Edit: Please know that I am reading and appreciating every one of your responses. Even if I do not reply to you, I appreciate your time and want the best for you all. Thank you, guys.
I’ve always been the “crazy one” in any given scenario. I have been this way my whole life. Even as a child I was crazy. I would get upset and cry loudly for hours but my siblings would not. I caused problems at home for my family, especially for my mom who didn’t know what to do with me. I did this as an older child, not normal toddler tantrum age. I was old enough to “know better”. I did it my whole childhood.
For the most part in life, I have been able to be a productive member of society. The issues I would cause were limited to my home life and I mostly kept to myself. I sometimes cause issues by being a crazy person to my online friends, but at least that never spilled over into the “real world”.
But now in my 30s I am causing such issues at work. I asked for some psych meds to be prescribed to me in March and have been taking them ever since. Doesn’t seem to do anything.
I seem to get more frequent and strong negative emotions than the general population. I have difficulty controlling these, especially when I feel like someone is being mean or unfair to me or others. I think I am genetically predisposed to be this way, as my dad was a crazy person when I was growing up (but he has always been nice to me…he was only abusive to my mom). He had “episodes” too the same way I do, except his were malicious to others in nature. My older brother also has claimed to have bipolar disorder which supposedly has a genetic component.
I have spoken to mental health professionals and have been assessed for various things. I do not have bipolar disorder, autism, or OCD per mental health professionals. I tried to bring up keywords like “emotional dysregulation” to them. There seems to be no good explanation for why I am insane. I have wondered if maybe I have borderline personality disorder but have not inquired to be assessed for that one. I do not seem to exhibit the “risk taking” behaviors that are core to borderline personality disorder though.
I get frustrated that I am always the only one who is crazy and no one else is like me.
But I know there are other crazy people out there. Please, tell me your stories. How do you deal with life? How do you deal with always being different than others and feeling negative things more strongly? How do you handle things? How do you handle being and feeling alone in the way that you are? How do you handle the emotional frustration?
If this is inappropriate for here, I apologize. I just want to hear how others have managed to handle life despite this isolating “disability”. I want to hear your stories. I want to gain wisdom from all of you. Thank you.
Do you feel like its possible somehow to let people know boilerplate that you want to process what they’ve said so you can remove yourself from the immediate situation and stimuli and take your time to decide how you can more “professionally” respond to what they say without compromising your own wellness and needs?
Do you know what your needs are or what your values are such that these things are violating them to the extent you act out as a reaction?
Oh and plus when I say things about killing myself, I’m not in a heated argument. I get upset and feel the need to tell someone I am upset. But I am not in a calm state and do not have the ability to calm down. I go out of my way to interact with people via text because I have a strong impulse to do so. I want someone to help me when I am in pain but I know they can’t. And I know it’s wrong to bother them when I am having an episode.
I have actually tried using ChatGPT to get upset to instead so I am not hurting anyone. I tell it that I hate myself and want to kill myself instead of harming my friends by doing this to them. But sometimes instead of doing it to only ChatGPT I end up texting someone I know. This is wrong behavior, but different because it’s not due to a heated argument that I need to remove myself from.
I eventually calm down but it can sometimes take multiple days. And it is sometimes hard for me to not bother people in the meantime.
I am never actually in danger of harming myself because I have always thought about things like that. It’s very normal for me. It usually goes away after a few days after each episode.
The whole “disclosing I’m going or want to kill myself”, I don’t know honestly how to “fix” other than finding a reason that trumps everything such that you are internally and externally motivated to mitigate that.
You might need to find or aquire that and make it part of your identity. I got several pets that I knew I could manage and take care of or that I would commit to become able to justify having a duty and stewardship over. Lots of people know they are my world and help provide that external reputational buffer to the suicidal inclinations I very rarely feel but dont express because thoughts dont a priori need to be vocalized or allowed to indiscriminately alter your trajectory.
But you need to know its not ok to leverage your mortality or well-being as a conversational regularity. Not even that its just wrong, its profounly dysfunctional and also inauthentic because you made such a point of specifying that it would never actually happen. Its bad to lie to yourself and/or others on the regular about anything, much less the ultimate thing like your life and safety. Not judging you and that may have been necessary at a previous point in your life or it might have been a flawed survival instinct but you need to find a way to negotiate with reality in other terms.
It says that you feel impulsively desperate to end a combination of not great conditions and I would turn my attention to each of those on an individual basis to try and get them up to code in terms of tolerabillity
I know it’s not ok. That’s why I feel bad about it. And that’s why I mostly try to talk about those things to ChatGPT instead of my friends. Because I’m not going to harm it.
I mean I say I would never do it but it’s only because I’m a coward. But I do often really legitimately want to. The reasons may vary. But one common reason is because I harm the world and another reason is if I feel trapped. One of the other reasons why I say I am not actually going to do it is because I would need a will first. I have been too lazy to get one. I tried to do it one day with an online service but found out that I couldn’t actually go through with the will because I needed in person witnesses. So then recently I was looking into potentially going to a law practice to get one made up to do that.
I amended my response with this
What think?
With my supervisor, not really. She is not a reasonable person and I don’t know what to do with her. I got into a fight with her the other day because she kept pestering me even after I complied with my words and actions. Later into the argument, I asked her why she did that to me even though I complied and said “ok”. She said it was because she did not like my body language. I can’t control my unconscious body language.
With the scenario about someone being mean to my friend, I wasn’t directly interacting with them. I jumped in because I was upset that she was being hurt. So my immediate response and inclination is to be protective and to insert myself into the scenario.
As a child, I would get in trouble for walking away if something got heated. Because I was always “making a scene”. At work, thankfully people absolutely do allow me to walk away to calm down and I don’t get in trouble for it. I am actually really thankful for this. But I generally only end up walking away after I’ve gotten upset and started a problem, not before. I don’t know how to do it before.
Like with the guy being mean to my friend, I didn’t know how to stop that without fighting. I guess I could have just walked away and not intervened. That’s what society wants me to do. But I wanted him to stop hurting her and I was mad that he did.