Topic: My experience.

Hi, my name is Alexis (the irony), I'm 16, scored 172 on the test, have no other combinrd condition that is known of.

Since I was born I didn't express emotions normally compared to other children, babies, toddlers, who ever else growing up around me.. To this day, empathy is impossible. But having had my lack of emotional understanding being identified by my mother I was given reading materials from early on to identify others feelings and wants through their body language rather than their expressions, although what I know is a label on an emotion and a guide on how to avoid causing conflict etc. i have NO actual understanding of how this emotion may feel. I do feel emotions, but anger is annoyed and annoyed is upset and happy is upset, basically it all feels like one big familiar and overly similar mess.

Through my life so far I have experienced the death of relatives, my mother for a stage was ill to the point of near death, I've had family pets which I've spent most my childhood with for, and through all this I only felt a stagnant emptiness, but until recently I didn't realise how abnormal that was, I'd been taught how to hide my Alexithymia since birth, without even knowing something was wrong... And I began to think I was alone. I couldn't find anything online on "why I lack empathy" or "why don't I feel emotions" or understand this one feeling that seemed to engulf all the other micro emotions that appeared for maybe even 0.16 of a second. It literally was and still is like internalised micro expressions. But despite all this. I'm enjoy drawing, but it's all over structured, I spent too long analysing anatomy etc... And it is over structured and follows a technique or sequence, and minor imperfections are no good. It's a structural thinking that seems to make me have some sort of ocd. So I guess I contradict some alexythemic traits, but I was raised by someone who may be mildly Alexithymic as a result of them being abandoned in childhood, so to some extent i may have a genetic trait more so. Either way. That's me done for now, and it probably didn't make much sense because I'm half asleep and typing on a laggy phone. Can anyone else relate??