From b5e9bed00eca1f7f1857a5d24e17671359fdaacc Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: John-Michael Reed Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2024 08:00:06 -0400 Subject: [PATCH] Update README.md Added past Lithium use details. --- README.md | 4 ++-- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index c16e369..2bfafce 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -93,7 +93,7 @@ The fourth reason I can't work is social. I have issues with forming or sustaini Before I go on to the fifth reason I'm not working, I'm going to go on a little tangent where I clarify a misconception about how I am socially. In the previous paragraph, I wrote "I can be sort of 'asocial' or 'not social' " towards other people. This is not the same thing as being "antisocial". The word "antisocial" is used in the phrase "antisocial personality disorder" (ASPD), which is the phrase that psychologists use instead of "sociopath". I am not a sociopath. I saw a person with ASPD and self-described sociopath talk about how she would do bad things, like in childhood push another kid down the stairs or in adulthood break apart another person's relationship with no regard for other people, just because it excites her, thus bringing her joy. I never do that kind of stuff. I do not enjoy hurting people in real life (although I am a little bit of a sexual dom or sadist rather than a sexual sub or masochist sexually). I am sometimes altruistic, like to homeless people (I once had delusions that homeless people were undercover FBI/CIA who were vetting me and I gave them massive amounts of cash as a bribe so they would refer me for the position of CIA director, which I never got). Anyway, going back to the sociopath with ASPD who I talked about before, this person with ASPD, a YouTuber named Kanika Batra, was female so a lot of the bad stuff she did was more sneaky and less openly violent than the stuff a male person with ASPD would do, but I'm not violent—if anything I do everything I can to avoid a fight. Kanika Batra talked about how ASPD ran in her family and how she had a very charming male family member who brought about the death of another family member to collect an inheritance. I would never do that. That being said, as an asocial person (I don't know if "asocial" is the right word), I'm not really close to my family (except maybe for my mother). Like I remember visiting my grandpa while he was dying and just knowing that this was the last time I would see him and not caring—I didn't feel sad or cry or anything. I didn't have a desire for him to die, but it also doesn't bother me in any way that he died. I mean I guess death is sad, but so is the death of a cute animal. It's just an inevitable part of reality. On Dec 13, 2022 a thought reminded me of my grandpa for the first time in a long time and then I was like "Oh yeah, he's dead", and I didn't feel any emotional response one way or the other—no response at all. Recently my parents went to visit his grave and I didn't care enough to go—he's just not that special to me (also I was getting tired during the day due to my Non-24-Hour Sleep-Wake Disorder). Next I'll talk about my relationship with my dad. I live with my parents now, so I'm forced to interact with him, but when one of us is out or on a trip I don't miss him at all or feel like my life is any worse without him in it. In November 2022 I went on a week-long trip to Washington DC with just my mom and I didn't call my dad—I just wasn't interested. When I didn't live with my parents, like when I was in college or working, I never called my dad. I don't hate him or anything (he regularly gets food specifically for me when he's at the grocery store), I just never experienced a desire to call him and it never crossed my mind to call him when I was living on my own. I remember sharing the house with him when my mom was out and it was like we were housemates who weren’t friends, like we didn’t talk or anything, we just both had parallel, non-intersecting lives and slept in two different bedrooms in the same house. Third I'll talk about my relationship with my mom, who I also live with. My mom regularly checks up on me by asking me things like "How are you?" or "How's it going?" (when I was at university she called me every day and would freak out if my phone battery were dead when she called), but I don't check up on my mother that way. Like I don't ask my mom "How are you?" on the phone. My mom is also constantly asking me if I ate and offering me food items like cucumbers even when I'm not hungry, but I never ask her if she ate or randomly offer her food items (I think if she's hungry she can figure something out). Sometimes she tells me about her mysterious arm pain and I might rub it or give her a hug. She's constantly bugging me about my appearance, trying to get me to be better groomed, and honestly if she didn't do that I would look like a caveman with a long beard, long nails, long unwashed hair, and a wrinkly shirt. I am aware that I would look bad, I just don't care. I can sort of fake take care of my appearance in the short term to leave a good impression on a new person but eventually I go back to wrinkly clothes and hair that hasn't been cut in too long. Anyway, I am appreciative of my mother for being there for me after everyone who isn't a blood relative abandoned me, like during times of most severe mental illness. I regularly enjoy my mother's company, like during meals or cuddling on the couch, and I would say I like my mother's company more than the company of any other person I know. My mother appears to be the only person I can actually be with long term (other than myself). When I was a little kid, before I developed my mental illness, I loved my mother so much that I said "I love you" to her every night before bed and made her name my computer game password, but when I first developed (non-ADHD) mental illness (around the age of 13, around puberty) my personality changed and I don't feel the same love for her that I used to (I guess the love for my mother eventually was replaced by a sort of narcissistic self love), but my mom and I are still close. Like there was a point where I changed from going by "Michael", the name my mom gave me, to going by "John", the name my dad gave me, and sort of went from being mom-focused to self-focused. Anyway, finally I'll talk about someone who used to be a friend to me for years (I say she used to be a friend to me but I don't believe I was an emotionally caring or true friend to her). Her name is "Ally" and she was on the same dating app as me (OkCupid) and was looking for a guy who would be her boyfriend despite her being asexual (a person who experiences no sexual attraction and doesn't care about sex). We matched (I like every female profile because it's faster and gets me more matches). When it came to initiating extended back-and-forth conversions, I never texted her first (except for rare little things like to write her "Happy Hanukkah" if something reminded me to), but she texted me every few days for years, beginning (according to the dates on our texts) in November 2020. I tended to just sort of play along with her texting conversation, just sort of matching her energy. Sometimes I would see her text "Hey" (this was usually her first text) and respond if I was in the mood to chat, and at other times I would ignore her and a few days later she would try again. Eventually because I hurt her self-esteem (I wasn't trying to be mean, I just shared my honest belief about her cognitive abilities) she stopped communicating with me (this happened on 11/8/2022), so at that moment she broke up with me interpersonal relationship wise (I wouldn't say I broke up with her because I never had a relationship with her beyond the relationship one might have with a random acquaintance) and that was the end of us knowing each other or ever communicating again (other than me texting her "Happy Hanukkah" the next month because something reminded me of her, but she blocked me on Facebook and deleted my number). Actually after that I tried to text her about an "autism awareness" event near her because she told me she is on the autism spectrum, but she never replied and I didn't get a read receipt, so I think she's gone permanently. She flunked out of high school without graduating and was unable to get her GED despite being in her 20's, and also she couldn't figure out basic things like how to use Google Maps on her phone or how to see just one move ahead in chess (we played chess online once or twice), so I don't think it was a lie for me to tell her that I don't think she's smart after she asked me for my input on her attempts at math, but it hurt her feelings (I suspected it might), and yet despite that, her feelings have no impact on me, so I guess not caring about other people's feelings is a flaw of mine. In a text she expressed that she believes I think lowly of her, and that is 100% true because she is one of the most unintelligent, socially unskilled, undedicated, useless people I have ever met. Anyway, as a teen I've been told that I have "no filter" when it comes to what I say out loud, like in class, which has resulted in classmates laughing despite me not trying to say anything funny, and sometimes, especially over text or writing, it appears that I am blind to other people's feelings (I think this is what prompted some people who saw my texts with women to ask if I have autism, but as a child I saw doctors and was never given that diagnosis, and after reading through the symptoms as explained by autistic people on the internet I don't believe I have autism). I've been told that I "don't seem to care" what other people go through, and I guess when it comes to Ally's feelings (or really any other person's feelings) that is true. I guess she sort of broke up with me interpersonal relationship wise because of that, but I genuinely don't mind. You'd think I'd feel some sense of loss at having lost the only person other than my mother who communicated with me frequently and regularly for years, but I felt no sense of loss. Never even missed her (although I did think of her or was reminded of her a couple times, like when I passed by her Jewish synagogue that I attended with her once after she invited me). You'd think I would be sad that someone who talked to me for years permanently stopped talking to me, but I didn't feel anything, again because there was never a real, close relationship from me to her. Despite all this, maybe a year or six months before our platonic breakup happened, she started telling me about this guy who she was hanging out with one-on-one (I thought to myself at the time "How come she was hanging out with this guy one-on-one and not even asking me to hang out with her?"), a guy who eventually became her first ever boyfriend, and while hearing about this I felt a little bit jealous—why did she end up in a real boyfriend and girlfriend relationship and not me? Well I don't