For the last 20-30 years I’ve been talking to myself. A lot of the time even out loud. Even when I’m outside and people can hear and see me.
It’s a very annoying and distracting habbit that makes me look like some kind of madman.
Over the years I’ve tried many times to break the habbit. I’ve even been in therapy to get off of it but nothing ever seemed to help.
This morning I finally figured out what I’m doing, why I’m doing it and what I should do to stop doing it.
I was laying in bed thinking about the epiphany I had a few days ago. The discovery that I have two modes of looking at drawings. The mode you usually use when looking at a drawing made by some one else. In which you see shades and ridges. And the mode I tend to use when I look at my own work. Where I see a flat drawing with darker and lighter areas.
I was wondering whether the ability to switch from one mode to the other while doing a drawing is something that’s specific for autistics with a visual thinking process or whether anybody could do it.
Then it hit me.
I have two modes of thinking. Two thought process.
I have the natural (autistic) visual thought process and I have the self taught talking thought process.
I started life thinking only in pictures.
For years I didn’t feel the need to talk very much, so I didn’t. Around my 8th or 9th I could get through a week without uttering much more then 3 or 4 sentences.
But by my late teens early twenties I found ever more that I became the bud of less then nice jokes people made. And my inability to response made it all the more frightening.
So at first I spend hours thinking about what I could have answered. Later on I spend hours practicing the answers I could have given. Then I progressed to thinking about the jokes I could have made myself in response to some ones joke. Then thinking about jokes I could make without being provoked. Then….
I’m still practicing.
I’m not completely sure what it is I’m practicing right now but I’m clearly practicing something.
Now I’ve finally figured out what I’m doing I find that I’m not sure whether practicing is a bad thing.
As my life progresses and I find myself facing new challenges, it could be that it is a good thing to practice the different roles I should play in different circumstances.
But it can’t be good that I spend all my time practicing speech. I need a little balance in my live.
My visual thought process used to be very important to me. It still is.
Not thinking in pictures as much as I ones did is something I feel as a big loss.
To get it back I’ll have to work on myself. And now I understand what is going on it’s quite obvious what I have to do.
In essence I’ve been training myself for years to talk to myself. So now I have to train myself to go back to thinking in pictures.
I used to be able to imagine a kind of full color 3 dimensional video. The difference was that I was in the video instead of looking at it through a rectangular window of limited size.
I still can.
Only nowadays it takes an immeasurable amount of concentration to ban the words from my mind. So usually I tend to give up and just think in words.
But of course there’s one rule that applies to every form of training:
The more you try it, the easier it become. The more you not try it, the harder it becomes.
“Not trying” as in starting with something but not finishing it.
In essence you tell yourself that it is too hard. And after a while you start to believe that it’s too hard and stop trying.
Which means that the way to train myself to think visual is to imagine 3 dimensional full color videos. And at first it will be very hard but over time it will become easier.
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