is questions: Who was I before? What do I value? What do I enjoy? What are my goals? What do I want out of life? Who am I now? How do I keep going like this, drifting untethered in empty space?

So, basically, life for me is like laundry. Any time I reach the end of the cycle, something happens to reset the progress I've made and in I go for another cycle, the experience itself knocking even more things loose. The rare times I do finish a cycle, I'm such a blank slate that all I'm left with

I experience ‘I used to know how to do this’ frequently, and the re-learning is basically fresh learning, which is draining physically and exhausting mentally. This creates stress/anxiety, adding another hurdle to retaining anything I'm doing.

Like for exams, memorizing notes to have it all in my brain for the test. But I forget it after the test is over. Without continued repetition and reminding, even things I have done or experienced hundreds of times may also fade.

This ‘amnesia’ also affects my emotional memory and learning memory. I have all of these things in the moment, but once that moment passes, it’s gone. The only way around it I’ve found (& it doesn’t work for all types of memory) is rote repetition.

So many times psychologists ask me to describe how a given emotion expresses itself in my body, and I can never tell them. I don’t know. I don’t remember. If I’m not actively in that state, I can’t tell you. Never mind having alexithymia so I can't describe or name emotions anyway.

This leaves me with no anchor to ground myself, which perhaps explains the detached/episodic way I move through life—in a specific moment I can experience intense emotion, but once that moment passes I not only lose the ability to articulate how it felt, I lose the ability to remember how it felt.

In times of great stress/panic I desperately want to go home, but while I know the address and can picture the interior, 'home' holds no emotional connection; it doesn’t evoke safety or nostalgia. I don’t have a home base to return to because I don’t remember one well enough to be comforting.

All of which is to say: I think being an anxious, audhd, queer/trans person is the perfect recipe for naturally induced amnesia, and it’s a weird feeling to exist outside of time like that. I don’t remember who I was so I can’t confidently say if I’ve changed or grown as a person.

Living without routine/structure & being forced to hang with other kids/go to loud spaces was overstimulating. It added extra stress on top of everything else so even (supposedly) fun times like birthday parties were inherently stressful because they involved several autistic triggers.

And on top of *that* (I know right): It was confirmed I have adhd this year, so I'm not just autistic, I'm audhd. And we all know how adhd folks can struggle with sustained attention and remembering things.

Add on top of *that*: I’m autistic but didn’t know that until two years ago either. I interpret everything differently from those around me but didn’t figure that out until my 20s, and didn’t figure out in what way until age 28.

On top of that: I didn’t know I was trans until I was 18. The person in those photos literally isn't me because I never was that person even when my body looked like that. Guaranteed puberty years have been blocked out because they were traumatic, though I didn’t know why at the time

At age 30 I already cannot tell you about 90% of my life because I simply don’t remember it. I look at photo albums from childhood—nothing. No memory, no emotion, not even a vague sense that the person in the photo is actually me.

When you're stressed you have trouble making short term memories into long term ones. I have general anxiety disorder but only learned this two years ago, meaning I’ve spent the first 28 years of my life in a state of chronic stress, doing a horrible job making long-term memories.

I'm also going to be looking at the overlap of autism with some of my other identities, if you have questions specific to autism/something else crossover:
1) panromantic
2) quoisexual
3) demisensual
4) transgender
5) writer
6) book reader