Other things about me

Things in the about me section that don't go anywhere else.

• Body abilities
• Worries
  • Body and voluntary control
  • Other things
• Other

Body abilities

There is a way that I can move the left corner of my mouth that feels like I'm moving it farther than normal. It hurts a bit when I do that, and I can't do the same thing with the right corner of my mouth.

I can curl my tongue.

Worries

Body and voluntary control

There are two overlapping types of worries that I've had at certain times during my life: worries about body malfunctions; and worries that I can voluntarily control things I shouldn't be able to and will accidentally do something I didn't want to. One of the most common of these worries is a worry that my heart will stop beating, and relatedly, a worry that I'll accidentally tell my heart to stop beating. And because I'm worrying about this, I'm thinking about my heart not beating, and I worry that my brain will interpret that thought as a signal for my heart to stop beating, so this ends up with a feedback loop. Other, similar worries:

• A worry that I'll stop breathing (similar, but I think it's less common than the heart thing).
• Worries about going crazy or my brain malfunctioning (again, less common than the heart thing).
• There's some overlap with derealization, where I've sometimes worried that I'll lose consciousness or make the world stop existing.
• A worry that my body will spontaneously switch to someone else's or I'll spontaneously change sex. (This was common in late middle school and high school, before I started realizing I might be transgender. I don't think this contradicts being transgender, since there would be non–gender-identity reasons I wouldn't want this, namely social anxiety about having to explain what just happened, and the fact that if this did happen then maybe I could do something like tell my heart to stop beating.)
• A worry that I'll be able to teleport just by thinking about it (like in A Wrinkle in Time's "tesseract"). (This is a worry because I could end up in some far-away city with no way home and no means to get necessities, or could end up in space with no breathable atmosphere.)
• A worry that the sun will turn into a black hole, and that I'll somehow be able to make that happen by thinking about it.

The amount that these worries happen has varied a lot throughout my life, and at the time I write this, they haven't been happening as much recently. (Probably most common in middle school and high school, but also certain years after that.)

Other things

A couple words I've sort of avoided saying at certain times in my life due to superstitions: "thunder" and "stroke". "Thunder" was probably around elementary school, and it was a superstition that I'd cause a thunderstorm; it might have been influenced by seeing a newspaper weather section abbreviate "Thunder storms" to "T. storms" (presumably to save space). "Stroke" was a bit later than that, maybe high school, and I worried I'd have a stroke; I remember worrying about this while writing graphics code in Java, since that uses "stroke" to refer to the outline of a shape.

Other

There was one time a long time ago (like... sometime in middle or high school, don't remember in much detail) where I had the hiccups and was coughing, and found that I often hiccuped immediately after coughing (like, in the same breath). Since then, whenever I have the hiccups I've been able to intentionally cause a hiccup by intentionally coughing (this being an easy way to determine if I still have the hiccups).

I'm not actually sure if I have the photic sneeze reflex. I thought I did, and the original (non-public) thing I wrote that I'm loosely basing this section of my website on said I did, but it's inconsistent enough that I'm not sure. I don't think I've ever gotten sneezes from electric lights, and haven't intentionally looked at anything bright to get myself to sneeze.

Memory recall for me often involves some form of reasoning, either as verification or to "decompress" any mnemonic devices I may have used. Doing this takes time. In some cases I'm re-figuring something out that I might otherwise be expected to recall. This can include personal memories (e.g. I might think, "Well, it was last week, and it was after this thing, but it wasn't Thursday because this other thing happened, so I guess it must be Tuesday"). I've always assumed this was normal (and that it was normal to be aware of this), but I've heard some claims at some points about things like confabulation and the unreliability of memory where I was thinking, "Okay, so they don't remember this, so they deduced it and got it wrong; how is this some sort of big revelation about how unreliable our memory is?"