Hello, my name is Ben. Some people call me Benj. My brother calls me Krunkle Benj (I guess it's a form of uncle Benj). Anyways, I could go on and on about my name. It's one thing I struggle with. Getting hung up on ideas or thoughts. I was recently diagnosed with high functioning autism. I've spent a good part of the past 45 years trying to figure it out. When I was little it was ADD and most of my adult life it was bipolar disorder. Turns out I don't have bipolar disorder. The ADD is still up for debate. Anxiety is a major problem for me. I often struggle with the paralyzing kind. I'm currently taking lorazepam to treat the acute symptoms and will soon be taking an antipsychotic to try and treat the broad symptoms. I'm gonna stop here because if I don't I'll end up writing a novel. Oh, I recently got married and I have a 14 year old step daughter. Ok, I'm done. Thanks for reading.
What's up Ben and welcome - you're gonna love it here! Do people call you Uncle Benjen? Are you a Game of Thrones fan?
I too get hung up on thoughts and ideas, and I just cycle over them all the time; people find it very irritating. I was diagnosed (not formally) with Asperger's during May of this year, so it's pretty recent for me too. I'm getting close to turning 30 and I too have spent my life not knowing what I am and why I'm so different and off-putting to everyone - yet I've been sweeping it all under the rug waiting for that magical moment where I become "better". I should have gone to see a professional a lot sooner than this. I've never been able to deal with my numerous struggles on my own. I exhibit some ADD symptoms as well - I get distracted easily, I can be really hyper, hardly ever relax and sit still...not diagnosed with it though. I also tend to go into extreme moods, either too happy and hyper or a really bad meltdown, which makes me wonder if I'm biploar as well. One of my grandmothers was bipolar, so there's family history there too.
I have major anxieties too, and it's very paralyzing for me. Combine it with my tendency to cycle over things, and it can get really bad. Every day some intrusive thought just totally contaminates my mind and I used to have so much trouble controlling it in the past. No matter how many talks my parents had with me about anxieties, it just wasn't working. Same thing happens at work, and no one knows what to do about anymore (believe me, neither did I) - and when I started visiting my therapist he recommended a method to use that has helped me overcome certain type of anxieties thus far (like the one about my friends cutting me off out of the blue and certain ones about bats and rabies, just to give a couple of examples), but I'm nowhere near mastering it just yet - here you go if you want to read up on it:
Managing Anxieties - the FLOAT Method - we'll try to do it without medications for now, see how things go. But my anxieties, overall, are extremely severe and constitute OCD and just general anxieties as well. It made me miss out on so much happiness in life, and that actually causes an anxiety of its own in the form of regret.
There's no such thing as writing too much, people just get way too fussy about that. Here on AC we're all about listening and helping out so you can pour your heart out as much as you want! I love coming here and being as broadly detailed as I can without people telling me crap like "we don't need to know that extra information", or that I'm "being redundant".
Congratulations on getting married and gaining a stepdaughter! I'm almost 30 years old and I yet have to go on some sort of first official date