think it is possible for me to end up in one given how I am with people; I don't form or sustain real relationships. There have been people who commented on my Facebook posts and were nice to me but I don't think it would work out even if I tried because I don't care about them as people like with a care about their feelings; they're just sort of an accessory in my life. That being said, people with ASPD (AntiSocial Personality Disorder) aren't necessarily asocial the way I am. This is an aside, but given that I am superficially socially initially when I meet someone in-person, especially someone new, I don't know if "asocial" is the right word to use to describe me, maybe a better word is "self focused", “egocentric”, or "narcissistic", although I don't have explosive rage, easily hurt self-esteem, or abusive behavior the way people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder do. Going back to the sociopath Kanika Batra who has ASPD, she said on TikTok that she has a tier of friends who she cares more about than other people and who bring value to her life and a higher tier of friends who she is fiercely loyal to and would do anything for (she said she would help them bury a body and give them an alibi). I never even keep secrets for other people (if you tell me a secret I will probably reveal it to someone or maybe reveal it somewhere on the internet). Other than close biological family, I basically have one tier of people and it's "acquaintance" or "person who I used to interact with because we both wanted to play a game of pool or a board game or something". Like (excluding my relationship with my mother) there's nothing special to me about any interpersonal relationship that I've had since my early teens with maybe one or two exceptions (well I have had penis-in-vagina sex with a 22 year old woman named “Anna Clements” more than once when I was 18, but it was a short term thing brought about by her promiscuity due to a brain injury and/or mental illness, but we don't have a relationship. I kind of caught infatuated feelings for her or experienced a crush where I felt that I wanted a relationship, but it didn't work out. Also once when I was 22 I had a sort of platonic partnership with a woman named Kristian because my “Relationship Destruction Reflex” was in remission for a few months, but then it came back and I had panic attacks like I described before and I destroyed my relationship with Kristian with my anxiety and panic which made me really clingy, ultimately causing her to dump and block me. The platonic partnership with Kristian was actually a really unusual period in my life because my panic attack response, or "Relationship Destruction Reflex" as I called it, wasn't just in remission—I actually had the opposite response which actually felt good and made me look forward to communicating with her in the future, as there was a time where every day while we were apart she called me at 9PM and I looked forward to that, but as I said before eventually the chemical response I get from interacting with her or sending her communications changed and the relationship became impossible to sustain. I guess I haven't had any close interpersonal relationships with other males since my early teens, and the couple close interpersonal relationships that I've had with women were flukes that didn't last). When it comes to all these people who I mentioned in the previous sentence, we don't talk anymore (later on I tried to create an email list of my social media posts and include them on it, but they didn't want to receive my emails, and frankly nobody did). Sometimes I am a stalker and I stalk or cyber-stalk people, especially women, who I think I feel a strong attachment to (maybe I think I want them to love me or that I want to be their boyfriend), but again there's no real, close, lasting, bidirectional relationship with emotional caring there (although sometimes in a stalker-stalkee relationship, the stalker will think they have a real relationship with the stalkee, but the stalkee, or person being stalked, will not believe this, and typically the stalkee is right). There were many times where I believed I loved a (usually sexually attractive) woman who I knew for maybe two days, but looking back it was more of an obsession or a delusion/illusion of love and I never really loved her, and honestly I don't think I even ever truly cared about her, although I did believe that I cared about her and felt attachment during the time I believed I loved her (and I went through a very mentally and emotionally intense breakup in my mind after she stopped responding to me and basically told me that I have to stop trying to contact her and move on). What I described in the previous sentence happens pretty regularly for me, especially if my mood and sexual feelings are up as they tend to fluctuate with my bipolar disorder or schizoaffective disorder (bipolar type), or whatever I have. Anyway, I remember one time when my mood was up I thought that if I were the only person on Earth and there were robots to keep everything including all the restaurants and websites and stuff working, I wouldn't be any less happy than I currently am. Like I mean sometimes I feel like playing a game of pool, and I might play a game against myself, but I would also be down to play against a real person, but playing a game of pool with a person doesn't bring me closer to them. If anything, playing a game of pool regularly with the same person for long enough results in us gradually playing together less and less often over time, eventually not playing together anymore (this happened with a neighbor I used to know, Willy). Everyone is just sort of an acquaintance or stranger to me, and the relationships fade or the interpersonal distance between us increases with time (or perhaps there was never a real relationship there to begin with and this fact just sort of materializes into apparent reality with time despite the fact that when we first met I said something like "Hi, I'm John, what's your name?" then shook their hand after hearing them utter their name that I will probably forget). It's kind of hard for me to explain what I mean by "asocial" because there's no such thing as "asocial personality disorder" and it doesn't mean that I have anything against people or want them to hurt themselves or anything like that (some people I actually have a positive opinion of or like), it's just sort of how I am. I don't think it's obvious to other people, and even to myself, that I am asocial because I am superficially social initially in person and I still go through the basic social gestures like making eye contact, introducing myself, and shaking hands, but these behaviors are just sort of an automatic initial thing and almost every time I forget their name (sometimes I get around this by sending myself a text with their name and description immediately after the introduction, but sometimes in a group even this isn't enough). Identifying as asocial (or someone who doesn't form and sustain real relationships with other people) also doesn't mean that I'm introverted, that I'm particularly shy, that I have autism, that I never enjoy activities that involve other people, or that I don't know or perform basic social gestures like shaking hands and asking you what you do for a living. I actually sometimes want to share information about myself and over-share information about myself, like what I'm doing in this essay to Social Security. Because everyone is just sort of a stranger or distant acquaintance to me and always will be no matter what, I don't have a problem with just dumping personal stuff on people and then never talking to them again. I don't really have boundaries, like I can just (verbally or in social media posts) dump my shit on anymore. More recently, like in April 2023, I switched from identifying as "an asocial person" to "a self-centered person", “an egocentric person”, or "a narcissistic person" (who doesn't meet the typical characteristics of a person with Narcissistic Personality Disorder) because I still write to people and post on social media, but all of it is about me or appears to show a lack of mental awareness of or care about other people's minds or what their feelings would be in response to reading my posts. Like most people post this smiling friendly social shit on social media but I will just drop “I've been so bored and lonely lately” in my Facebook status, and obviously that's not the content people want recommended to them in their social media feed, lol. I understand that at a logical level, like by using my brain, but I don't really care. I might have some sort of personality disorder. There are these people who call themselves "empaths" because they feel and experience other people's emotions very strongly, and I consider myself the reverse of that because even though I can determine what feelings other people give off, I don't experience those emotions at all myself. I have tried consciously pretending and lying to try and be like one of those “normal” prosocial people, but I can't keep it up long-term. There are some disadvantages with being the way I am like being unable to lead despite wanting to (I once ran for President of the United States in a manic state for maybe 6 months and the only person who donated to my campaign was my mother despite me spending thousands on political ads on social media) and being unable to get a girlfriend or long-term female sexual partner despite wanting one, but that's just my reality. This is an aside, but as a non-famous, not particularly good looking, not particularly charismatic heterosexual man with no real relationships (except for the familial relationship with my mother), it is also a pretty rare event for me to get sex. Straight women usually want to get physical with their husband, fiancé, boyfriend, or at the very least a friend with benefits who they feel a real connection with (like who they feel is their friend), not some random distant acquaintance or stranger like myself. One time after having sex with a woman in the missionary position she told me (I don't remember her exact words) that it was like there was "nothing there", like as if I were looking "through her rather than at her"—"no connection" (I don't think she used all these exact words but that was the idea). That's not what women want. Women want to talk about themselves more than they listen to a man. Women want a man who remains genuinely interested in them and their life and who cares about them and their feelings, who wants to hear about their Christmas and know if they slept well last night and is interested in texts from them that say what they're doing today, and none of those things are true for me, at least beyond the initial meeting(s) or introduction(s). Straight women want a man who truly loves them as a person and doesn't just get infatuated or obsessed with them for a few months and then not care if they die. I regularly go years (sometimes about half a decade) at a time with zero sex of any sort despite being open to almost anyone with a vagina under 45 who I'm not afraid might try to kill me for not committing to her (just speaking loosely based on personal experience with a severely mentally ill woman). I am almost always open to it when a woman expresses sexual interest, it's just a very rare thing for me as a guy with no real non-familial relationships for a woman to do that, and when a woman does randomly express sexual interest in me there is usually something wrong with her like some form of mental illness, homelessness, or brain injury (and yes, I have engaged with such women before, I've even made out with one homeless woman and was rejected by another who I took out to dinner after I saw her begging outside a restaurant, so my standards are extremely low). More often than a real woman expressing sexual interest in me, a catfish or scammer on a website like Instagram or TikTok does so by impersonating a woman and then trying to get me to invest in her crypto scam or receive a "donation" from a famous billionaire or pay for her nude cam website or something like that. It's a very rare, very random thing for a real woman to express any sort of sexual interest in me, either online or in person. Most young-ish straight men who don't get sex with women often don't actually know exactly why this is the case and tend to start by assuming superficial things like that women want a taller man with more money, but women aren't as superficial as men and, if they're in the mood, will have sex with a guy who isn't particularly tall or rich if he is her boyfriend who has a real, close, caring, truly loving, two-way relationship with her or she's fallen in love with him, like with attachment. Also, before my muscle rigidity (maybe some sort of pseudoparkinsonism) caused my back to hunch over, I was 5'11" and making $86 an hour on W2 and got zero sex or girlfriends for years, so I don't think height or money was my problem. I once saw a hot woman married to a small, deformed, crippled man (who I admit had a good sense of humor) in an electric mobility scooter who presumably was like that before they met, I've watched a women hold hands with her partner who is significantly shorter than her, and I've seen a man with an ugly face (who appeared very caring and loving) with an average looking woman, so I know women aren't that superficial. I am worse at attracting women into a relationship with me than a small, deformed, crippled man in an electric mobility scooter and an ugly-faced man because of permanent differences between my personality and theirs which I never consciously chose. I have never been anyone's real husband, fiancé, or boyfriend, I don't have real, close, two-way relationships, and in almost every case where a woman has fallen in love with me, she has been severely mentally ill as usually only mentally ill or crazy people fall in love with random people who have no real relationship with them (sometimes people think they've fallen in love with a celebrity but that's not real love with a person and there is no real relationship there). As an example of a crazy person who believed they fell in love with me, one time a woman a couple years younger than me named "Deanna" who I knew for like an hour or two beforehand at this sort of group therapy place told me that she would have sex with me if I introduced her to everyone I knew as my girlfriend, and I basically said "no" (I felt literally nothing for her at the time and just wanted to fuck her in my dad's old SUV after the group therapy session), but some time after I was like "I change my mind, come back" and she was like "now that I know you, I wouldn't have sex with you if you were the last guy on Earth". Oh well. Anyway, I have met lots of very nice, good people, and maybe if I actually wanted to hear about their Christmas or genuinely and in a healthy, non-obsessive, non-stalker-ish way wanted to hear about their day or something like that we could be real friends in a bidirectional way, but to be honest I'm not interested and I can't even fake it so real relationship formation will never happen. If I really forced myself to have a connection with someone, it might trigger my "Relationship Destruction Reflex" that I talked about in the previous paragraph, causing me to have panic attacks or feel that I can't breathe until I destroy the relationship. -It is 11/19/2022 and I thought of some additional stuff related to being someone who doesn't have real relationships (I used the word "asocial" before but now I use the phrase "self focused", "self-centered", “egocentric”, or "narcissistic but without NPD"). Some people may have different notions of what a "real" relationship is. I previously mentioned the stalker-stalkee relationship. A stalker-stalkee relationship is not a real relationship the way say a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship is a real relationship. The person being stalked has, while they are ignoring, avoiding, blocking, or trying to get away from their stalker, no real relationship with their stalker as a person despite what their stalker might believe. Maybe one or even both of them believed they had something in the past, but at the time the stalking is happening there is no real relationship there other than what the stalker believes exists, what the stalker imagines in their head. Some people (especially stalkers) believe that they can obtain a real relationship with their stalkee, the sort of relationship they imagine exists in their head, by obtaining more information about their stalkee, like from the internet, but having information about someone doesn't necessarily mean you have a real relationship with them, even if you believe otherwise. For example, a stalker may Google someone's full name and find their email or online username and then Google those things to find all their social media, past blog posts, or podcasts, and binge through all of these sources of information about their stalkee to try and develop or feel a connection with them (something that I have done multiple times in the past), but doing these things does not cause a real relationship to exist, and the connection is unidirectional (from the stalker to the stalkee, but not the other way around). Real relationships are bidirectional and a stalker-stalkee relationship is not bidirectional. Conceptually it's very similar to the relationship a random US citizen might have with a US President who they have strong emotional feelings about, or a fan might have with a celebrity. They like the celebrity and consume all their social media, but there is no real, close, bidirectional relationship with genuine emotional caring there—the relationship only exists in their head, just like the stalker's relationship with their stalkee, and is more of an obsession or parasocial relationship than a real relationship. I have been the stalker before and I have even had someone who was very attached to me in their mind who I couldn't get rid of (I would say they meet the definition of a stalker but they're a mostly harmless mentally ill woman, or at least mostly hardless as long as you don't sleep with her, which I didn't). In my experience the best thing to do about such people is to ignore, avoid, and block them, and try and make it so they can't find you, get to you, or interact with you. Engaging with them or interacting with them can just cause them to stalk you more, and doing things like sleeping with them can just increase their belief in the existence of a relationship between you two, and when it doesn't work out like they imagined it in their head they can become vengeful and might do something crazy like find your address on WhitePages.com, go to your house, and try to light it on fire or something like that. Stalkers may truly believe they love their stalkee, that they care about them and that there is a real relationship there, but it is a delusion because someone who really loves you as a person, cares about you with genuine feeling and actions, and supports you would not do something like trying to burn down your house while you're sleeping in it (I'm just using this as a hypothetical example, but you get the idea). There's a certain danger in someone else believing they currently have a close relationship with you when that relationship does not actually presently exist. I used to believe I had relationships with people, especially certain women who I liked and wanted to have sex with. Time and time again, reality proved to me that the relationship I believed existed and might exist in the future did not actually exist and would not exist in the future. And I'm done with it. I'm done with trying to get into a boyfriend and girlfriend relationship. I'm in a relationship with myself and that's the only relationship I'm able to be in. I used to search for board game events listed on websites like meetup.com and eventbrite.com to meet women who occasionally enjoy playing board games like I do in hopes of developing a relationship with one of them, but I don't do that anymore because it's futile—it's not like I'll ever talk to or hang out with anyone who I play board games with at one of these events outside of the event or form a real lasting friendship or relationship with anyone. Heck, I'm done with even trying to learn and remember other people's names. I don't actually (and will not in the future) have a real relationship with you, why should I bother asking for and remembering your name (as if I even could remember it without checking my phone)? When I go to a board game event and meet people I've never met before, I smile and shake their hands, but I'm not actually happy to see them; that smile is automatic or fake, it's just politeness. I have no interest in those people and they don't matter to me and never will matter to me. It's fake (as in the relationship is fake—I'm not really close to anyone, except maybe my mother, relationship wise, and while I may develop obsessions with people, I don't truly and genuinely, in a healthy prosocial manner, want to hear about their Christmas or their day or whatever). Or perhaps a better word than "fake" is simply that in reality there is "nothing there" with another person, and there never will actually be anything there. Like once a woman who I thought I fell in love with and who agreed to go on a walk date with me told me after the walk that there was "nothing there" with me other than what I at the time imagined in my head, and I think that description of "nothing there" kind of applies to my relationships with everyone else as well. I may fall in a sort of short-term obsessive love sometimes, but after that fades away there is “nothing there”. All of my relationships are temporary (except for the closeness I have with my mother). I do not have the ability to have real, close, bidirectional relationships with other people. I have the ability to stalk people (especially