Spontaneous regression

I have spontaneously regressed to 11 years old me. I am afraid to talk, when asked something I feel panic and the only thing I can say is "I don't know". It feels pretty autistic. I cannot understand a narrative of a text, as if I lost all my linguistic skills. Till now I have been quite worried and freaking out, but maybe it is a good idea to analyze this state. With my adult mind. Writing still comes pretty easy.

When I look at the text I just read I see a number of words. I know that there is an effort to be done in order to make meaning out of them, but I am unable to make that effort. Yes, those words do influence me, and my imagination and mind is affected by their collective meaning, but later I am unable to articulate what I just read. Yes, it is not the inability to understand, it is inability to conceptualize, as in to recall what the text was about when I have finished it. Its inability to create that concept of "meaning of the text" in my head. Reading it comes as an experience, and as experience I understand it. I am actually reading it with my whole body. My whole body feels the text, it is exactly like they way I think, I don't use words, I just feel what I think. And when next someone asks me: "so what was the text about?" I am unable to answer. I say "I don't know".

When as a child I would have gone to a trip, and later people would ask me how was the trip, I would also say "I don't know". I have been experiencing the trip when I was there, but after the trip the trip is not part of my experience anymore, so I don't know how it was. It is some inability to recall. To look back. If I made conscious effort to remember events and describing sentences during that trip, I would probably be able to recite them afterwards, and to be honest this is what I do nowadays: I just recall some facts I have previously memorized for that purpose and I spit them out. I have always been terrible at history, maybe this has something to do with it. Not "terrible" as when people say "I was bad at this and this because I didn't like the teacher", but terrible in the way that I felt like in a minefield where I had no clue what on Earth was going on an why. All I could reduce history to was memorizing lookup tables of "date->event title" and "event title->date", and talking (often passionately) about memorizing something on a regular basis I would find really bizarre. I could never understand the idea that there is a narrative, a succession of actual events behind it. I still cannot. Actually it is correct, because there was no narrative, it was just a set of often unrelated events spread across different times and locations. Humans have added a narrative to it and it is what they nowadays enjoy. But narrative is not the experience itself. The experience is gone. You can get a bit of it by watching a documentary and an interview with a war survivor. Getting excited about history narrative I feel similar to getting excited about a plot of sci-fi book: good for you if it brings you joy, but don't call me names if it doesn't bring me joy.

The trip example goes even further: if someone asked me at any moment of the trip "how do you like the trip" I would also say "I don't know". First of all, because the trip has not yet finished, so I don't have all the data yet, second of all, because I am not able to recall how it has been so far. All I ever have is just the very current moment, which can say close to nothing about the trip. I could only answer the question "Do you feel good or bad now, or in between?". That I could answer. To any other question the answer would be "I don't know". And now I think it's the correct answer, from a philosophical point of view. When I was 6 people would ask me what my name was and I would say "I don't know". Because I didn't know the context in which they were asking me. If they asked me "How does your mum call you on the majority of times" then I would know the answer. Assuming my mum was the female I was seeing the most often, but I think I would take it as the most probable meaning, because this is what the kindergarten teachers meant when they said "mum". But how shall I know what a random stranger on the street means by the word "name". Words tend to change their meaning depending on the context. Sometimes by "name" only first name is meant, sometimes name and surname, and sometimes a nickname. If someone asked me "are you thirsty" I would also answer "I don't know". Because so many times my mum told me I wasn't thirsty even though I felt the thirst, I concluded that there is a threshold above which the thirst means that I actually am thirsty. But I have never managed to figure out where that threshold was. So I would always rightfully answer "I don't know".

Maybe my problem, after all, was much less ability to conceptualize than to feel as a child. Like back then I didn't have a concept of a threshold, I just knew that with time the probability that I am thirsty increases. If I knew the concept of the "threshold" I would say "I am a bit thirsty but not very much yet". So I had many feelings, combined logically, but I didn't know how to conceptualize them, let alone express them. Also as a small child I probably never saw anyone expressing them to me, as they thought I am too little to understand. But I think that the conceptualization was the main bottleneck there, though I would maybe be able to reverse engineer it if my parents used less simple language with me. I have to say I was amazed at 4th grade maths, where I finally started finding concepts for many things I was struggling to name. Like the concept of a function. I was amazed that finally I could have a mental representation for a situation where the more something happens the more I feel something. It was as if someone came to me and said "yes! how you feel is correct!". The teacher (she was so awesome) saw this, and sometimes would ask me for an intuitive answer to a problem that was too complex for my age, and I just felt the answer. I didn't know why, but it just felt so. And I have to say that I still use this nowadays, even though most people say it's stupid to rely on intuition when doing formal stuff.

The main workaround I have found for not being able to express myself, at the age of 21, was throwing all my insides unfiltered to the outside and wait for the people's reaction. It's like someone is asking me "how was the trip?" and I spit out literally everything that comes to my mind, in hope that at least one of them will be taken as the answer to the question. Or I throw a pile of photos at them and say "see yourself". And I have taken this to such level that it had 3 effects:

The last point is very important. What I am doing with this throwing behavior is throwing myself at mirrors of other people in order to be seen, and what narcissist does, is reflecting everything back in a set of mirrors all around him, in order not to be seen, at the same time controlling the surroundings. And if a narcissist finds that with their mirror they can actually control someone - that is hell of attractive. And if I find someone who is in fact a ball made of mirrors that is attractive for me too, because my self expression problems are mitigated just by being anywhere next to that person. It's as if I had a see-me-not hat and mirrors were the only way I could even see myself. It is not a wish to be seen as on stage, it is not existing till I have a mirror where I can see myself. So, in other words, codependency.

The only thing I am still missing is why I failed to develop the ability to conceptualize, which feels to me that it goes together with the inability to relate myself to other things. So the first big missing concept was the concept of myself. Is it the first three years of life? Must be, because this problem leads as far as I can think of. Not having any reference point. Not having any mirror. Not having my mother around enough when I was a newborn. Not having seen myself enough in the reflection of her. Maybe this is it? Not sure.