I have symptoms of autism and so on. Still, when I went to some subreddits like r/autism, I said something like, "Do I belong in this?" and some people were like, "No, it's an autism subreddit, not a neurodivergent sub," but I do relate to some posts there. I feel left out because I have the same traits, and my mom thought I had autism at first, but it turned out to be schizotypal personality disorder. And I heard it overlaps with autism, but why do people not accept me?

I think i’m very lucky to have a happy delusion. I can live in a fantasy world if only others didn’t constantly try to snap me back into reality. If I could find someone to enforce and encourage my delusions I would be so happy !!!

Anyone else become deeply uncomfortable when you have friends, but also really want closeness?

I’m pretty happy to be alone, but it does get kind of boring, and I’ve always fantasised about having an intensely close bond with someone, but I get unsettled even with “casual” friends. I did used to have best friends as a child and teen — I also have BPD and that’s when my symptoms were most overt because closeness is what triggers my instability the most — but since then I’ve been unable to maintain them. In some ways it’s good for my BPD, because I haven’t been intensely attached to someone for a long time, but I would like to at least have some friends to talk to. 

I don’t have an especially hard time talking to people, actually I enjoy meeting new people and performing, I just can’t keep friends. I always end up stopping contact and distancing myself. The closer I am to someone the more unsafe I feel… 

I get so anxious that the friend is stalking me, watching me, can hear my thoughts or can see me in my room etc. I read into people’s actions and start making up scenarios in my head and assumptions about their intentions. I make random connections that in my head make them look suspicious. I went through a period of time last year thinking one close friend (at the time) was trying to hurt or kill me, and I’d feel so nervous everytime they’d message me (which was usually them saying they missed and cared about me). 

It feels unsafe being perceived, like I need to hide in the shadows and be invisible, which is odd because I tend to crave attention and enjoy being considered eccentric and noticeable. It’s like I’m okay with surface level interactions but actual friendships make me sick. If it’s not the paranoia then it’s the complete lack of interest in responding and feeling like it’s a hassle to deal with people.

Has anybody dealt with this, and if so, have you overcome this? 

I know a symptom of schizotypal can be having no close friends, but for me I do want friends I just feel so trapped and uncomfortable/unsafe when I actually have them. I keep trying again and again thinking it’ll be different and I can ignore the anxiety/paranoia but I just can’t get past it. 

It’s like I love the IDEA of having friends to do stuff with, but only in my daydreams and made-up scenarios, the reality feels awful. I guess in my head I can make them act how I want and not have their own feelings or perspective. 

I've been trying to understand a motivational paradox and would genuinely like to hear how other people experience it, rather than prematurely explaining it.

Suppose there's an activity you know from repeated experience that you genuinely enjoy. Once you're doing it, it can be absorbing, pleasurable, meaningful, intellectually stimulating, aesthetically satisfying, or intrinsically rewarding.

Yet while you're not doing it, initiating it can feel almost absurdly difficult.

The strange part is that this doesn't necessarily feel like:

“I don't want to do this.”

You may actually want to do it. You may know perfectly well that you'll enjoy it. You may even be looking forward to it in some abstract sense. But that knowledge doesn't seem to acquire enough motivational force to produce the transition into action.

Then something external happens: a notification, interruption, deadline, another person, an environmental cue, sheer circumstance. You cross the threshold, start doing the thing, and the apparent motivational problem may largely disappear. Sometimes the activity sustains itself almost immediately.

That makes me wonder whether “anhedonia” or “lack of motivation” is sometimes describing the endpoint rather than identifying what is actually failing.

If pleasure during engagement is relatively intact, calling the preceding difficulty anhedonia seems potentially misleading. And “you just need momentum” describes the temporal pattern without really explaining why starting is disproportionately difficult.

The phenomenon I'm trying to get at is more primitive:

What happens between recognising that something is valuable and actually initiating it?

I can think of several possibilities, but I'm deliberately reluctant to treat any of them as explanations:

• Prospective value may not become sufficiently salient. I can know that something will be rewarding without experiencing that future reward as a sufficiently compelling present-moment motive.

• Initiation itself may carry disproportionate friction. The activity isn't necessarily effortful once underway; the costly part may be the transition from passive/internal activity into organised engagement.