women), but a stalker-stalkee relationship is not a real relationship, and it's not good for anyone. I learned the hard way that I cannot stalk my way into being a woman's boyfriend, fiancé, or husband—it will never happen and I'm done with that. I'm done with trying to be someone I'm not. I am asocial towards other people (or perhaps I'm just completely self-focused, self-interested, self-centered, egocentric, and/or narcissistic, I'll talk about that more in the next paragraph), and I have been that way for a long time, for at least as long as I've had discernible mental illness. That's just how I am. If I had the power to become a "normal" person, with real two-way friendships and intimate partnerships with other people, I would have made that choice in a heartbeat, but I can’t, and no psychiatric drug can fix me (and I have tried over 10 different ones including Lithium, Lamictal, Depakote, Carbamazepine, Topiramate, Saphris, Risperidone, Invega, Haldol, Latuda, Vreylar, Prozac, and more). The initial and true reason I went on psychiatric drugs was not for primary symptoms of mental illness like mania or depression (even though when I went to my first psychiatrist at around the age of 17 I said that was the reason). The true reason was to try and change my personality and get a girlfriend, and it never worked. Before I developed mental illness (not including my childhood ADHD), when I was about 12 or 13 years old, there was this girl named "Cathy" I used to eat lunch with each day in an outdoor area behind the school, just the two of us, but then I developed my initial mental illness and changed and things didn't work out with us (in high school I wanted to go with her to the senior prom, but before the prom, when I asked her to join me on my regular walk on the beach, she frustratedly said that she was "not interested, never interested", which I still vaguely remember over 10 years later because it fucking hurt. I ultimately ended up going to the prom alone after multiple other rejections). After I graduated from that school (I went there for both middle and high school), I wanted to use psychiatric medication to fix me to make things work out interpersonal relationship wise in the future, but it never worked. Years after things stopped working with her (perhaps the reason things stopped working with her was because I became distant and/or completely self-focused/self-interested/self-centered/egocentric/narcissistic), Cathy blocked me for stalking/harassment. Even more years later, in 2019 (according to the Facebook messenger logs), from another Facebook account I used to go around her first Facebook block, I apologized to her and reminded her of us with a photo of the two pages she filled in my ninth grade yearbook where she wrote in a friendly manner about how we first met, but then she blocked that second Facebook account of mine as well. From high school on I had similar experiences (as my experience with Cathy) with many other women who I also felt I had fallen in love with, although she was the first. Cathy has since gotten married (from my second Facebook account I saw a profile photo of hers where a man was proposing to her), but my experience with her was one of the most emotionally painful and formative experiences of my life (I still to this day have a small teddy bear holding a heart that says "Love" on it which she gave me on Valentine's Day when I was maybe 13 years old) and what happened set my future objectives in life. I wanted to correct what happened, but maybe with another woman. I had dreams of marriage and I wanted one day to have children with a woman who I had fallen in love with (it's not unusual for me to fantasize about a future with a child with a woman who I had fallen in love with), but I don't see either marriage or children ever happening for me. I hate mental illness for ruining my life, but I'll hate my life even more if I get kicked off SSDI. As an atheist who believes in biology (I never chose to be an atheist, I'm just kind of hardwired to not be religious in the same way some men are hardwired to be gay), I see life pair off and reproduce itself, and I believe that's the purpose of life, or at least of my life as a heterosexual man, but I don't believe I'll ever be able to achieve my purpose as a lifeform. I've heard LGBTQIA+ people like Lady Gaga say things like "God makes no mistakes… I was born this way", but I think that's a load of overly nice bullshit people say to spread positive feelings and make other people feel good. When a horse has a baby with a visible birth defect, it is not uncommon for her to kill her baby after it's born (in some other species the mother eats the unhealthy or deformed cubs). Like the horse born with a birth defect, I am defective, a mistake, and I believe I as a human being at least deserve the right to put myself to sleep forever in the manner of my choosing, in accordance with my personal beliefs. I want to go to Switzerland where physician-assisted suicide is legal and I'd like to receive a legal barbituate overdose from a doctor there, and I actually tried to get approved for it, but I couldn't get the required letter from a forensic psychiatrist attesting rational decision making capacity with regard to my will to end my life. +It is 11/19/2022 and I thought of some additional stuff related to being someone who doesn't have real relationships (I used the word "asocial" before but now I use the phrase "self focused", "self-centered", “egocentric”, or "narcissistic but without NPD"). Some people may have different notions of what a "real" relationship is. I previously mentioned the stalker-stalkee relationship. A stalker-stalkee relationship is not a real relationship the way say a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship is a real relationship. The person being stalked has, while they are ignoring, avoiding, blocking, or trying to get away from their stalker, no real relationship with their stalker as a person despite what their stalker might believe. Maybe one or even both of them believed they had something in the past, but at the time the stalking is happening there is no real relationship there other than what the stalker believes exists, what the stalker imagines in their head. Some people (especially stalkers) believe that they can obtain a real relationship with their stalkee, the sort of relationship they imagine exists in their head, by obtaining more information about their stalkee, like from the internet, but having information about someone doesn't necessarily mean you have a real relationship with them, even if you believe otherwise. For example, a stalker may Google someone's full name and find their email or online username and then Google those things to find all their social media, past blog posts, or podcasts, and binge through all of these sources of information about their stalkee to try and develop or feel a connection with them (something that I have done multiple times in the past), but doing these things does not cause a real relationship to exist, and the connection is unidirectional (from the stalker to the stalkee, but not the other way around). Real relationships are bidirectional and a stalker-stalkee relationship is not bidirectional. Conceptually it's very similar to the relationship a random US citizen might have with a US President who they have strong emotional feelings about, or a fan might have with a celebrity. They like the celebrity and consume all their social media, but there is no real, close, bidirectional relationship with genuine emotional caring there—the relationship only exists in their head, just like the stalker's relationship with their stalkee, and is more of an obsession or parasocial relationship than a real relationship. I have been the stalker before and I have even had someone who was very attached to me in their mind who I couldn't get rid of (I would say they meet the definition of a stalker but they're a mostly harmless mentally ill woman, or at least mostly hardless as long as you don't sleep with her, which I didn't). In my experience the best thing to do about such people is to ignore, avoid, and block them, and try and make it so they can't find you, get to you, or interact with you. Engaging with them or interacting with them can just cause them to stalk you more, and doing things like sleeping with them can just increase their belief in the existence of a relationship between you two, and when it doesn't work out like they imagined it in their head they can become vengeful and might do something crazy like find your address on WhitePages.com, go to your house, and try to light it on fire or something like that. Stalkers may truly believe they love their stalkee, that they care about them and that there is a real relationship there, but it is a delusion because someone who really loves you as a person, cares about you with genuine feeling and actions, and supports you would not do something like trying to burn down your house while you're sleeping in it (I'm just using this as a hypothetical example, but you get the idea). There's a certain danger in someone else believing they currently have a close relationship with you when that relationship does not actually presently exist. I used to believe I had relationships with people, especially certain women who I liked and wanted to have sex with. Time and time again, reality proved to me that the relationship I believed existed and might exist in the future did not actually exist and would not exist in the future. And I'm done with it. I'm done with trying to get into a boyfriend and girlfriend relationship. I'm in a relationship with myself and that's the only relationship I'm able to be in. I used to search for board game events listed on websites like meetup.com and eventbrite.com to meet women who occasionally enjoy playing board games like I do in hopes of developing a relationship with one of them, but I don't do that anymore because it's futile—it's not like I'll ever talk to or hang out with anyone who I play board games with at one of these events outside of the event or form a real lasting friendship or relationship with anyone. Heck, I'm done with even trying to learn and remember other people's names. I don't actually (and will not in the future) have a real relationship with you, why should I bother asking for and remembering your name (as if I even could remember it without checking my phone)? When I go to a board game event and meet people I've never met before, I smile and shake their hands, but I'm not actually happy to see them; that smile is automatic or fake, it's just politeness. I have no interest in those people and they don't matter to me and never will matter to me. It's fake (as in the relationship is fake—I'm not really close to anyone, except maybe my mother, relationship wise, and while I may develop obsessions with people, I don't truly and genuinely, in a healthy prosocial manner, want to hear about their Christmas or their