Mistake
I overcommunicate and feel too much
-- Hayley Kiyoko, "Feelings"
I'm mentally ill. I've been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, PTSD, and some other fun things. My brain functions differently from the way society expects it to.
To me, a mistake doesn't just feel like a mistake; it can make me feel wrong, like I'm not a person. What do I mean by this? Generally, when I say I don't feel like a person, I mean that the component parts of me feel as though they are separated by galactic areas of space, as though they will never connect. My mind feels separate from my emotional processing, which feels separate from my physical, biological needs, which feels separate from the tactile sensation of touching things. A person is a unit, all components working together in service of a common goal; I am dispersed, my components at war with one another, my goals torn apart.
Making a mistake can shove me into dissociation so fast that my head would spin if I felt like my consciousness were still connected to it. I have a physical self, and this is indisputable, but my physical self floats aside from the mental. I don't think this should happen? I don't like it, certainly, because it makes me feel as though no part of me is real.
Because of this, when I make a mistake, I find it difficult to process quickly. I'm paralyzed by my own wrongness and by learned fear of social retaliation if I don't fix my mistake quickly enough. But if I try to fix it too fast, it's sloppy and I don't learn as much as if I take my time and work to feel like a person again before fixing it. This feels elementary, but I can't find a solution.
Every minute after my mistake that I don't spend trying to fix it is another minute of rising anxiety. Is it that I want to be a good person, or is it that I want other people to think I'm a good person? I don't know. When I'm like this, I think in strict binaries -- I've never known who I am, I've never existed as a whole rather than as a set of components.
I overexplain because I confuse transparency with honesty
I overexplain because I think people will care if they know my motivations, but impact > intent
I say that I overexplain because I care, but what I really mean is that I overexplain because that is what caring looks like to me, regardless of what caring looks like to others (which is often something very different)
How do I stop centering myself when I don't feel centered?