Another personal post because I feel like I need to dump my thoughts somewhere to help analyze them better.
I’ve been trying to think about other ways fanfiction is important to me to understand why I fixate so heavily on it.
I’m crushed that I just can’t seem to stick to the “a little at a time” story building for long, which makes writing every day impossible as heck. Once I am in the zone, I am in it for good and nothing can shake me out of it. This leads to me writing an ungodly amount with the chippies in a short time and needing to recover.
But recovering is heck, and after 3-4 days, I feel the NEED to write again.
I think writing is not only essential to my emotional regulation, but also to my ability to understand how emotions feel, work, present, and how to understand different viewpoints outside my own. If I go too long without writing, I suddenly notice I default to making everything revolve around me and my wants and I find it substantially harder to connect with anyone, harder to read facial cues, harder to even properly emote unless emoting by impulse.
Can any other Autistic, ADHD, or both people relate to this experience? And offer any ideas of how to counteract this and remember to not only check in with my own thoughts and emotions but my friends, families, and the Chipmunks and Chipettes too? (The Chippies store up a lot of the emotions before the body is through processing them, I think. Autistic emotional processing for me is incredibly slow, while my ADHD emotional processing is super fast and LOUD)
Writing not only generates dopamine, it helps me toggle on and off all the different aspects of The Chipmunks, Chipettes and I at will. It helps me understand things that I would typically miss because instead of getting trapped in mono-tropism and all of nothing thinking, I find myself able to slide my intensity from 0 to 10 on a scale easier. I have better empathy, more depth, more nuance, an easier time identifying sarcasm and picking up other people’s subtle emotional cues.
And that’s why I feel so….empty and lonely when I don’t have time to write, or I get time but I’m too low on energy and I recognize my brain can’t handle writing at that time. I have to take care of my brain and body and sometimes that means not writing, but what else can I use to help me maintain my understanding of other people and my ability to form friendships and keep them?