day or whatever). Or perhaps a better word than "fake" is simply that in reality there is "nothing there" with another person, and there never will actually be anything there. Like once a woman who I thought I fell in love with and who agreed to go on a walk date with me told me after the walk that there was "nothing there" with me other than what I at the time imagined in my head, and I think that description of "nothing there" kind of applies to my relationships with everyone else as well. I may fall in a sort of short-term obsessive love sometimes, but after that fades away there is “nothing there”. All of my relationships are temporary (except for the closeness I have with my mother). I do not have the ability to have real, close, bidirectional relationships with other people. I have the ability to stalk people (especially women), but a stalker-stalkee relationship is not a real relationship, and it's not good for anyone. I learned the hard way that I cannot stalk my way into being a woman's boyfriend, fiancé, or husband—it will never happen and I'm done with that. I'm done with trying to be someone I'm not. I am asocial towards other people (or perhaps I'm just completely self-focused, self-interested, self-centered, egocentric, and/or narcissistic, I'll talk about that more in the next paragraph), and I have been that way for a long time, for at least as long as I've had discernible mental illness. That's just how I am. If I had the power to become a "normal" person, with real two-way friendships and intimate partnerships with other people, I would have made that choice in a heartbeat, but I can’t, and no psychiatric drug can fix me (and I have tried over 10 different ones including , Lamictal, Depakote, Carbamazepine, Topiramate, Saphris, Risperidone, Invega, Haldol, Latuda, Vreylar, Prozac, and more). The initial and true reason I went on psychiatric drugs was not for primary symptoms of mental illness like mania or depression (even though when I went to my first psychiatrist at around the age of 17 I said that was the reason). The true reason was to try and change my personality and get a girlfriend, and it never worked. Before I developed mental illness (not including my childhood ADHD), when I was about 12 or 13 years old, there was this girl named "Cathy" I used to eat lunch with each day in an outdoor area behind the school, just the two of us, but then I developed my initial mental illness and changed and things didn't work out with us (in high school I wanted to go with her to the senior prom, but before the prom, when I asked her to join me on my regular walk on the beach, she frustratedly said that she was "not interested, never interested", which I still vaguely remember over 10 years later because it fucking hurt. I ultimately ended up going to the prom alone after multiple other rejections). After I graduated from that school (I went there for both middle and high school), I wanted to use psychiatric medication to fix me to make things work out interpersonal relationship wise in the future, but it never worked. Years after things stopped working with her (perhaps the reason things stopped working with her was because I became distant and/or completely self-focused/self-interested/self-centered/egocentric/narcissistic), Cathy blocked me for stalking/harassment. Even more years later, in 2019 (according to the Facebook messenger logs), from another Facebook account I used to go around her first Facebook block, I apologized to her and reminded her of us with a photo of the two pages she filled in my ninth grade yearbook where she wrote in a friendly manner about how we first met, but then she blocked that second Facebook account of mine as well. From high school on I had similar experiences (as my experience with Cathy) with many other women who I also felt I had fallen in love with, although she was the first. Cathy has since gotten married (from my second Facebook account I saw a profile photo of hers where a man was proposing to her), but my experience with her was one of the most emotionally painful and formative experiences of my life (I still to this day have a small teddy bear holding a heart that says "Love" on it which she gave me on Valentine's Day when I was maybe 13 years old) and what happened set my future objectives in life. I wanted to correct what happened, but maybe with another woman. I had dreams of marriage and I wanted one day to have children with a woman who I had fallen in love with (it's not unusual for me to fantasize about a future with a child with a woman who I had fallen in love with), but I don't see either marriage or children ever happening for me. I hate mental illness for ruining my life, but I'll hate my life even more if I get kicked off SSDI. As an atheist who believes in biology (I never chose to be an atheist, I'm just kind of hardwired to not be religious in the same way some men are hardwired to be gay), I see life pair off and reproduce itself, and I believe that's the purpose of life, or at least of my life as a heterosexual man, but I don't believe I'll ever be able to achieve my purpose as a lifeform. I've heard LGBTQIA+ people like Lady Gaga say things like "God makes no mistakes… I was born this way", but I think that's a load of overly nice bullshit people say to spread positive feelings and make other people feel good. When a horse has a baby with a visible birth defect, it is not uncommon for her to kill her baby after it's born (in some other species the mother eats the unhealthy or deformed cubs). Like the horse born with a birth defect, I am defective, a mistake, and I believe I as a human being at least deserve the right to put myself to sleep forever in the manner of my choosing, in accordance with my personal beliefs. I want to go to Switzerland where physician-assisted suicide is legal and I'd like to receive a legal barbituate overdose from a doctor there, and I actually tried to get approved for it, but I couldn't get the required letter from a forensic psychiatrist attesting rational decision making capacity with regard to my will to end my life. It is 3/19/2023 and I thought of one more social/interpersonal thing that is wrong with me. I've heard it said that if you just be yourself, people will gravitate to you. When I just be myself, people describe me as "exhausting", "obsessed with myself", "like a cross between autistic and narcissistic", or actually seem to want to get away from me or unsubscribe to me, or at the very least don't like the interaction with me (the most success I've ever had while online dating was actually by pretending and faking interest, which may have given them the impression that I love them as a person, but that put me in an immense amount of distress by setting off my "Relationship Destruction Reflex" that I talked about before). In high school my nickname was "Sheldon Cooper" from the TV show The Big Bang Theory because of how I was in my social interactions (I didn't watch this show until after I graduated from there but when I did watch it I became aware of how insulting that nickname is). I think the phenomenon of people not liking me being myself or not liking interacting with me is most evident in people's experiences with my social media, especially my Facebook, where I express my inner self. In "normal" people's social media, they seem to want to appear friendly, welcoming, and happy, and share the good feelings. It seems that they want to invite the viewer in. My social media seems to be the opposite of that. Whereas a normal person's social media might include photos of smiling people and say something like "had a wonderful time with my beloved " and get lots of likes, my social media might say something like "I hate my life and wish for euthanasia" (where a doctor puts me to sleep forever) and get no likes despite having some views. Like I look at my social media and it's horrible (it's not uncommon for people who see it to unfollow me on Facebook or unfriend me). Or my social media will share way too much information about myself in a one-sided manner such that nobody cares to read it (except for maybe my mother). I have no boundaries. To give you an idea of the kind of stuff I post on social media, I have in the past taken quotes out of this essay/journal and posted it on social media. My cousin Karina ("Kara") doesn't have a Facebook, but I wanted to share my posts with her because I wanted to be close to her, so I started emailing them to her and some other people who I like or who were significant in my life, and she replied telling me to stop emailing her (which I guess is not surprising because it was mostly me ranting about how I can't get a girlfriend, making educated guesses about what is wrong with me that is the reason, and ultimately saying "I've kinda just accepted that I'm going to die alone"). I thought her telling me to stop emailing her was brutal because if she wasn't relatively close family I wouldn't have shared my inner self with her, but apparently she didn't like my inner self, and from personal experience nobody does, but that's the natural, authentic me. Another person, my neighbor Willy, responded to my email list by writing "John, I appreciate that you thought of me enough to add me onto this email list, but I don't use gmail to read people's navel-gazing rants. Please remove me. Thank you." I realized that nobody wanted to read me express my inner self, so for like a day (on April 13, 2023) I tried to pretend to be a different person, and tried to show love, care, and interest in others (even though in reality I don't care), but pretending made me hate myself and ultimately I ended up taking out those feelings on my mother who I live with (she was like "maybe we need to raise the dose of your medication because you are acting really moody and antisocial towards me"), and then I realized that no making people who don't matter to me like me is worth destroying my relationship with my mother, so I stopped that and then went back to normal. I am who I am and that's who I will be. Going back to my Facebook, I get very little interaction with my posts on social media. One person who I used to play pool with (Willy, the guy who unsubscribed to my emails) told me that when he sees a Facebook posts of mine, he reads it and silently judges me without interacting with it (as do other people), and he said that I should keep the stuff I post on social media in my head. He said my posts show no awareness of other people, they're often like I'm thinking out loud. My mother looked at one of my Facebook posts on May 12, 2023 and read it out loud with me and the impression I got from it was that it was like I showed no mental awareness of other people, I guess I'm sort of mentally blind to other people, especially when I am writing or posting to the void. One guy who I sometimes used to eat lunch with in high school (but who later on ended up blocking me online) told me over Facebook messenger that I "overshare my distress" on