Does this make sense at all? In my head, it’s the most clear. When written, I feel like I’m not able to fully express what I’m thinking. When speaking, it’s like fucking Russian roulette and can be wonderfully put together and eloquent or stroke-like.
Is there any way to improve this or is it just the way my damn brain works?
Curious to know if anyone’s found a way to adress this as well. I’m ADHD and I’m constantly tripping over my words. I’ll either have a perfectly clear thought and just be incapable of articulating it or I’ll forget what I was going to say halfway through. It’s almost like I have a stutter or something and it’s definitely gotten worse over the last few years. I don’t remember having this problem pre 2021-2022ish. Writing is similarly bad for me, but I have an opportunity to edit and focus on what I’m doing so it usually comes out alright.
I wish I had an answer for you OP but hopefully it brings some comfort to know you’re not alone
I don’t remember having this problem pre 2021-2022ish.
Huh, I wonder what could have happened (and is still happening) to cause sudden cognitive impairment for countless people around the world.
Good news is you can always go back to masking. It’s not too late for you, the people you love, the vulnerable and marginalized.
Quite a bold claim, could just as easily be related to the dissolution of social structures brought about by Covid which affects someone’s ability to practice their social skills
I don’t see why both our assertions can’t be true. But I’m also willing to bet that most people in your life have long since returned to business as usual in regards to their social lives and have all but forgotten about the very real and long term threat of COVID. In the process, they have likely contracted it, numerous times, as it has become endemic in populations around the world.
Though with this return to normalcy, people should expect normalcy to return. For countless many, especially the vulnerable and marginalized, people who do not have adequate access to care and community, it hasn’t.
Smarter people than I can walk through the impacts of COVID, the illness, on society at large. On an individual level the cognitive impact of COVID is something that is verifiable and has a growing body of evidence. I know it’s a difficult reality to face that there is still a global pandemic. One with a pathogen that has been shown, time and again, to cause systemic damage to the body, including the brain.
This is not a fantasy, overblown, fear mongering. The disease is real, it is not over, and there are in fact many more diseases old and new who affect the human body in ways scientists have yet to fully understand. Our “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” mentality in modern society doesn’t reflect reality. What doesn’t kill you leaves you with scars. COVID does, on almost every part of your body.
Part of the social structures you’re referring to that could help mitigate the sheer devastation caused by diseases is universal healthcare, more medical research, public health messaging. None of these serve the profit of the ruling class though. They would rather convince us that disease is something that can be solved with over the counter medicine.
And if you can’t afford that then you’ve failed as a person. And if you find yourself being more forgetful, less sociable, having trouble articulating thoughts, well then I guess you’re just not trying hard enough. These are misattributed condemnations. We should be blaming disease. Diseases the ruling class does not care to stop.
It is a bold claim that a disease which is proven to cause brain damage, evade immunity, and mutate rapidly may have affected your cognitive ability around/after '22 when everyone was told COVID is over and it’s cool to take the masks off with no evidence of its eradication or even effective long term treatment? Is it really?
I will back you on this, this started happening to me before I ever got COVID. And then the subsequent burnout that happened for me when everyone was “getting back to normal” and I simply could not readjust like neurotypical people did made it even worse. I won’t deny that COVID could be playing a role here but it’s also explainable based on what was going on socially/societally.
Im an EMT, during that period I was testing regularly and hadn’t gotten covid until well after my communication issues started. Maybe it’s a traumatic response or something, maybe covid eventually made it worse, but it didnt cause my problem
Could be both. Trauma causes the integration of the brain to be more difficult due to dissociation which means attention/conscientiousness is much more difficult.
I’m not gonna deny your personal experience because I’m not you. But I honestly don’t think it’s helpful to have a chicken or the egg discussion about a disease that has clear links to cognitive impairment. My child has a heart condition that to the best of their cardiologists’ knowledge is not known to have a causal link to COVID. We hadn’t contracted COVID either by the time they were admitted to the hospital for acute myocarditis, which COVID can cause. My partner and I have had many sleepless nights wondering if we could have given them COVID asymptomatically and that could have precipitated into their condition. And it took a long time for us to realize that the cause doesn’t matter. What matters is knowing the threat now and protecting ourselves from it.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely agree with you broady. Covid has definitely caused this problem or problems like it in a lot of people. It’s only in my specific context where I disagree, simply because I have a pretty solid reason to believe that covid didn’t cause my problem. There were extended periods (several consecutive months) between 2020-2023 where I was tested weekly. I also was lucky enough to receive the vaccine in December of 2020, and had kept up with my boosters. We tested when we were exposed or when covid was making the rounds through the staff. I had a regular partner at that time and wasn’t working with randos, so either we were both exposed or neither of us were. Also masked up off shift, etc etc. I didn’t catch covid until November or December of 2022. I really started noticing my communication issues in late 2020 or early '21.
I know that false negatives are a thing and being asymptomatic is possible but I’ve always reacted really poorly to covid, even the shots knock me on my ass for a couple of days.
It’s so fascinating, docs have had a hard time diagnosing me with autism or ADHD so I think there’s a point on the spectrum where neurotypes overlap? I truly believe we haven’t found the best way to categorize our brains and neurotypes are the best thing we’ve found so far
I will also add, anytime I try to describe this phenomenon to others in my life, they usually just tell me that it’s anxiety. But idk that seems…reductionist?
