Your neurotic/autistic/weird habits

[haruhi]

.
Would you say this is something like a borderline Tourette syndrome?

I don’t think it is, due to the fact I can suppress the urge (to a degree) and I get positive emotions when I do it (compared to a Tourette’s tic where nothing is felt afterwards.) My therapist did mention some autistic people do it, so it’s likely that.

I talk to my cats in both human and cat. I think animals do understand when you speak to them in another language, they like the attention. However, this behavior has made me meow in public, which makes people think I have 80 IQ, or I’m a furry (worse)

for another weird/autistic habit I have, I have to fully wash the bottom half of my body every time I use the restroom. It doesn’t matter what I pass, I must fully rinse and wash my lower half afterwards otherwise I feel disgusting, almost like maggots are crawling over my body. I can deal with it when in public, but at home I almost always wash myself after every bathroom trip. It’s quite inconvenient… I’m always spending 5-10 minutes in there.

[drummyfish]

.
Would you say this is something like a borderline Tourette syndrome?

I don’t think it is, due to the fact I can suppress the urge (to a degree) and I get positive emotions when I do it (compared to a Tourette’s tic where nothing is felt afterwards.) My therapist did mention some autistic people do it, so it’s likely that.

I talk to my cats in both human and cat. I think animals do understand when you speak to them in another language, they like the attention. However, this behavior has made me meow in public, which makes people think I have 80 IQ, or I’m a furry (worse)

for another weird/autistic habit I have, I have to fully wash the bottom half of my body every time I use the restroom. It doesn’t matter what I pass, I must fully rinse and wash my lower half afterwards otherwise I feel disgusting, almost like maggots are crawling over my body. I can deal with it when in public, but at home I almost always wash myself after every bathroom trip. It’s quite inconvenient… I’m always spending 5-10 minutes in there.

Thank you for your answers Also that bathroom thing -- it reminds me of someone I've known IRL who had relatively "serious" issues in this area. He always spent way, WAY too much time in the bathroom and actually visited a psychiatrist because of it, even had a partial disability admitted. I don't know the details but I suspect it may be something like OCD. With you it seems like you have some very light hints of these things like Tourette/autism/OCD, but you're very good at managing them, and well, that's great.

One other weird quirk about me, please let me know if any one of you shares this. It sounds weird to be describing it because it comes across as super narcissist and as if I'm considering myself very clever and whatnot, and please know that I know I am very very stupid, slow, unread etc., but this is what occasionally happens to me: I am sometimes afraid of thinking about certain things because I am scared that I might get a good idea. And again not because it could be a brilliant groundbreaking idea but maybe just something cool that I wouldn't be able to write down because I don't have pen and paper with me, so it's like "I mustn't think about X because if I do, there's a chance I'll get a good idea about X and then I'll be stressed all day about not forgetting it because I can't write it down now." Having a good idea is great, but it's also a burden because you have to turn it into something real and I am scared of that pressure. And so many times I willingly stop myself from thinking about my favorite topics that revolve for example around programming languages because I am afraid that I could randomly stumble upon an idea for a good program or programming language or something like that, which would then force me to try it out and implement it which means a lot of stress. I don't know if this is normal lol. I have avoidant personality disorder so maybe it's part of it, I don't know.

[Deoster]

I have some basic, common autism-y things like talking really fast when I'm interested, repeating phrases/actions from things I watch, rocking myself when nervous, the very classic "T-Rex arms" thing (more present when I was younger), and so on. But I would say the thing most unique to me that I haven't heard described much elsewhere is a specific form of intrusive thought based on something I might call "fear of becoming suddenly radically confusing."

What this actually looks like is I can be talking with someone and suddenly get the thought "you should say 'I hate you and talking to you.'" This won't come from anything I actually feel but in my head I'll imagine saying it and then imagine what happens in the other person's head when they hear that. I'm not particularly concerned that they'll *believe* me and be hurt because it's just such an out of character and random thing to say suddenly, what I'm afraid of is that they'll become very confused and suddenly have to re-calibrate their entire perception and schema of me in their heads to fit in this incredibly strange thing I just said.