social media. My mother told me that I provide way too much information about myself on social media and that other people don't care. She said that I shouldn't just dump my personal shit on social media, but I do it anyway. Anna Clements, this one woman with a traumatic brain injury and mental health problems who I had sex with a few times in college when I was 18 (I kind of became obsessed with her and wanted to become her boyfriend but she told me I would "make a horrible boyfriend", which fucking hurt) but who later cut off all contact with me (she sent one or maybe two short email replies after blocking me on social media and blocking my phone), before cutting off contact with me, told me in an email that she could not call me a friend (despite me believing that she was my closest and most enduring female friend) and that "you don't know what people are going through, and based on my interactions with you and on what I've seen of your social media presence [which is mostly self-focused/self-interested/self-centered/egocentric/narcissistic ranting on Facebook], you don't care." I don't know, but I guess that makes sense given that I never ask people I know (or used to know) how they're doing (perhaps I don't care). She used to be the only person other than my mother who regularly liked my posts on Facebook, but I never looked at her Facebook posts unless I developed an obsession with her and was sort of cyber-stalking her (which was when I would go on her Facebook wall and her Instagram and go through all her old photos/posts at once, and then chat with her to try to pull her back to me). Switching to a different woman, one time I matched with a woman on a dating app and she asked me "How are you?" and I replied (with my total lack of boundaries) that I wanted to kill myself, and she was like "I can't handle this shit from a stranger" and unmatched me. I don't know. I really didn't mind at all that she unmatched me. I don't really know why I am the way I am. Maybe I am mentally unaware of other people (I mean I'm aware that other people exist, I can see them with my eyes, but maybe mentally it's like I am all there is)? It's okay, I don't feel that I really need any real friends. I guess I write about what is significant to me and what I care about, and really all that is is me and my personal struggles in life. Like I generally agree with the Democrats on most issues, but I don't care about the world being destroyed by global warming because only 4°F of warming is predicted by year 2100 and by the time year 2100 rolls around I'll be dead. If there was any chance of me having grandkids I would care for my grandkids as a continuation of me but I can't even get a wife so I don't see grandkids happening for me. At this point in life, in my depression (in year 2022) where I can't enjoy things like music or reading, my greatest desire and greatest source of happiness is food that I want to eat. Like I might feel like "I want a chicken sandwich" or maybe a chicken burrito or something but there is no cooked chicken in the fridge, so I struggle despite my muscle rigidity to get to the nearest restaurant to my house to buy food (sometimes I can't walk but I can scooter so I use that), and if I manage to make it and eat the food I feel happy, and really at this point in my life that is my #1 source of happiness and my biggest concern. I am concerned that if my disability benefits get cut I won't be able to get food. My mother already told me that if my disability benefits get cut she won't give me any money and I have to pay her money to sleep in the bedroom I grew up in (I get a great deal on rent relative to what a stranger would charge), so I would really be in a predicament if I get kicked off disability benefits. @@ -135,7 +135,7 @@ ________________________________________________________________________________ Also, it is of note that the core, positive symptoms of my form of bipolar disorder, bipolar schizophrenia, or schizoaffective disorder (bipolar type) are not what make me unable to work. In the past, I did my job while I perceived the walls were shimmering (note that this might actually be a neurological symptom and not a schizophrenic hallucination, see later paragraphs). I showed up to work depressed but still showed up (when I was 13 or 14 I had depression so severe that I couldn't move or get out of bed, but the severity of my depressions since that first one have been less than that). I got fired for delusional manic psychosis, but that didn’t stop me from finding another job in the past. These other things like the specific cognitive deficits, sleep disorder, inability to safely drive myself, and social issues are what make me unable to work, not the core symptoms of my schizoaffective disorder (or maybe it's actually some form of bipolar disorder, I don't know). And my medication does not help with these non-core symptoms (in fact I don't even know if it helps with the core symptoms—I have so many symptoms and they all get better or worse or even vanish entirely all the time for no visible reason and with no intervention, so if I take a medication and then one symptom gets better or worse, or even goes away entirely, I don't know if that happened because of the medication or if the timing was a coincidence). Regardless of whether I take or don't take medication, I am still unable to work. To be honest the only reason I even bother with medication is I'm afraid of getting kicked off disability during a Continuing Disability Review if I refuse medication—my medication is (at the time of writing, before April 2023) in the form of a long-acting injection so it's not like a pill that I can just skip taking—if I refuse a nurse will note it and it can count as treatment noncompliance which can look bad during a disability case. Note it is now March 2nd, 2024 at the time of writing and I am no longer seeing a psychiatrist or taking medication (they didn't work), but I am trying to see a psychologist, Dr. Karilshtadt-Byk, instead. -One additional thing that I'd like to mention. I have experienced all sorts of unexplained neuro-psychiatric symptoms over the years. For example, there was a point where for no reason, and without any emotional response, tears would roll down my face or I would randomly burst into laughter (this is called "pseudobulbar affect"). There was a point where parts of my body would shake or random muscles would involuntarily contract, but no seizure activity showed up on an EEG (Dr. Alberto Pinzon did a 4 hour video EEG in South Florida on 4/27/2020 and I pushed a button when I experienced weird stuff from my brain or partial-body shaking, but he didn't see any seizure activity in the readings, so he classified these phenomena as "pseudoseizures" or "non-epileptic seizures", which is the new name for "pseudoseizures" because people used to think that if they were "pseudo" that people were just acting out, but they're not). There was a point when my handwriting got small for no reason, like what sometimes happens with people with Parkinson's disease, but I didn't have Parkinson's Disease. There was a point where my speech temporarily involuntarily changed and it started sounding like I was talking in a foreign accent (called "Foreign Accent Syndrome"). According to Wikipedia, that syndrome is usually caused by strokes, but neurologist Dr. Howard Kreger ordered a brain MRI of me and it showed no sign of past stroke, brain tumor, or any other abnormality other than a little structural deformity around one of my brain's hippocampi which has no known cause and according to the person who wrote the MRI report may be congenital (although my mother and father's brain MRI's didn't have it). There was a point where light sources would suddenly start twinkling and my eyes would be pulled towards them, symptoms which resemble occipital lobe seizures, but again I never showed any seizure activity on an EEG. There was a point where I would be looking directly at an object, like a stop sign, and it would appear closer than it actually is or bigger and then it would appear the reverse, over and over again in a come-go-come-go or on-off-on-off pattern, a symptom called "Alice in Wonderland Syndrome", which according to Wikipedia can be associated with a variety of different things like brain lesions or migraines, but my brain MRI showed no brain lesions and this symptom didn't go along with any sort of a headache. Sometimes I hear a loud ringing in one ear that comes and goes repeatedly, and sometimes I randomly have double vision (where my eyes go out of focus without me wanting them to), often repeatedly going in and out of focus for a period of time. I honestly can't recall or even describe all the random weird brain sensations and symptoms that I have experienced, and I left some that I can out for brevity. Maybe every 2-10 months (starting in year 2017 or 2018) a new symptom or group of symptoms appears and an old one or an old set of symptoms goes away. Also, symptoms at a given point in time sometimes appear to all affect the same area of the brain, like there was a time when most of my symptoms resembled various kinds of simple partial seizures of the temporal lobe of the brain (ex. feeling of strange familiarity or deja vu, sudden very intense fear, smelling an unpleasant burnt smell), so they all affect that part of the brain, but the temporal lobe symptoms have since all gone away and my symptoms have moved on to a different area of my brain, so it's like the affected area of my brain moves over time. It's almost like whatever condition I actually have can produce almost any brain-related symptom (depending on which area of my brain it's affecting), from involuntary contractions in any muscle in my body or face to various sensations including pain (like in my fingers and toes). The symptoms appear in "clumps", though, like there was a time when the involuntary muscle contractions were happening mostly in my right arm, so maybe there is a part of my brain that corresponds to that part of my body, but again the affected area of my brain and corresponding symptoms "move" over time. I have no explanation for any of it and no doctor has ever been able to explain any of it. My diagnosis of bipolar schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (bipolar type) doesn't encompass most of the stuff I go through, but "doctors don't really know" isn't in the SSA blue book, and since I have a history of mood issues and delusions, that's the closest diagnosis that I could get and it describes what was seen in the past. I do not believe that diagnosis is 100% accurate and it does not capture all or even most of the symptoms that I go through (and it might even be a misdiagnosis—for example some other rare, undiagnosed neurological disorder may have caused all or some of my symptoms or maybe I actually have bipolar disorder with some rare undiagnosed neurological condition). I suspect that it's some sort of rare evolution of bipolar disorder