our amnesia, repetitive thoughts, and complex thoughts

2022 01 28

Earlier this month, we had a psychiatrist appointment, to talk about, various things we've put on our stats in our identity page.

at some point, they asked us if we had amnesia, which was unexpected. We had gone into appointment planning to talk about intrusive and conflicting thoughts, and psychosis stuff, so we wrote notes about them so we could remember what we meant, and have something cohesive and accurate to our experiences (instead of just bullshitting stuff after we forget).

we said we don't think so, especially because it was context to plurality, which is usually characterised as blanks like black outs.

after the appointment, we, uh, thought about this. we think literally after climbing down the stairs onto the pavements outside.

oh my god, we wrote those things down because we couldn't remember them.

over the last couple weeks, we have repeatedly been noticing times where we randomly can't remember what we're talking about, mid conversation, and we can't remember no matter how much priming or reminders we are given. and then it will randomly come back to us after a while but our other memories from between those two points are also much looser.

oh my god, we have partial amnesia. we just never realised it because of how fluid our plurality experience is.

um, and it's pretty frustrating.

we said that we wrote down notes so we could not only remember, but so that we could put those notes in context and make them cohesive, and accurate to ourselves, without bullshitting stuff once we forget. bullshitting here means trying to approximate what we think we felt or thought previously, and that emulation is often wildly inaccurate and very flat!

it's like, if we didn't write down our thoughts, all of our memories and experiences sorta spur out and fray like hair, randomly, unpredictably.

we actually do this for weblogs, but our notes do not provide context for the thought, and are just bullet points, so if we switch while writing, the notes are basically useless because the bullet note doesn't have the framework for us to remember all of our thoughts about that context and have context.

we've known we have been plural for a couple years, and we remember that in the past, we could remember some important things much better. stuff like self care strategies, stuff like how to take care of and support people, how to express interests, how to be vulnerable to others, how to be accessible and safe and radically inclusive.

within the last year, maybe longer, we've completely forgotten a lot of these things, periodically. We'll sometimes read something that triggers something or re-introduces a topic to us and for a bit we'll be like "woah this is so cool!" and then we eventually realise that this was something we used to be able to remember on our own, and then we realise that we will probably forget this too soon!

especially, we seem to forget when we relapse and have poor mental health or bad self care habits. sometimes, when we do self care on our own combined with some mindfulness, we'll also have these realisations about old things, before those memories usually go away again.

it's interesting to us that we used to be able to remember without issue, and now we can't. we think something has changed!

we think we may have different targetting of our thoughts, and it may also be poorer mental health (less spoons). We'll describe what we mean by thought targetting.

At that psych appointment, we said that we think we can remember stuff if we have a landmark for it in our brain. we bullshitted in the moment by saying that meant exceptionally positive or negative expereinces stick with us as landmarks, but we don't think that's neccesarily accurate. But we like calling them landmarks!

we've read online that plural people specifically struggle with member specific memories, and experiences that are confined to only one system member. reading this was so helpful, because it gave us ways to articulate our experiences. landmarks are things that are significant to all of us internally maybe, and so it feels like it would make sense that we had deeply internalised a lot of these things a long time ago, and they become embedded into who we were, so remembering wasn't a task in itself.

gosh, we went to go edit a different part of this and now reading these words back is so fucking strange. they feel like they were written by someone else, and like, that's probably true. it's fucked up.

a big thing we want to talk about is the difficulties that happen with amnesia, and we want to figure out ways to embrace that healthily as a part of being proudly plural. we've been trying a lot to document things in our crisis card and our diary pinned pages as we have important memories, so that we're able to remember in the future. we've also had the idea of storing a collection of books that have triggers or complete outlines with context to some of our most important things. like, right now we're reading an anthalogy of experiences by trans auties, and the second chapter talks a lot about how being able to express yourself at all when you are suicidal can be what you hold on to to stay alive, even if that self expression is invisible. the way they say that and reiterate it is so good at triggering and stimulating other memories and information and relearning social stuff and mental health and self care.

the other part that we think makes amnesia different from a long time ago, having less spoons, is like, we have less capacity for thoughts and memories, and our thoughts are so much more strained and focused on achieving much more low level goals. the "maslow's hierarchy of needs" is often co-opted by capitalists to teach people how to be good little workers (in school, we were literally told that we shouldn't try to achieve self-actualisation since it's a lifelong thing that is hard to achieve. we were there when we were 17 just because we cannot work or do more streinuous education because we're disabled.), but the pyramid in a less capitalist form is very good for guiding self care.

if we're constantly focusing on just realising we don't need to listen to our intrusive thoughts, or trying deperately to have people who love us surround us, then we don't have the spoons to focus on writing out things accurate to our feelings. we often hardly have any feelings with poor mental health, or have the ability to express them! we can't easily expand on this right now, because we don't have many spoons, but we think we might have gotten across the idea.

something that we think happens a lot because of amnesia and because we are autistic is repetitive thoughts. especially when we don't have ways of expressing ourselves comprehensively and accurately, we continue having the same thoughts over and over. maybe because we're trying to find ways to articulate and figure out what we're feeling at a deeper level! maybe because it just makes us happy to think about and want to be heard and engaged with. maybe because we need to reiterate it multiple times because of plurality.

something that we've been able to internalise and understand better recently is disassociation and how it affects uz. disassociation seems really related to social inclusion and exposure, (we forgot what we were writing but it was related to what we wrote about in the last paragraph!)

we wanna talk a little bit about our mental health recently, if we can remember, to end page.

but! we can't think right now :3