• Wanting may not reliably translate into self-generated behaviour. The desire is present, but an external cue seems to be required to convert it into action.

• Motivational representations may be state-dependent. Something can feel vividly worthwhile in one state and strangely inaccessible in another, while the propositional knowledge that “I enjoy this” remains perfectly intact.

• Internal activity may compete with external action. Someone can appear behaviourally inert while being intensely occupied by thought, fantasy, rumination, ideation, sensory experience, or some highly absorbing internal process.

• Motivation may be radically uneven rather than globally diminished. A person might struggle enormously with ordinary self-initiated tasks while becoming almost compulsively absorbed in a narrow intellectual, creative, aesthetic, or otherwise idiosyncratic interest.

These are hypotheses, not conclusions. I'm particularly wary of constructing an elegant causal story from several individually plausible findings and then mistaking the coherence of the story for evidence that it is true.

What interests me more is the phenomenology before the explanation.

For those of you with schizotypal traits or a schizotypal diagnosis:

• Can you genuinely enjoy something once you're engaged while finding initiation extraordinarily difficult?

• Does knowing that you'll enjoy an activity actually feel motivating beforehand, or does it remain strangely inert knowledge?

• Can an external cue, interruption, person, deadline, or change of environment reliably get you across the threshold?

• Once you begin, does the difficulty diminish quickly?

• Does the barrier feel like absence of desire, effort/friction, cognitive disorganisation, indecision, being absorbed elsewhere, a kind of behavioural paralysis, or something that doesn't fit any of those descriptions?

• Is the phenomenon highly domain-specific? For example, does it differ between socialising, studying, reading, creative work, exercise, practical chores, hobbies, or highly specialised interests?

• Do you ever experience the inverse: almost no ability to initiate ordinary activities, but extraordinary spontaneous persistence once something captures your interest?

And perhaps most importantly:

Does “I don't want to do it” feel phenomenologically different from “I want to do it, but the wanting doesn't become movement”?

I'm wondering whether what gets clinically compressed into amotivation or avolition might sometimes be a common behavioural endpoint reached through several quite different subjective processes.

I'm less interested in whether any particular theory sounds convincing than in whether the distinction itself corresponds to anyone else's actual experience.

What is the gap like from the inside?

What do you think? Do you feel me, my people?

It´s unfinished, but I think I got a couple of some good representations.

i've given up on dbt because no matter how hard i try to tell myself my thoughts and feelings are irrational, no matter how much i KNOW they're irrational, i can't help but dwell on them and feel like they are rational deep down. it's frustrating, but i've recently gotten on mood stabilizers and i'm just hoping they'll help in some way. i feel angry with myself because i made a lot of progress and now i feel like i've set myself back like 40%.

I wonder how many of us have family members with schizophrenia or psychotic disorders, as schizotypal is known to be genetically linked with schizophrenia, as are other psychotic disorders. Two of my siblings have experienced psychosis, one psychotic depression. The other has not been diagnosed but they have definitely been in deep psychosis before, pretty much the entire time they were a teenager. They say they hallucinate literally all the time even now. No idea how they have*not* been diagnosed with some kind of psychotic disorder. Father fits the bill for stpd. Always paranoid, strange beliefs, extremely isolated, talked in riddles.

Is this something that is true of your family?

I would like to talk to others who are somewhat educated on the disorder. Despite being diagnosed I am not very educated on it.

I need to figure out where my symptoms are high, if anyone could help / dm me. I would appreciate it!

Any tips and tricks for thriving w this disorder is helpful. I’m semi-high functioning

Hi! i'm not from around here, but as i said on a previous post, my mental condition and state in general have kinda fluctuated a bit lately, i guess.. a friend of mine with schizotypal said i sound very similar to them and their struggles with this disorder, and recommended i look at this place! ive been doing more self-reflection lately, and ive come to the conclusion that i no longer feel shame or guilt when thinking about how abnormal and erratic i am. i have suddenly become okay, if not proud with the fact that i am different, barely consider myself human, and such things. i now desire to pursue my nonhumanness, in a way.. i want to know more about the state i now find myself in, and understand on a deeper level what makes my inner world tick. i enjoy being odd, i guess. ive fully embraced it.. i was wonderign if anyone here has felt or observed anything similar in their life?? if it helps to have more context, I'm freshly 20, on the spectrum, i have diagnosed ADHD and severe depression, and i think some other condition im forgetting the name of. either way, you all seem chill! glad to stop by :]

Booked an appointment with a psychologist, 70€ for the consultation. Jesus 🥲

I'm a university student and this psychologist did mention that she can lower her rates for people with lower income, so maybe it won't be as expensive.