that changes over time, but nobody truly knows although they might make assumptions based on what they see during a snapshot in time. Anyway, doctors tend to avoid writing down in the medical records that they don't know, like when the epileptologist Dr. Alberto Pinzon put down "pseudoseizures" in my medical records, the reality is that pseudoseizures virtually always resemble whole body shaking or passing out or in rare cases staring into space, not the symptoms I've had which more closely resemble simple partial seizures or focal aware seizures (but without the accompanying readings on an EEG, so they're not "real" focal aware seizures), and I can't find any record of pseudoseizures having ever resembled what I have, so I think he was just writing down the closest thing he could think of but I believe the reality is he doesn't know. These pseudoseizures which resemble simple partial seizures also are disabling because they happen all the time (sometimes over a hundred times an hour, at least in year 2022), on most days of the week, and they are very distracting. They are part of my cognitive issues. I don't believe anybody actually understands internally what's wrong with my brain or knows how to fix it—the human brain is very poorly understood from a medical perspective in comparison to other parts of the body. Like in 2019 I went to outpatient behavioral health (a place called FHE Health in Florida) after a psychiatric hospitalization and a doctor there gave me a diagnosis of "conversion disorder" based on involuntarily partial body shaking (also at the time I needed a cane to walk), but conversion disorder, like functional neurologic disorder, is based on a diagnosis where no physiological cause can be identified—all the tests show up normal. Rather than writing "I don't know the cause of these symptoms", doctors like neurologists write down big words like "functional neurologic disorder", sometimes even in cases where the symptoms do not match the symptoms typically seen for this diagnosis, just because "I don't know" isn't something they explicitly write out. Instead of explicitly writing "I don't know", they do other things like refer you to someone else, who refers you to someone else, who writes down a made up diagnosis like "conversion disorder" or "functional neurologic disorder" that is not based on any real biological cause. With my conversion disorder diagnosis that I was given at outpatient behavioral health, the psychiatrist basically said "I can't treat this" and referred me to the therapist for treatment, and the therapist said "I can't treat this", and referred me back to the psychiatrist, so I was in a loop and nobody could do anything about my symptoms. According to the Wikipedia page on functional neurologic disorder, "neurological symptoms which are unexplained by organic disease are common in neurological services, accounting for up to one third of outpatient neurology clinic attendances, and associated with as much self-reported disability and distress as those caused by organic neurological disorders." Basically, when it comes to the human brain, stuff like this is not that rare and despite that, doctors really don't know, but it can be disabling nonetheless. Also, I found an online Reddit/Discord group for people with a conversion disorder diagnosis, and despite these people all having the same diagnosis, they all had different neurological symptoms—the only thing most of them seemed to have in common is a history of or concurrent psychiatric diagnosis. We are in many cases unfixable and unhelpable. We like to think that modern medicine is so advanced, but when it comes to the human brain it’s really not—doctors don’t even know how lithium works and it’s been FDA approved for classic type 1 bipolar disorder since 1970. This is an update on April 3, 2023, but today I saw Memorial Healthcare System neurologist and epileptologist Tarek Zakaria and after I showed him all this stuff, he didn't have any scan or blood test which I haven't already had that could show a visible, physical, biological cause, and he didn't know what my condition was based on the symptoms, and suggested maybe I try some sort of psychological, brain-performance testing, but I refused because I was afraid, given my high or even very high IQ test scores (like over 125) in the past, that such testing would show above average cognitive abilities in certain or even most areas and then I would have a Continuing Disability Review and these above average scores will be used to try and get me kicked off my Social Security benefits, so I said I'll delay such testing. Also, I know I mentioned pseudoseizures, but most of my old pseudoseizures by this point have been replaced by involuntarily muscle contractions that come and go with similar frequency as the old pseudoseizures, so I think they're linked in the same condition. Really a whole lot of my symptoms over the past 5+ years have all had a similar repetitive come-and-go or on-off-on-off pattern, so I think they're all linked in the same underlying condition even though the symptoms over time appear different, but I do not know the name of that underlying condition and neither does anyone else. This is an update on April 13, 2023, but while sleeping last night I was woken up by a flashing white light that I saw even though my eyes were closed, a loud ringing noise in one ear (like tinnitus) that came and went and then switched to the other ear, and a sensation of horror. Sometimes a sudden really intense fear is a symptom of a simple partial seizure. I don't know what the hell it is, but no drug I've ever tried appeared to have any effect on whatever condition this is, so at this point I just ignore it and don't talk about it. Oh, and these don't look like regular schizophrenic auditory or visual hallucinations, which I don't have and have never had. I never hear voices or see spiders that aren't there or anything like that. I don't really know what I have, it's pretty ill-defined. If I yelled or made a fuss every time something weird from my brain happened I would constantly be yelling and making a fuss about something that nobody on Earth could do anything about and it would be useless so I just do my best to ignore it and act normal. Like yeah, I’m seeing flashes of light or spots of light or double vision or something like that but I’m just keeping it to myself. +One additional thing that I'd like to mention. I have experienced all sorts of unexplained neuro-psychiatric symptoms over the years. For example, there was a point where for no reason, and without any emotional response, tears would roll down my face or I would randomly burst into laughter (this is called "pseudobulbar affect"). There was a point where parts of my body would shake or random muscles would involuntarily contract, but no seizure activity showed up on an EEG (Dr. Alberto Pinzon did a 4 hour video EEG in South Florida on 4/27/2020 and I pushed a button when I experienced weird stuff from my brain or partial-body shaking, but he didn't see any seizure activity in the readings, so he classified these phenomena as "pseudoseizures" or "non-epileptic seizures", which is the new name for "pseudoseizures" because people used to think that if they were "pseudo" that people were just acting out, but they're not). There was a point when my handwriting got small for no reason, like what sometimes happens with people with Parkinson's disease, but I didn't have Parkinson's Disease. There was a point where my speech temporarily involuntarily changed and it started sounding like I was talking in a foreign accent (called "Foreign Accent Syndrome"). According to Wikipedia, that syndrome is usually caused by strokes, but neurologist Dr. Howard Kreger ordered a brain MRI of me and it showed no sign of past stroke, brain tumor, or any other abnormality other than a little structural deformity around one of my brain's hippocampi which has no known cause and according to the person who wrote the MRI report may be congenital (although my mother and father's brain MRI's didn't have it). There was a point where light sources would suddenly start twinkling and my eyes would be pulled towards them, symptoms which resemble occipital lobe seizures, but again I never showed any seizure activity on an EEG. There was a point where I would be looking directly at an object, like a stop sign, and it would appear closer than it actually is or bigger and then it would appear the reverse, over and over again in a come-go-come-go or on-off-on-off pattern, a symptom called "Alice in Wonderland Syndrome", which according to Wikipedia can be associated with a variety of different things like brain lesions or migraines, but my brain MRI showed no brain lesions and this symptom didn't go along with any sort of a headache. Sometimes I hear a loud ringing in one ear that comes and goes repeatedly, and sometimes I randomly have double vision (where my eyes go out of focus without me wanting them to), often repeatedly going in and out of focus for a period of time. I honestly can't recall or even describe all the random weird brain sensations and symptoms that I have experienced, and I left some that I can out for brevity. Maybe every 2-10 months (starting in year 2017 or 2018) a new symptom or group of symptoms appears and an old one or an old set of symptoms goes away. Also, symptoms at a given point in time sometimes appear to all affect the same area of the brain, like there was a time when most of my symptoms resembled various kinds of simple partial seizures of the temporal lobe of the brain (ex. feeling of strange familiarity or deja vu, sudden very intense fear, smelling an unpleasant burnt smell), so they all affect that part of the brain, but the temporal lobe symptoms have since all gone away and my symptoms have moved on to a different area of my brain, so it's like the affected area of my brain moves over time. It's almost like whatever condition I actually have can produce almost any brain-related symptom (depending on which area of my brain it's affecting), from involuntary contractions in any muscle in my body or face to various sensations including pain (like in my fingers and toes). The symptoms appear in "clumps", though, like there was a time when the involuntary muscle contractions were happening mostly in my right arm, so maybe there is a part of my brain that corresponds to that part of my body, but again the affected area of my brain and corresponding symptoms "move" over time. I have no explanation for any of it and no doctor has ever been able to explain any of it. My diagnosis of bipolar schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (bipolar type) doesn't encompass most of the stuff I go through, but "doctors don't really know" isn't in the SSA blue book, and since I have a history of mood issues and delusions, that's the closest diagnosis that I could get and it describes what was seen in the past. I do not believe that diagnosis is 100% accurate and it