life as a werewolf (touch hyposensitivity & dissociation)
life as a werewolf, or a vampire, or a demon- or ghost-possessed person, or [...].
this post is about mental health and might be hard to read, continue with caution.
so information-disabilities, sensory-processing-disabilities, they're not just hyper sensitivity. Sometimes they're hypo sensitivity, getting too little brain acknowledgement of [insert sense here]. Healthy amounts of sensory input are required for most people to function, to understand and attach to the world around them and their body in space. the brain and mind start to spiral when understimulated (as to what is an understimulating circumstance, that's relative to the person).
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hi, I'm an unlucky bastard with touch hyposensitivity.
when shit is bad in that regard, most things that would register as things-touching-me do not really register. I can't feel the clothes on my body, so I'm out in public glancing down at my self to make sure I havent been walking around butt-ass naked. I can't tell the difference between my body and the surrounding bed sheets, like we've melded together into one being, color-out-of-space. Since I can see and hear the world but I can't feel it, everything feels like it's a movie or a video game, and I start to detach, I start to get scared and disoriented, I risk a fall into psychosis. There is a deep, primordial craving, felt in every inch of my skin and muscle, for touch that I feel. in the same way you need to sleep, eat, drink, when you've been deprived of it. I cannot simply not-act on the craving.
so I need touch I feel, which means stronger touch than what other people need. It means throwing a punch, it means getting punched, it means self-harm, it means dancing and crawling on all fours and scratching myself bloody. It means the kind of thing that makes people think you're angry, violent, that you want to cause pain and destruction, but really that pain and destruction is an unwanted side effect of needing to confirm I exist in the world. I don't want to hurt people, but I crave strong-touch and the best way to do that seems like punching a rough-bark tree because if I ignore it, what if I punch a person instead?
I care much for other people and all living things and I would not want to hurt someone, unless circumstance where the hurt I cause prevents worse hurt from happening. but my body needs to be handled roughly or else I'll lose it for real. it's a dark craving that, now that I know what's up, is easier to do something about.
but as a kid? I didn't know that "hyposensitivity" was a thing. I didn't know I was neurodivergent until my 20s.
I was a non-competitive and sensitive and shy kid, I didn't like making people upset and I wanted to be nice to others, and at the same time I was having this touch-craving which felt like an urge for real violence. and what comes with it, a euphoric high from being in a fight. I was lucky enough to do fighting-sports but I would often refuse to spar for practice (cause I was afraid of myself) and then when I did I would need to be pulled off the other person because I wouldn't stop.
I thought that I was secretly evil inside. that was the only explanation offered by the culture around me.
because see you are probably familiar with many stories of a kind person, who becomes evil and/or is compelled to do evil things due to an often-supernatural force. Werewolf. Vampire. Possession. someone who lashes out and hurts people, not because they want to, but because their body or something else in them needs it, and who hates their actions and considers them to be not-their-own. I didn't know which, if any, of these were my own case, but I definitely thought I had an evil side to me that would hurt people I cared about, so I retreated back from social interaction and spent my time in distant shut-down.
because of., untreated ADHD. I thought I was evil and bad and should self-exclude from society. Yeah? I thought that I could turn into a werewolf, so I had to pre-emptively chain myself to the wall in the basement before the full moon rose.
that fucks up a person, yeah. Never allowing yourself to be fully a person, fully present, fully feeling your feelings and attachments because you're convinced you'll hurt people you reach towards. I've since figured it out to a degree, that I need stim toys and whatever. but I don't see enough discussion around strong-touch-craving, at least relative to hypersensitivity or stimming using pleasant fluffy fabrics or whatever. no shame to y'all. but I don't want some other kid out there thinking theyre a monster and getting all fucked up because of it.
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some things that I've tried or wanna try, that might help:
- boxing gloves or padded swords, so u can brawl with a consenting friend and avoid injury, or beat yourself with something less hard and harmful
- spikey/rough sensory objects, I think you can get some searching "pain stim", I wanna get these
- compression sock
- weighted blanket
- cold things: holding ice, laying on cold floor, cold water
and for everyone really, but like, Mental Health Online Community Active people i guess? For the sake of everyone with OCD or sensory cravings or whatever, quit it with villainizing impulses based on what the impulses appear to be and start trying to broaden the horizon of what they represent. Maybe they're/you're punching a wall cause they're/you're violent and horrible, or maybe they/you need a fuckin ice cube to hold. it's probably too late to nip it in the bud, but there's a notable tendency for disability/neurodivergence/mental illness stuff to shed the "unpalatable" bits as it becomes more openly discussed. As stimming becomes more mainstream to talk about, people who beat their hands onto their heads are excluded from the picture. So we end up hurting ourself and/or others, and no matter the cause and whether we wanted to hurt someone, that hurt is real! We did that, we have to sit with that responsibility, and the target of the lashing-out might be fucked up by our actions.
No space for preventing the harm, since that involves talking about this stuff. No space for werewolves, we're too scary. giving us no space to talk to one another, so there isn't a way for people to find about non-harmful or less-harmful outlets for what we feel!
damn it yall, disability discussions gotta involve us too!
a message written with love for other werewolves. Much hope for your escapades, if you're worried about "secretly being evil" I hope this brings you calm.
awoo
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thanks for reading!🪱🦀
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