This idea, of them thinking "what? why'd he say that? what's going on here?" and leaving them confused and unsure about me as a person makes me often physically recoil for some reason, and sometimes people will notice and ask what's going on. As I think about it more I become more and more afraid that I'll lose control and blurt it out and so I have to concentrate really hard on *not* saying the strange, hurtful, embarrassing thing.

I think to some extent this began when I played the intro to Fallout 3 as a kid and got really weird afraid feelings from the options to be mean or dismissive to the people giving you birthday gifts, lol.

[cheesybomb]

i have a very specific way of applying the toothpaste to the toothbrush - additionally, i must use the same hands for each time. my brain tells me there is something wrong when i hold the toothbrush with my left hand, even though that's my dominant hand. i absolutely MUST hold the toothpaste tube with the left and the brush with the right. i must use a certain grip to hold the tube. if i am not doing it that explicit way then my mind tells me something is deeply wrong, and that it is now wrong to use the incorrectly applied toothpaste.

I have some basic, common autism-y things like talking really fast when I'm interested, repeating phrases/actions from things I watch

numerous times after i've watched movies i'll find myself picking up certain physical mannerisms that characters have, like having my hands on my hips a lot, or i'll start to do impressions of them for fun (i think the first time i noticed myself replicating a movie character was after i saw There Will Be Blood, and started trying to mimic Daniel Plainview's voice). i don't do the impression thing in public, just around my friends, often with me saying ridiculous things in their voice for shits and giggles. i've been having "fear of becoming suddenly radically confusing" except with more extreme things, like just straight up slapping someone or punching them in the face or destroying their property. no idea why this is but i just have these thoughts during conversations sometimes.

I am sometimes afraid of thinking about certain things because I am scared that I might get a good idea. And again not because it could be a brilliant groundbreaking idea but maybe just something cool that I wouldn't be able to write down because I don't have pen and paper with me

i would say i have this, kinda? but i think the fear is probably the AVPD. i sometimes am walking outside and then get a good musical idea going in my head or a solution to a programming problem and then go "shit, i gotta go home and write this down," or else i end up saying to myself that i'll remember, and then, boom, i don't fucking remember when i come home. it's more an annoyance than a persistent worry.

the feeling of being physically touched also repulses me. it's not pain, per se, as some people with the same thing apparently feel, it's just deeply uncomfortable. not sure why this is.

[drummyfish]

i've been having "fear of becoming suddenly radically confusing" except with more extreme things, like just straight up slapping someone or punching them in the face or destroying their property. no idea why this is but i just have these thoughts during conversations sometimes.

I definitely have this but I suspect this kind of intrusive thoughts may be relatively normal and that people just don't want to talk about them, but correct me if I'm wrong. I sometimes think of how I could fuck up with others in a very prolonged fashion, like doing something evil like a punch in the face, then apologizing and making friends again and then immediately doing another evil thing and repeating this over and over (and these fantasies make me uncomfortable but that's the definition of intrusive thoughts I guess). I also have somewhat masochistic tendencies and for some reason I used to imagine being cut in half or beheaded before sleep -- WITHOUT being suicidal in way -- because it somehow relaxed me or something. It was the idea of a quick and clean death that was somehow comforting because I generally love quiet and dislike loud and messy destruction, like being ran over by train or splattering on concrete after a long fall, so it somehow felt "comfy" to think of such swift and peaceful ways to die.

[Amlux]

i've been having "fear of becoming suddenly radically confusing" except with more extreme things, like just straight up slapping someone or punching them in the face or destroying their property. no idea why this is but i just have these thoughts during conversations sometimes.

I definitely have this but I suspect this kind of intrusive thoughts may be relatively normal and that people just don't want to talk about them, but correct me if I'm wrong. I sometimes think of how I could fuck up with others in a very prolonged fashion, like doing something evil like a punch in the face, then apologizing and making friends again and then immediately doing another evil thing and repeating this over and over (and these fantasies make me uncomfortable but that's the definition of intrusive thoughts I guess). I also have somewhat masochistic tendencies and for some reason I used to imagine being cut in half or beheaded before sleep -- WITHOUT being suicidal in way -- because it somehow relaxed me or something. It was the idea of a quick and clean death that was somehow comforting because I generally love quiet and dislike loud and messy destruction, like being ran over by train or splattering on concrete after a long fall, so it somehow felt "comfy" to think of such swift and peaceful ways to die.

