3:50am November 2, 2013

➸ "You don't need this junk. You need a cat.": Question for everyone autistic (anywhere on the spectrum), whether officially diagnosed or self-diagnosed I don't care.

clatterbane:

youneedacat:

How many of you have lost important abilities for a significant length of time, quickly or slowly, any time from puberty to old age? (Sometimes called “regression” or “burnout” or “long-term shutdown”.)

It can be speech, language, the ability to move, executive function, organizational skills,…

At various times, pretty much all of the above except for the movement-related stuff. As came up in a recent discussion, mostly in my teens and 20s.

One of the weirdest, though not even in the top 10 for daily frustration value: I think that may have also been medication related, but who knows, because (not unusually) a burnout got me seriously overmedicated for a while with assorted stuff that will cause verbal cognitive problems by itself. But, I actually lost access to pretty much all the German I had ever learned almost overnight, and got a terrible railroad spike headache whenever I tried to retrieve any words. Which kinda complicated the going back to finish my degree plan, yeah.

I’ve since managed to get some back, and relearned more out of stubbornness. But that was still freaky, and nobody I mentioned it to even wanted to believe that could happen. I didn’t even talk about most of the rest—especially cognitive and executive function fails—given the way the tip of the iceberg, obvious to other people parts of that got approached. :/

I know someone autistic that something similar happened to:

1.  English was her first language.

2.  She learned Spanish.

3.  She forgot ALL THE ENGLISH she’d ever learned, and retained the Spanish.

4.  She had to relearn English from scratch, and now speaks it with a Spanish accent.

This happened somewhere in adulthood.

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