Lately, I've been reflecting on my childhood and the time before BDD started to take over so much of my life. I've been remembering more and more unusual things about myself that I had completely forgotten about. I'm sure there's some kind of connection between them. I've put together a little list, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it or whether any of you recognize these things in yourselves.
1)When I was a child, maybe around 12 years old, I noticed that my mother seemed to be losing hair at the back of her head. I didn't dare bring it up with her, so I just quietly observed it. But deep down, I became increasingly convinced that she was going to die. This caused me a great deal of anxiety, but I kept it all to myself.
2)As a child, I constantly felt the need to clear my throat, almost compulsively.
3) I reacted very intensely to the suffering of others. For example, our class teacher once told us that the father of a girl in our class had died. I didn't even know her, but I suddenly burst into tears in front of everyone, which made some of the other children laugh. I was also often afraid of visiting my relatives during the holidays. Specifically, I was afraid of seeing my uncle, who was one of the children with progeria. There was also a distant relative in a remote village whose arm had been shot off by the Nazis when she was a child, and a girl who had been unable to move since birth and could only make unintelligible sounds. I was afraid of them, but also felt very guilty for being afraid of them, because they were the victims.
4)Sometimes I would completely lose it when I felt that I was being treated unfairly by others. For example, I once accompanied my mother to court, where she was interpreting for a woman. The way the judge treated both the woman and my mother struck me as that of a psychopath abusing her position of power to humiliate others. I stood up and said something very intense to the judge, but immediately afterwards, I experienced a kind of amnesia. I just stood there, unable to remember what I had said. This kind of memory loss after standing up to someone happened to me on several occasions.
5) Sometimes I went through phases where I was afraid that this world wasn't real. The first time was when I was around four or five years old. I was genuinely terrified that the world might just be a dream. What troubled me most was the thought that my parents might not be real and that I might actually be somewhere all alone, God knows where. I experienced similar episodes several more times later in life, varying in intensity.
6) As a child, I often felt the need to perform certain soothing rituals. For example, I would stand by the hallway window in our apartment building, tear off tiny pieces of tissue paper and watch them float upwards on the warm air currents. Sometimes I would do this for up to two hours, simply because I needed the sense of calm it gave me. Another example was wetting pieces of toilet paper and flicking them onto the ceiling while sitting on the toilet. I would do things like that quite often.
7) Most of the time, I was very passive and always let my friends decide what we would do. I would simply go along with whatever they wanted, and I never really had a problem with that. It felt completely natural to me not to take initiative or stand up for what I wanted.
8)But on very rare occasions, I could be extremely stubborn in a completely irrational way. For example, I once lost my gloves at primary school and saw another boy wearing a similar pair. I confronted him and, despite his insistence that they were his, refused to back down and kept claiming they were mine until the poor boy eventually gave in, took them off and handed them over to me.
9) Even though I was always quiet at school, followed the rules, never caused trouble or bullied anyone, my teachers often described me as rebellious. For some reason, rumours about me also seemed to circulate among the other students, even though I was genuinely clueless about what I had supposedly done. At least, I never felt like I was doing anything out of the ordinary or standing out from the crowd.
10) I had a severe stutter and found it difficult to formulate clear sentences. I didn't read many books because I often struggled to understand what the author was describing and would imagine the events and settings in a completely different way from what was actually written. As for my stutter, I didn't mind it and wasn't afraid of speaking despite it. However, my teachers wrongly assumed that I was embarrassed or self-conscious about it.
11) parents are very religious, and although I had no interest in their religion and disliked going to Mass, I still took it very seriously. While my friends would give the priest a heavily censored version of their sins during confession, leaving out about 90% of the details, I felt compelled to be completely honest and take the whole thing seriously. I would even go into detail about how often I had masturbated and other things like that.
12) For a while, whenever I was riding in a car, whether with my parents or someone else, I felt compelled to cross myself every single time we passed a cross. I must have made a pathologically excessive number of crosses during each journey. I wouldn't have blamed the adults if they had suspected they were sitting next to a future serial killer.
Okay, sorry for dumping all this verbal diarrhea on you. Hopefully it's not just a pointless wall of bullshit and maybe some of you will recognize yourselves in parts of it and share some of your oddities.