This is definitely more common than most people want to admit. There's a whole kind of OCD based on it called "harm OCD." It can be real torture apparently. I remember reading an interesting excerpt of what might be one of the earliest documented cases of OCD of some English woman in the 1600s who was afraid she was being possessed by demons because she constantly had thoughts of violently murdering her husband and children. I sometimes have this because I might have a minor form of OCD (as if my OP here wasn't enough of a proof lmao), but not to an extreme degree. At its extreme it must be real torture to have such unpleasant images constantly in your mind.

[Deoster]

I sometimes have this because I might have a minor form of OCD (as if my OP here wasn't enough of a proof lmao), but not to an extreme degree.

I do imagine this stuff is quite common. It might be good to live in a world where people were more open about this sort of thing.

I had this thing as a kid that seems slightly OCD-adjacent. I would occasionally think about how complex language and the language-processing parts of my brain were, and how much time it took to develop my language abilities from when I was born. I would then get paranoid that something would happen, like some neurons would fire incorrectly or my brain would just go weird somehow and that such a complicated system would be fragile and break, and then I'd lose my ability to read and speak, and just be stuck in my own head unable to communicate or be communicated to, and it was very scary. If I thought about it for too long, I would start looking at words and feeling like I was less able to comprehend them, or as if my language-processing abilities were "slipping away" (the effect was kind of similar to how if you say the same word over and over again it starts to lose its meaning) and I would get terrified about this.

[satoridepon]

I'm pretty sure one of my relatives has the stereotypical OCD where they wash their hands an excessive amount and such. It sure looks funny to people on the outside like me because theres NO NEED to use half the soap dispenser to wash your hands, they will be just as clean when you only use a bit and do it once. I wonder if soap companies exploit and profit from people with these curses. I'm glad that I do not have issues like these.

[BobDeus]

That's very funny, I do the same thing with my candy except I order them roughly by their colour. I can't tell the flavours apart. I'm not autistic but enough people say I am, then I guess I'm honorary autist. If everyone thinks you are, it may as well be the same thing. Some weird things I do:

• Insisting on using LaTeX for literally everything. Have rewritten entire assignments hours before they were due in LaTeX, because I get too frustrated working with WYSIWYG editing. I write all lecture notes in LaTeX only, and once I wrote a guide to LaTeX to teach one of my work partners, so we could use it on the report together.
• Spending hours upon hours finding the best way to hierarchically organize files from the Internet. Problems such as whether graph theory books should go into computing/theory/graph or mathematics/discrete/graph are very serious to me. I spent a few hours the last week scraping /wg/ on 4chan, then deleting 90% of the images that suck, and for the rest, organizing them in taxonomy that suits me.
• When I'm bored, I try counting up in binary with my fingers representing binary digits, and see how fast I can do it. I can count to 31 (max with one hand) in 5 seconds. I have done the maximum of 1023 during a very boring meeting once.

Hmm... maybe I'm just plain autistic.

[drummyfish]

Spending hours upon hours finding the best way to hierarchically organize files from the Internet.

This path only leads straight to hell -- Isn't this actually the problem of onthology LMAO (sorry I'm a not a philosopher). Trees are a very rudimentary structure for organizing anything, especially things related to real life. OOP is one example of how this approach fails, even OOP proponents now discourage inheritance. Symlinks in file systems help a little but not nearly enough. It's not just that things tend to fall under multiple categories, but they're also fuzzy and sometimes they belong to categories only to some degree. Maybe this would deserve a whole new thread but in short: I made peace with the fact that organizing stuff into directories makes you wanna kill yourself and so I only do so one a very basic level, then I leave a room for a little bit of controlled chaos and regress to the best organization tool I have found so far: tags (i.e. overlapping sets). Of course I understand this is not how filesystems work, but you can help it with metadata, tags in file names and so on.

BONUS thought: It is funny to study the mess that is the category hierarchy of Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons. I used to be a little obsessed with this also and studied things like the book categorization systems that libraries use, but I never found anything satisfactory really.