble for 10 minutes about fruits and vegetables. Although we got graded individually, his lack of effort into the powerpoint pretty much made the entire powerpoint shitty and that adversely affected my grade and put my grade down to an 89% or a B, which affected my GPA.

And this group is worse, because I have to deal with 4 other people and a technologically-handicapped professor from Croatia who speaks broken English.
On day 1, I wrote a long beautiful email to everyone in my group because coincidentally, we were assigned the country Japan (and Mexico) so I happily wrote a long list of facts and information + some notes from class to get this project started ahead of schedule.
Nobody had acknowledged my post for weeks.
We have to send in a "plan" of who is the leader, who's doing what, etc. I think this is a dumb idea because plans change all the time. Anyway, I emailed everyone again asking who wants to be the leader, and if nobody steps up then I will be the leader. (I really don't want to be the leader).
One girl responds, but it has nothing to do with the project. She literally just says "i will personally venmo $20 bucks to anyone who signs my name in the attendance sheet (for the group meetings)." I ignored it, because I didn't want to get into any confrontations.
So a week has passed, and I hesitatingly decided yesterday that I will be the "group leader" since nobody is even doing anything.
This is what I gathered today:
Person #1 has never shown up for class except for the first exam. The professor emailed him to reach out to the group, and he has never done that. Then I found out today that the professor gave me his email, through some weird online forum email through the university that I don't know how to use, 2 weeks ago. I emailed the professor that he had not been reaching out to me, and she said I could fire him from the group, so I did. But I guess she assumed that I had reached out to his email first and he never responded. But I never contacted him. Now this guy is probably going to have a talk with the professor, and show that I had not contacted him at all, and then since I am the self-proclaimed group leader, it's all my fault. FUCK.

Person #2 is the girl who is trying to bribe her way out of this, and she has only shown up for class one time.

Person #3 is the only person I can trust right now because he finally responded to my email today, but we exchanged phone numbers since email was too slow. The professor said not to text each other because it's unprofessional, but it's the only way I can get a quick response from him. So we organized a meeting on Monday via text message (just me and him so far). I told the other people in the group, and now I feel like I'm going to get a nasty email from someone about how I'm planning secret meetings behind them. Even worse is that he has the same last name as me, so the professor might think we are related and try to split us up.

Person #4 is some transfer student from Australia and a total jock. Has a douchey vibe. I don't expect much from him because he always sits in the back of the auditorium playing on his laptop and never participates in class. Hope I'm wrong. He responded to my email finally, but he seems to be a little too 'chill' about it, saying that it's not a big deal, and the Plan will be easy to write up. But he doesn't think he will make the meeting. It's understandable, because I just picked a random date hoping someone would tell me ASAP that they couldn't come so that we can change the date....but the Plan is due on Tuesday.

TL;DR
So I accidentally fired someone who I didn't even reach out to, and stuck with some stupid rich girl who doesn't want to do anything, and an Aussie chav who is way to chill, and now I feel like a tyrant who is hijacking the group and planning secret meetings behind everyone via text message with someone who could be my brother.

The worst part is that everyone has to 'evaluate' one another, and I know I'm already going to get an F from the guy I fired and the rich girl who I'm not pandering to, and the Australian who probably thinks I'm being too controlling and authoritarian.
I smell mutiny.

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Re: Venting thread

Post by Imralu »

cunningham wrote:[...] I carry myself as the most pompous of douchebags (as that's what is considered attractive these days).
America is a weird country. Some tall-poppy syndrome there would do a world of good.

I guess being a clown to entertain my sociopathic friend not only made me feel adored, but it also gave me some good stories to tell: like how I got alcohol poisoning,, or got tied to a wheelchair and had to untie myself before she rolled me down a flight of stairs (which she did but i was ok). So I'm glad it happened in a way, because it made me more "interesting", but goddamn was I stupid. Maybe this is normal for people my age to do stupid things like this? I can't tell because I don't really have any friends. Not trying to get sympathy, but I'm more of a lone wolf.
Dunno. I have a scar on my elbow from falling out of a shopping trolley at some speed. I guess it's normal ... but it's an issue if you're hanging out with people who only like you because of the crazy things they can convince you to do / they can do to you.

