hell brain: avoidant edition

poss. he/him. 24. conflicted avoidant. a place for my AVPDposting and other such Madness. pfp made with @avpdvoidspace's avpd flag

[avpdpossum]

welcome to the avoidant zone™️

you can call me poss!

i have avoidant personality disorder (AVPD), and that’s what i talk the most about on this blog. i spend a lot of my time researching AVPD as well as living with it, so the posts here will generally be a mixture of casual posts about my life and more formal posts about the things i learn in my research.

i also have depersonalization/derealization disorder (DPDR), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), social anxiety, and double depression with psychotic features. i’m auDHD too, but that probably won’t come up as much, since i want to focus on the parts of my experience that i don’t often see included in discussions of mental health and neurodivergence.

please note, if you...

are anything less than enthusiastically pro-self-diagnosis

try to force people to disclose if they’re self- or clinically diagnosed

disagree with anti-psychiatry/psychiatry-critical ideas

think “narcissistic abuse” and “borderline abuse” are real

call people “psychopaths” or “sociopaths” when you see them as evil

say you’re “schizoposting” when you’re not schizospec

purposefully trigger someone’s paranoia or dissociation when you don’t like them

armchair diagnose people you see as “bad” with NPD and/or ASPD

exclude personality disorders from the neurodivergent umbrella

don’t believe in personality disorders and think they’re “just autism” or “just cptsd”

romanticize OR demonize self-harm and/or disordered eating

would call the cops to “check on” a suicidal person

think “recovery” should be the goal for every single person with a PD

...you’re probably not going to have a great time here. i can’t stop you from staying, but i don’t like you and you probably won’t like me either. don’t say i didn’t warn you.

if you have any questions about the topics i talk about here or just want to talk, feel free to send me an ask or DM me! i can’t always answer (thanks AVPD brain) but i’ll always do my best, and it’s never a bother!

[insomniac-arrest]

[youvebeenlivingfictional]

[as-111]

CEO of disappearing and ignoring people when I'm not in the mood

[woodwool]

severely deficient in whatever vitamin makes u a person

[meanbuddhist]

identifying a maladaptive coping mechanism is so bitter sweet like that’s great now i know what i need to stop doing. but that’s literally my something

[eerie-eyedd]

[avpdpossum]

the avpd+ocd grad student combo means that sometimes you will be forced to submit an assignment that you’re not particularly proud of because you wanted to go above and beyond but ended up only realistically being able to do a much more simple version, and the idea of your professor seeing the not-as-good version will make you want to take it all back and spend a few more months agonizing over it and maybe drop out while you’re at it, and submitting it anyway will make you feel inexplicably like you might cry and/or throw up, and unfortunately i’m learning that you kinda just have to let your brain throw a little tantrum over it for no reason

i wanted the feeling of being overwhelmed by the assignment to get BETTER when i submitted it, not WORSE, but i suppose i should’ve known myself better than that. i literally have Terminally Perfectionistic In A World Where Perfection is Impossible And Coping With That By Doing Absolutely Nothing Ever disease so i don’t really know what i was expecting from Doing Things Anyway. doing things that are ultimately good for your mental health and your future SUCKS ASS dude i hate it here

[tlirsgender]

Having your main anxiety response be Avoidance is crazy cause you'll think you're chillin and then one day you're like waitttt I've been paralyzed with fear this whole time. Damn

[tlirsgender]

Was anybody else playing dead the whole time they were teenagers or is that just a me problem. Like I'm 20 now and I'm like Oh shit I didn't do anything. Because I'm scared

[tlirsgender]

And you see. Now I'm scared because I haven't done anything. Everything in the world is so scary and I am not medicated. I've been waking up sweaty the last few days. I hold so much tension you wouldn't believe. But to everyone else I just look like I'm chillin

[tlirsgender]

I will be sitting here holding enough tension that the pressure could create a black hole in my temporomandibular joint and I'm like Yeah I'm good I just need to sleep with a mouth guard and have a snack and smoke a bowl and get out of my hometown and do my laundry and do the dishes and get a job and see a doctor and smoke another bowl

[lactating-deactivated20220703]

“make friends” who am i doctor franking stein

[sportsandlaughs]

[punksalmon]

worst part of anxiety/ocd is that sometimes your fears actually do happen and you have to wag your finger at i like this still doesn't prove you're right asshole. it's like having a venom symbiote except you don't even get to have gay alien sex

[schizosupport]

Wishing a good day to the people who aren't sure if their experiences count as full-blown psychosis, but who still relate heavily to psychotic experiences.

Psychosis IS a spectrum, and sublinical experiences of a psychotic nature are still often very difficult, distressing and potentially disabling to live with.

It can be very confusing to simultaneously feel like you aren't psychotic bc you never had a full-blown episode, but at the same time most people with anxiety look at you confused when you share the type of things you fear.

Psychosis flavoured anxiety is absolutely a thing - and quasipsychosis is a real thing. Diagnostically, we have clinical high risk for psychosis, schizotypal and more. But whether you relate to any of these specific diagnoses or not, if you have psychosis-adjacent experiences, you are welcome in the schizo and psychosis spec communities.

[shikariix]

one thing about avpd is that when you consciously do a thing you would normally want to avoid you will feel like eating rocks regardless of how well it went

[tlirsgender]

Crazy thing about #healing #recovery Small Victories is when you'll have some shit going on that's like, saying this would involve admitting how you used to be doing. You know? Like hey guys good news I'm gonna change my bedsheets this year

[tlirsgender]

That's the thing about Doing Really Bad you kinda keep it to yourself. And then you start doing a little better & when you try to tell people this the vibe is like "what do you mean you were living in the sewer this whole time are you good?" while you're standing there like Yeah that's not the important part never mind that. I'm literally out of the sewer

[avpdpossum]

Hi! I have a somewhat personal question so feel free to not respond if i'm being too intrusive. I have avpd, and have problems talking to people, making connections or friends. And something that called my attention is that you have said in your posts that you too have problems talking to other people (like your roommates) and yet you have a partner. I guess my question would be, how did you end up finding a partner? how did you navigate that?

Again, apologies if this is too personal to ask!

it's not too personal! i just haven't talked about it much because honestly, i don't have a particularly satisfying answer for it. i just...got lucky and met my partner before the avpd really hit. we met in high school, which was the Very Bad Mental Health Period that led to me developing avpd. it was college when things sort of solidified and i started completely isolating myself, but at that point we were already together and very comfortable around each other, so they became the one person i actually talk to outside of my family.

(i also got lucky because our friendship also bypassed my pre-existing autistic inability to make friends. i had a friend group in high school because i was still more social then than i have been in the years since, but it took me forever to make those friends and i had no idea how to get closer with them. a bunch of random circumstances just pushed us closer and closer together until we eventually realized that we were both social anxious idiots who really wanted to talk to each other more but were scared that the other person didn't want to. we texted literally every day before we were dating, which is something i've never really had with anyone, even my other closest friends at the time.)

so yeah, i wish i had an answer that could give some insight into forming relationships with avpd, but the real answer is just that avpd hadn't really entered the chat yet, and even then a lot of the things that let me get closer to them were pure chance. which isn't to say it's not possible – i just haven't figured it out yet. i've gotten jobs, started grad school, moved to a new city, a bunch of shit that i thought i might not be able to do because of my avpd, but figuring out how to form relationships with people is still...very much a work in progress.

[kosmogrl]

[eclipse-ofthe-sun]

[8nin]

hey sorry i acted weird the other day i was trying so hard to act normal that it backfired