The following was my contribution to a private discussion about the way our own neurological oddities made us think about reality, consciousness, perception, etc.  (My first paragraph came about mostly because someone used the word “phenomonology”, which I have only once heard before.) There’s much more I could add to such a discussion, but the following are the words that actually left my fingers. 

I remember once managing to describe to a condescending professional a little of what my experience of the world was like. He told me that he had “once been interested in phenomenology” but later found out it was meaningless. Which I found rather insulting, the idea that the way he experienced the world was likely something he considered meaningful (at least he seemed to for all that he always seemed to talk about it) but the way I did was meaningless. (He also seemed of the belief that it’s only ‘phenomenology’ if it’s a ‘defective’ person’s experience, not his, which he called among other things ‘wisdom’ and tried to mold me into.) Personally I’ve always found different people’s experiences interesting rather than pointless. 

I’ve often found that coming at language/thought/movement/perception/etc. from “below” rather than “above” (not value judgements in either direction, just ways I conceive of such things) gives me a perspective on these things that seems unusual. I’d never thought of it as philosophy (because the academic discipline of philosophy has mostly proven too abstract for me to penetrate deeply), but it certainly makes me think about reality and perception thereof. 

One of the weird things of the moment for me comes from a new level of motor oddity where what used to be unintentional movements (“stimming”, “ticcing”, and the like) that took place in outwardly observable parts of my body, now more than half the time take place only in my head. I can feel them trying to happen (in a way that feels like someone else thinking a thought for me, except the thought is a pre-movement intention rather than my usual thoughts; pre-movement intention as in comparable to what happens to me when I consciously try to move but it doesn’t find its way to my body). This can even take the form of an entire screaming, head-banging, thrashing meltdown, taking place entirely in that pre-movement realm where only I can feel it, while my body just goes inert. (No, not all my appearance to have gained self-control is my doing.) Involuntary or semi-voluntary movements and lack of (or difficulty with) voluntary movement have always been part of my life, but it is very weird to experience involuntary non-movements as it were. It makes me wonder about such strange intersections of what are already in-between areas of consciousness.