Ngl, I suspect that I might be a little AuDHD but diagnosis is expensive. There’s also some overlap in symptoms and presentation between the two so we may just have this in common despite being different flavors of neurodivergent. With the categorization part, I think the anxiety thing is a bit reductive, or maybe backwards? Like, yeah I have anxiety for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons is that whenever I talk a mess of unintelligible nonsense comes out. My anxiety doesn’t make me do that, it’s the fact that I do that makes me anxious.
And just to speculate on the categorization part, I agree. I think part of it is just that the neurotypical mind is already impossibly complex and difficult to categorize. When you throw the added layer of atypical thought patterns and behavior in, the complexity is multiplied. I also think that qualified neurodivergent people haven’t been leading the charge on the study of our minds is another issue. There are some aspects of our conditions that are nearly indescribable within ourselves, to people similar to us, and particularly to neurotypical people. If there were a greater neurodivergent presence within this area of study, I feel like they would be best equipped to determine where efforts should be focused
Is there any way to improve this
yes! more reading, more writing. in my experience I encounter turns of phrase and ways of expression that fill my toolbox
It’s like getting a crystal clear image of a schematic with everything laid out, but then I have to do the human equivalent of translating it into binary so it can be perceived at low resolution by others
As a kid I used to tell my teacher that I have “issues with putting the knowledge in my brain into the world”, of course me claiming that I actually knew the right answer/proper solution was dismissed as “cope”.
One of the best explanations for how I feel that I’ve ever come across
Human language is so limited compared to the vastness of the mind, especially when our mind got to conceptualize multifaceted aspects of the reality.
For example: human language presumes time and place. What if the concept revolves around the nothingness and non-existence? If I were to say that “nothing is infinite, ever existed”, the grammar will need definite article “the” (“THE nothing is infinite, it ever existed”) except that it’s not a “thing”, it’s “no thing”, so it’d be paradoxical to refer to it as “it” or “the”. In my mind, it makes sense, it’s clear to me. But words cannot express it as clearly as my thoughts.
So it’s can be possibly be a limitation of the whole human language mechanism (independent of which language).
This sounds like one of the many exceptionalities that are often concurrent with autism. I only an elementary teacher, but I have kids with ASD who tell me similar things. They normally have a Language and/or Auditory Processing Disorder. There’s lots of things that help my students with spoken and written language development, but yeah it is very much how their brains are. Which is totally valid by the way.
I’m not sure what would be helpful for an adult to improve spoken/written communication. Simple and guiding prompt activities help my students (“I thought/felt/did…because….”) engage with organizing thoughts. Writing and speaking in past tense structure seems to be important, but I honestly can’t tell you why. I just trust our Speech Pathologist and our Psychologist.
If it’s any consolation, I’m not autistic, but I have a lot of overlapping learning disability diagnoses, like ADHD and dyslexia (and probably some kind of sensory processing disorder, but seriously if you have one of these diagnoses you likely experience multiple exceptionalities). Comments like this usually take me like half an hour or more to write. And there’s probably still mistakes.
for me i am incoherent no matter what i do. doesn’t help that my handwriting is bad. my speech is all uh’s, um’s and hexbear’s :butt: emoji…'s especially because i can’t speak my native tongue normally and apparently my brain is “too fast” compared to my body
i repeat stuff i already said, i somehow piss people off just by speaking, it’s a mess honestly. i can’t help sorry
Stumbled into this thread because of admin stuff but yes absolutely. Whenever I think of something deep it feels like literature but when I try to convert the words in my head into spoken or written words I fail every time lol. So far I have not found a fix for it.
Something I’ve noticed is this problem goes away when I’m talking about something technical, or within my “special interests”. But then I fall apart if I’m trying to do something like summarize a movie or explain how I feel. If I’m explaining something like polyploidy in plants, my speech becomes fluid and I’m able to adjust my vocabulary/rhythm for the audience. If I want to talk about the movie I saw a couple hours ago, it’s hopeless.
Like with every other autistic trait, it’s a human brain thing that just tends to have different patterns with autistic people. Neurotypical people also have the experience of not being able to express themselves, but I think being better with social cues/nonverbal communication helps them fill in the gaps. And they usually get a lot more practice.
But it’s extremely annoying and gets in the way of building any relationships. Therapy has definitely helped.
I’ve had so many instances where my poor intonation and tone ruin the thought. The focus on how I say something is what matters in the end unfortunately. I’m sure this hits home for a lot of NDs
I think this might be a sign to start masking again and deal with the ensuing burnout later
The middle of a sentence is where speech goes to die.
Only ADHD, but I routinely run into a tip-of-my-tongue moment where I can’t recall the word I’m looking for right in the middle of a sentence. I’m also pretty trash at properly enunciating while talking, so a lot of my sentences will end on the wrong cadence and people around me take a second to realize I finished it.
I’m not sure there’s a fix for any of that, and I’m pretty sure I don’t have a degenerative brain disease or something that’s actually the root cause.
(Also ADHD, maybe undiagnosed autism) This is so relatable, I’ve been getting very good at restructuring sentences mid-speech because I forget the exact word I’m looking for. Either that, or my brain hyperfixates on remembering the specific word I was looking for and I interrupt myself to try and get my conversation partner to help me remember the word I was looking for.
I think my experience is somewhat related, although from the opposite end - all of my thoughts exist as language and I really struggle with ideas that aren’t already “spoken” in my mind. I was completely unable to mentally picture anything in my “mind’s eye” before my head injury, I had to describe images to myself using language! Somehow my TBI gave me the ability to mentally picture images if I really focus on it, but it’s still very hard for me and much easier to just narrate.
