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2:17pm July 3, 2014

Are there workarounds for autistic catatonia?

twocentsormore:

This is not an “I want a cure” post.  It’s an “I don’t want a cure, but I don’t like every aspect of my autism and this is one I don’t like and if I could take a pill to cure it I would.”

But I feel like it’s eating up more and more of my ability to do things, as I get older.  And the pain meds I’m on now are ones that I have desperately needed for awhile, but they make the catatonia even worse.  It feels like I spend a lot of my day just sitting around staring at things.  One of the reasons I went back to community college and burned myself out trying to work in ways I have deep-rooted aversive conditioning against, was because it helped me fight against those sedentary tendencies.

I was very active as a kid.  I was always wandering off because I often couldn’t understand what people said to me when they told me not to go anywhere (I got in trouble for this a lot on field trips and summer camp), and because I just wanted to discover what was around me.  I was always riding my bike, climbing trees, etc.  The catatonia started to set in when I was placed in a school that overloaded me with work, but puberty ground it in even more.  But still, even into my late teens and early 20s, I could still take long walks and often did on a daily basis, to get away from my house and my family.  Walking anywhere is very exhausting for me now, and I don’t know what took that away from me, if it’s physical or neurological. 

I can ride an exercise bike and lift weights, and I sometimes do at a gym, but it doesn’t seem to make a long term difference in my ability to take walks again without getting exhausted.  I know my body is not in great shape because I’ve been very sedentary for about six years, but what ability I had seems to be diminishing, and the meds make it even worse.  And there’s the problem where I don’t know if regular exercise would make any difference because I can’t break the catatonia often enough to get to the gym.

I want to see if a physical therapist can figure out where the “weakest links” in my body are and help me either strengthen those or get support braces or something.  But to get one, I have to go through this bureaucratic mess of referrals.  I have to get a general physician’s referral (or I was told that anyway), and I have the name of a trans friendly one but I’m afraid to call her because I’m terrified of the phone and I don’t know if she would know the first thing about autistic catatonia anyway.

I just want my walking back if nothing else.  It saved my sanity when I was a teenager.  I also get hyperhidrosis (excessive sweating) from even small amounts of exercise and it’s gotten worse as I get older, and it makes a mess and soaks my clothes.  One of my medications made it worse but I’ve been off that one for six months and I still easily get excessive sweating.

Does anyone have any experience in overcoming stuff like this, a tendency towards being sedentary when you don’t want it, that’s hard to break? Or even just a remedy for the exessive sweating? (And I tried talcum powder, it doesn’t do enough, I would have to be pouring it on my body continuously to stop up the sweat.)

Music.

Country music is supposed to work well, as is baroque, according to Tony Attwood. I don’t know how far I trust Tony Attwood.  Baroque doesn’t work for me.  Country works amazingly.  It helps me align my body’s rhythms with the music.