That's really interesting you say that, because I keep having a recurring daydream of getting HIV and going through the whole process like getting blood tests, going to counseling, trying to explain to my parents, trying to find the person who gave it to me and trying to befriend him just to keep him from slipping away.
Is this something that your brain likes to do, like you get some kind of weird pleasure out of running this situation through your head (like it is with me) or is it more like a run-away worry that you can't turn off (with no pleasure)?
And then when I'm sleeping, I have nightmares that I didn't get tested in time, and the disease progresses to AIDS and I get sarcoma sores on my face and then my body starts disintegrating into this black liquid. It's really fucking scary and I keep having this nightmare happen over and over again. In real life, I actually got another HIV blood test yesterday. The second one this month. I test myself way too much because I'm so paranoid. I think I'm a hypochondriac.
Well, if you're having a lot of unprotected sex, there isn't really "way too much" with testing but if you're not doing anything risky, yeah, maybe. Still better to err on the side of caution. There are too many people out there who just think it will never happen to them and don't get tested.
But I also have conversations with myself too. Maybe this is normal? I actually have the conversations out loud when I'm walking to school or in my room alone, which can be awkward when someone overhears me. It really helps me though, because I always have this stutter(?) where I can't really form coherent sentences. It makes me feel stupid, but it's good for me to be proactive and memorize things to say when those conversations happen in the future.
Not normal as in "everyone does it" but normal in that it's not A Thing that you should be worrying about. I was talking to a friend of mine recently and I told her that a significant proportion of my thinking takes the form of hypothetical conversations about things that I would have with either real or imaginary people ... it's often kind of how I sum up what's going on in my life to myself. (I think, aside from these imagined conversations, there is very little in my thoughts that takes place in a language ... so when people ask "What language do you think in", it kind of depends who my imaginary conversation is with ... although these days, suddenly realise I'm playing a conversation through my head in German ... with a person who doesn't speak German, and I usually only notice that because I can't simulate what they'd say because it's the wrong language.) ... anyway, my friend was like "OMG, I do that too ... but I've never told anyone about it." Later that evening, she went out on the balcony alone for a smoke and when she came in she was like "Oh, I just had one of those imaginary conversations."

As for saying it out loud ... that depends. I often mouth imaginary conversations (at least my part) and if I'm alone, I sometimes voice them a little bit. (I think this is how I learnt German in Australia quicker than anyone else I knew ... I was constantly running imaginary conversations in my head and doing them in German, and if I didn't know how to say something, I'd look it up. If I was doubtful about a structure, I'd check it too.) If I'm having an imaginary conversation in sign language, I often kind of sign along with it, although in much reduced form, usually only one handed and keeping my hand low, basically changing the handform to match the signs and doing a little bit of the movement ... the more privacy I have, the closer it is to real signing and when I'm alone in my room, I will sometimes just sit and fully sign. I had a bit of a phase where I'd pretty much always be in this imaginary sign language conversation mode as I walked through a square down the road from me on my way home. There are always drug dealers there and quite a few times, they interpreted my subtle signing as gestures to come over or something so I had to tell myself to fully stop as I'd go through this square. (Not because it's scary or anything. They're generally polite and friendly and it doesn't hurt to say no thanks, but like, I don't want any human interaction, especially when I'm simulating human interaction in my head, lol). Aside from that, I sometimes voice things in languages I'm learning or in my conlangs just to get my tongue and mind around it. Today while walking to my friends' place, I kept saying [ˈʔu.a.ˌi.a], a pronoun in a new conlang I'm working on ... just because it's kind of weird to me to stress the high vowels rather than it coming out as something like [ˈwa.ja] ... there are so many times where I'm in the middle of doing something weird and if anyone where to stop and ask me what the hell I'm doing, a truthful explanation would be even weirder than just being mysteriously odd. "Why are you saying [ˈʔu.a.ˌi.a ˈʔu.a.ˌi.a ˈʔu.a.ˌi.a ˈʔu.a.ˌi.a ˈʔu.a.ˌi.a]?" "Um ... well ..."

Reminds me of a guy, S, who I went to primary school with. A mutual friend of ours, D, was visiting him and they were watching TV. S got up to go to the toilet and didn't come back so after a while, D got up and went looking for him and found him outside pretending to shoot everything with his fingers and making gun noises. D asked him "What are you doing?" and S said "Oh, I just came out here to be weird." Pretty much the most amazing conversation ever that I can think of now.

Yeah, group assignments suck. And the justification that "that's how things are in the real world" is so stupid.
Glossing Abbreviations: COMP = comparative, C = complementiser, ACS / ICS = accessible / inaccessible, GDV = gerundive, SPEC / NSPC = specific / non-specific
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MY MUSIC

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