Friday, 10 May 2024
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Hello. All is well. I've been rather busy this week, playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure. 

Anyhow, it's currently 2 in the morning. Something woke me up. One of my earplugs fell out. I think I'm at the REM sleep stage. I'm more emotional, and as I fall asleep, a buzzing sound intensifies, slightly scaring me. 

At some level, I fear dreaming. I seem to have some OCD when I'm in this heightened emotional state. My thoughts turn demonic, hindering me from falling asleep. I can visualize something calm and friendly, but it turns into chaos with demon-like figures. I try to focus on my breath, but slowly, the intrusive thoughts creep in. 

When I was young, I would have nightmares every night essentially. I have an extensive collection of nightmares I can vividly remember, but I'll spare you the boredom of reciting them, haha. I don't have nightmares like this anymore, but something in me still remembers this time, it seems. My thoughts still take me to some scary place similar to those nightmares. Perhaps during this sleep time, parts of my brain responsible for reasoning are less active.

I guess I also have intrusive thoughts throughout the day, but they don't affect me in the same way as I'm not in an emotional state. As I've gotten older, I think it has calmed down. However, I think I've become more afraid of germs. I feel it on my hands, and I need to wash them when I've been outside. I don't see this as a problem. I only noticed that other people don't. This is also why I'm generally grossed out of physical contact. At least more intimate contact. 

Anyway, I wanted to talk about OCPD. I need control and oversight. I think my life experience is more strange and uncertain than what it's generally for people. I think undiagnosed ADHD and some form of ASD can lead to OCPD, perhaps. Also, I use ASD as a placeholder to explain my traits. There may be a better explanation, but who knows? Of the three psychiatrists I've been with, they all suggested it. I have a lack of attention and short-term memory. One thing I wanted to say is that in a previous writing, I said it was dangerous to begin stimulants without understanding. What I meant specifically is that I think OCPD can be a coping strategy one has developed to tame ADHD. When you start stimulants, if you're still using OCPD as a coping strategy, your productivity will come to a halting grind. You can spend all day on the most minor, unimportant things. You're given the power of focused attention. One can easily misuse that with the wrong tools. 

Unrelated, I wonder if people live life more intuitively than I do. I guess so. It struck me the other day how much of everything I do, goes through filters of conscious processing. I'd really like to just live without that. To be free.

I've been doing some maths this week too. Mainly just arithmetic, but I feel I have become enlightened on some level. I have always feared fractions, but now I can't get enough of them. In school, the decimal system was the default, and I didn't really think of how it's just fractions by multiples of ten. That may feel obvious, but things felt more doable when I started explicitly writing everything as a fraction. I think I need a high level of verbosity. Nothing can be implicit. But also, things made more sense when you think of stuff as fractions, including whole numbers. It helped me intuitively make sense of how multiplication and division are opposite. I found it interesting that division can be accomplished with multiplication simply by switching the denominator and numerator, which makes sense when viewing it all as fractions. Division is getting a fraction of a fraction. We can achieve that by multiplying the whole part instead of the part we're counting. I'm half asleep now, so I'm probably saying this incorrectly. It's all new to me, but it has made me more interested in math.