I think this is why I don’t talk much with people in person. I have an easier time on the internet, maybe because there is so little sensory input or stimulation involved, just texts and the occasional funny image.
Whatever I’m thinking or doing, most of the time, my mind produces (often metaphorical) imagery to go with it. I see the real world, and I simultaneously see what my mind is producing. It also produces vivid imagery to correlate with my emotions most of the time.
I think this has always influenced me trying to explain myself to people. I have a strong tendency to go with metaphors when trying to explain symptoms to a professional, for example. It’s what I’m used to, as far as my own internal communication.
Lately I’ve been getting obsessive thoughts about not wanting to eat anymore, and with these thoughts always come scenes in my mind, vivid and detailed, of large mechanical structures that can put up plates and walls, closing themselves off from the outside environment. I hear the loud clanking and metallic vibrations as they pull up their plates and doors and seal themselves shut. Sometimes there is water involved for no apparent reason, as though each mechanical structure had been flooded or recently pulled out of the ocean.
Most of my life that is how I communicate internally and experience things. I won’t actually experience the thoughts, I’ll just get a scene like that and automatically know what my mind means, what it is conveying to me.
A lot of my intrusive imagery has connections to my past, as well. Like when I was getting vivid, intrusive scenes of me tearing out my eyes, and then one of the entities in my mind started explaining that a person cannot cry anymore if they have no eyes. I wasn’t allowed to cry growing up, it was forbidden and met with physical punishment. I know what my mind might go off on a weird tangent of sorts about having no eyes. But it does it all with intrusive imagery/scenes that feel so realistic they unsettle me when they happen.
Words on the other hand are always empty to me, they have no power. I can sit and talk about my biological father for an hour with anyone and feel nothing, like we’re talking about the weather or dinner. But if my mind hits me with a scene of my father being homeless, enraged and sick (like he often now is), that’s like my language, that’s how I really communicate, and it gets to me.
I used to try using the same imagery to communicate with others, like bridging the space between my mind and other people. I’m a so-so artist so sometimes it was frustrating when I couldn’t get it exactly like how it was in my mind. But mostly it was frustrating because the few people who looked at my art only got the message that it was “bad”, whatever was being communicated was “bad” or that I was obviously upset or disturbed. They couldn’t share my language because they couldn’t share my memories and all the dots that I only I can connect due to those memories.
I’m not sure why it’s like this, why it’s so hard to talk, and images/scenes are my mind’s primary way of conveying anything. But I bet before I became more self-aware about it, it probably had a lot to do with why I seemed even crazier than I really am. If it came more naturally to me to make a painting of me tearing my eyes out, than to be able to just sit there and talk about the effed up childhood. Like no wonder, really.
Anyone similar to this?