does not capture all or even most of the symptoms that I go through (and it might even be a misdiagnosis—for example some other rare, undiagnosed neurological disorder may have caused all or some of my symptoms or maybe I actually have bipolar disorder with some rare undiagnosed neurological condition). I suspect that it's some sort of rare evolution of bipolar disorder that changes over time, but nobody truly knows although they might make assumptions based on what they see during a snapshot in time. Anyway, doctors tend to avoid writing down in the medical records that they don't know, like when the epileptologist Dr. Alberto Pinzon put down "pseudoseizures" in my medical records, the reality is that pseudoseizures virtually always resemble whole body shaking or passing out or in rare cases staring into space, not the symptoms I've had which more closely resemble simple partial seizures or focal aware seizures (but without the accompanying readings on an EEG, so they're not "real" focal aware seizures), and I can't find any record of pseudoseizures having ever resembled what I have, so I think he was just writing down the closest thing he could think of but I believe the reality is he doesn't know. These pseudoseizures which resemble simple partial seizures also are disabling because they happen all the time (sometimes over a hundred times an hour, at least in year 2022), on most days of the week, and they are very distracting. They are part of my cognitive issues. I don't believe anybody actually understands internally what's wrong with my brain or knows how to fix it—the human brain is very poorly understood from a medical perspective in comparison to other parts of the body. Like in 2019 I went to outpatient behavioral health (a place called FHE Health in Florida) after a psychiatric hospitalization and a doctor there gave me a diagnosis of "conversion disorder" based on involuntarily partial body shaking (also at the time I needed a cane to walk), but conversion disorder, like functional neurologic disorder, is based on a diagnosis where no physiological cause can be identified—all the tests show up normal. Rather than writing "I don't know the cause of these symptoms", doctors like neurologists write down big words like "functional neurologic disorder", sometimes even in cases where the symptoms do not match the symptoms typically seen for this diagnosis, just because "I don't know" isn't something they explicitly write out. Instead of explicitly writing "I don't know", they do other things like refer you to someone else, who refers you to someone else, who writes down a made up diagnosis like "conversion disorder" or "functional neurologic disorder" that is not based on any real biological cause. With my conversion disorder diagnosis that I was given at outpatient behavioral health, the psychiatrist basically said "I can't treat this" and referred me to the therapist for treatment, and the therapist said "I can't treat this", and referred me back to the psychiatrist, so I was in a loop and nobody could do anything about my symptoms. According to the Wikipedia page on functional neurologic disorder, "neurological symptoms which are unexplained by organic disease are common in neurological services, accounting for up to one third of outpatient neurology clinic attendances, and associated with as much self-reported disability and distress as those caused by organic neurological disorders." Basically, when it comes to the human brain, stuff like this is not that rare and despite that, doctors really don't know, but it can be disabling nonetheless. Also, I found an online Reddit/Discord group for people with a conversion disorder diagnosis, and despite these people all having the same diagnosis, they all had different neurological symptoms—the only thing most of them seemed to have in common is a history of or concurrent psychiatric diagnosis. We are in many cases unfixable and unhelpable. We like to think that modern medicine is so advanced, but when it comes to the human brain it’s really not—doctors don’t even know how lithium works and it’s been FDA approved for classic type 1 bipolar disorder since 1970. This sentence was originally written on Sept 10, 2024, but speaking of Lithium, I was on 1800mg of Extended Release Lithium every 24 hours (900 mg of ER Lithium Carbonate in the AM and 900 mg of it in the PM) for like 6 or 7 years in the past (which was a very high amount of Lithium) and I'm not on it anymore, so maybe I had some sort of weird reaction or something or it affected or changed my brain somehow; I don't know. I was on Lithium from around the age of 17 to around the age of 24, so when my brain was growing new brain cells, don't know if that matters. Anyway, this is an update written on April 3, 2023, but today I saw Memorial Healthcare System neurologist and epileptologist Tarek Zakaria and after I showed him all this stuff, he didn't have any scan or blood test which I haven't already had that could show a visible, physical, biological cause, and he didn't know what my condition was based on the symptoms, and suggested maybe I try some sort of psychological, brain-performance testing, but I refused because I was afraid, given my high or even very high IQ test scores (like over 125) in the past, that such testing would show above average cognitive abilities in certain or even most areas and then I would have a Continuing Disability Review and these above average scores will be used to try and get me kicked off my Social Security benefits, so I said I'll delay such testing. Also, I know I mentioned pseudoseizures, but most of my old pseudoseizures by this point have been replaced by involuntarily muscle contractions that come and go with similar frequency as the old pseudoseizures, so I think they're linked in the same condition. Really a whole lot of my symptoms over the past 5+ years have all had a similar repetitive come-and-go or on-off-on-off pattern, so I think they're all linked in the same underlying condition even though the symptoms over time appear different, but I do not know the name of that underlying condition and neither does anyone else. This is an update on April 13, 2023, but while sleeping last night I was woken up by a flashing white light that I saw even though my eyes were closed, a loud ringing noise in one ear (like tinnitus) that came and went and then switched to the other ear, and a sensation of horror. Sometimes a sudden really intense fear is a symptom of a simple partial seizure. I don't know what the hell it is, but no drug I've ever tried appeared to have any effect on whatever condition this is, so at this point I just ignore it and don't talk about it. Oh, and these don't look like regular schizophrenic auditory or visual hallucinations, which I don't have and have never had. I never hear voices or see spiders that aren't there or anything like that. I don't really know what I have, it's pretty ill-defined. If I yelled or made a fuss every time something weird from my brain happened I would constantly be yelling and making a fuss about something that nobody on Earth could do anything about and it would be useless so I just do my best to ignore it and act normal. Like yeah, I’m seeing flashes of light or spots of light or double vision or something like that but I’m just keeping it to myself. Here's an additional thing that I’d like to mention. Some time in 2022 I believe I switched from seeing Dr. Alexander Pushka to APRN Edgar Matamoros for psychiatric treatment because Dr. Pushka was billing me each time I saw him for CPT code (insurance billing procedure code) 90833 - 30 minute psychotherapy - in addition to the CPT code for a regular office visit, but he never actually did any psychotherapy. Like each appointment basically consisted of Dr. Pushka asking “How are you?”, me saying “Fine”, him injecting me with the antipsychotic medication Invega, and then me leaving. I think he was trying to squeeze extra money out of my insurance on each visit with the extra CPT code. Also, I don’t think it was an honest mistake because in the “Psychotherapy” section of the medical records he would make stuff up and put it in there which gave the impression that actual psychotherapy happened. Oftentimes he would just copy-paste from a previous record. Edgar Matamoros’s medical records aren’t perfect (like one time he unintentionally put in that I was “noncompliant” instead of that I had a history of noncompliance, which is why I was on the monthly injection instead of the daily pill at the time, but in the next month's medical record he fixed that). This error concerned me because I heard of people getting kicked off of or rejected for SSDI due to treatment noncompliance, and I really don’t want to get kicked off because I genuinely can't work, but I think APRN Matamoros just made a transient little honest mistake whereas with Dr. Pushka I think it was more consistent, intentional fraud. I wanted to record my sessions with Dr. Pushka using the microphone on my phone to prove that there was no psychotherapy and he was just making up the stuff in the medical records, but in the state of Florida it is illegal to record a conversation without everyone's consent and if I just filed a complaint it would be Dr. Pushka’s word against mine and he would get away with it and might have retaliated. I’ve seen about five actual therapists including two psychiatrists who did actual therapy in addition to prescribing medication (with Dr. Mark Root in Michigan it was one-on-one therapy and with Dr. Lewis Winkler in Washington D.C. he oversaw group therapy sessions with me in them) and I never made any progress in therapy or got anything out of it. I don’t have any desire to talk to or see a therapist, and if I were forced to see one I think I would just stare at them and not say anything or ask to leave or not see them anymore after I have given them my backstory. This sentence is being added on April 5, 2023, but basically today I was thinking of maybe going back to an old therapist, Dr. Karilshtadt-Byk, to try and get treatment for my personality (I saw no change or effect from seeing her before), and I concluded that I do not want to say anything to her or see her (even if it were free), and that this isn't specific to just this therapist. By and large, the issues that I face have no cure and there is nothing I (or anyone else, I believe) can do about them - talking doesn’t help. My plan is to stay on Social Security until I either die of old age or commit suicide or (hopefully) get approved for physician assisted suicide, maybe in Switzerland, at some point in the future. This is an update on March 2nd, 2024, but I am now seeing Dr. Karilshtadt-Byk monthly. I verbally poured my shit on her, but I don't know if I will be able to keep this up long-term. I'm afraid I'll eventually get to an appointment where I just say nothing except for maybe a one-word answer here or there. I have never been able to keep seeing a therapist long-term.