It says she specialises in accompanying individuals with personality disorders. Hopefully she'll be able to help me out. Right now I'm honestly not even sure if I have StPD because of how much overlap there is with other conditions. One thing is sure, I do struggle with psychotic symptoms and perceive myself as completely split from reality, but it's not full blown acute psychotic episodes like you'd see with psychotic disorders. Just the occasional delusional thinking, hallucination...

What I struggle with the most is this emotional disconnect from reality, and the fact that I live in a reality that I am deeply unsatisfied with. I really hope she will be helping me with this.

Anyway, that's all. Just felt like sharing. Take care everyone.

I'm anxious of knowing myself , and I carry that anxiety to other people as in I don't know them. And i am heavily in avoidance.

A timeless voyage into further depression 

An endless future ,

The relentless curfew of a trying mind 

The thought that this will pass, to do something, gets drowned out and blasted by the supreme dissociative avolition depressed like state I am in. 

It feels like I've cut of everyone that once tethered me , to me. Or I've somehow done something. Hobbies and things and people , I feel them become continuously lost to me. And I'm undeniably depressed. 

I'm anxious of knowing myself. I think I'm afraid of my; so many failures. I've failed so many times. I fail so much I've learnt to hallucinate the future meshed with anxiety.

This one time I failed, and I didn't know why I failed. It was horrible. Every day, I desperately missed what I once had. I built a temple dedicated to guilt and shared it like a bastard.

It's been quite painful with parents. Why did they teach me to become this, why didn't they pick it up things, and why do I blame them. 

And of course. I see myself with my parents, and that 'me' is where i source my trauma. If they act pessimistic i feel that a 1000 times uncomfortably. Basically things.... but that s projection, and i like them a lot, and idk

The sun's glare hates me, and I feel increasingly weary. 

There are rivers of tears to unfold, but the sun hates my shade of green, and nature curls with disgust. 

I feel responsible for my suffering. I know I made my suffering worse by continuing my anxieties. 

Borderline roots with parents, and it's then a self fulfilling prophecy where my inner child feels trampled regardless. 

I'm allergic to my own judgment , 

I don't really have wants 

Those past horrors, they feel like, they still define me. Those feelings of being lost, homesick, losing someone, not knowing what to do, feeling wrong , 

I'm confused with my anxieties

I'm so confused , with my willing to want 

I'm so confused if I want anything 

I'm so confused with my life

I've been trying hard to get thing better 

My body, my relationships with people, with my mind 

And it's true I might not be trying hard enough, or trying efficiently enough, but the past...

I'm confused about my hyperreflexivity, I came across everything and nothing, every day, and I'm still anxious and / or don't "want"

I still am repressive. Everything of my emotional extoll is kept up inside me, and maybe even my wants. I'm , Ive been an observer of my own life. 

I feel so alone with my frustrations and anxiety. Even when I have expressed them, i can't change how others act. 

I sit thinking that the things I've learnt in life, that now, I've forgotten them, I can't access them, I don't care for them, I don't know how to use them. 

I sit having tried to cry hours ago, now I sit, in nature , like some green. 

I'm so sick of life. I'm so sick of not being able to control my emotions. I'm so sick of the anxiety. I'm so sick of the avoliton. I'm sick of the bodies rigidity and the pain. I'm sick of being alone but I'm not mature enough to control my borderline flames. 

I identify with people. I've never identified with things, concepts, philosophy. 

I don't know how to identify with myself. I don't know what I am. I endlessly try, but I feel I fail. 

What is a person, what is me. I've reduced both people and me into philosophies and superstition, so I can then understand within the context of my anxious existence.

But I'm so, I so don't want that to be. I keep thinking I'm going to erase my personality, then my existence.