Do I have schizoid / aspie tendencies or am I just selfish?

Yep, your post even more confirms to me that you do have, at least, very strong schizoid traits. Not only are SPDs indifferent and have only few selected friends (if at all), but they virtually always prefer solitary activities over social ones *and* often the closest bond they have is to their parents only -- their parents are sometimes their best friends and the bonding is very deep, something extremely hard to achieve with other people. A lot of schizoids, when present in a social situation, feel a sense of "escape" and want to "get over" the social situation as soon as possible and be on their own... Due to the strong bond with your parents and seeing them worry, it is absolutely not uncommon that a schizoid will evaluate their decisions and act upon them by seeking help, even though the schizoid may not feel it necessary to change (they don't see their situation as a big problem), but will "give in"' at some point when the close relatives are too worried and there's a strong bond between them & the schizoid. Again, this doesn't apply to all schizoids. Some loath even their family and when they call to see how they're doing, they most of the time don't pick up the phone and pretend (or lie when asked about) that they were busy or not at home. There are common features schizoids share, but when breaking it down onto the individual level, schizoids can differ from each others, even though it won't be hard for a pdoc or trained person to spot the schizoids, despite their varying differences on individual level

you know I wouldn't rule out Aspie quite yet either...

CarmenRose23 wrote:you know I wouldn't rule out Aspie quite yet either...

Don't try to put all people in having AS, a behavior I found that seems increasingly common on this forum. Not all are Aspies and there's some core things missing in her before one can call/diagnose her as Aspie. There's no mentioning of her having impairment in nonverbal behavior (eye contact, emotions recognitions, facial/body expressions, etc) nor any language/verbal "issues"

The fact that she prefers a few selected solitary activities does not make her per se an Aspie

Mh, well I don’t think I have language problems (though I think I sort of speak in a loud monotone voice and I mumble quite a bit) but I do have problems with emotion recognition and eye contact. I’m also horrible at remembering faces (AND names) of people I’ve met a few times. But I don’t know if those are AS symptoms. The reason I was asking about it as well as SPD is that I have some tics (like urges to tap my foot, swaying left to right when I’m sitting, crossing my fingers, picking the skin off the tips of my fingers, etc.) and very obsessive and idiosyncratic interests. But I think the description of the secret schizoid encompasses most of my personality. I might just be SPD with tics.

Like I (we) said, no one can precisely diagnose you on here and you need to see a professional (though I'd argue that even a professional won't diagnose you 100% correctly, but that's a different topic). Often symptoms between different illnesses or disorders overlap each others and it's sometimes (very) difficult to tell them apart and it's perfectly possible for different disorder to share some common features. Sometimes, mental illness not related to a personality disorder can mimic some of the features present in a specific disorder and make it appear as if you may have a disorder.

However, there are good indications which make it possible to tell them apart and towards which side a person "swings" more, even though two different personality disorders may be very close to each others. You may also have OCD traits, if you have a tendency to excessively repeat some things, almost like it's a ritual that need to be followed precisely. In the end, there's no "pure" SPD, AS, NPD, HPD, etc as they all share to some extent some features with each others but they also have enough specific features/behaviors which makes it possible to distinguish between them

As for your tics, that's not uncommon in SPD. I myself have eyelid tics which only appear when I close my eyes

I think I might have had an OCD streak as a child, I always had to check that the oven and stove were turned off and that the doors were locked before I went to bed. I also asked my mom that she gave me an equal amount of kisses on the left and right cheeks. And it would make me irrationally anxious if I had to step on cracks on the sidewalk. I don’t have that anymore (obviously), but I do always cross the street at the same spot in front of my house, and although my apartment is a mess, my desk at work is impeccably clean and everything is at an angle. (Bothers me when it’s not). I also make pointless lists and my CDs (all 400+ of them) are all in alphabetical order (and when I have more than one album by one artist, they are in chronological order).
I don’t have intrusive thoughts that obsess me and prevent me from functioning normally though. Just quirks. And I don’t think of any of those things as ritualistic or even problematic.

Well, that sounds to me like having mild OCD traits (not that you have a full blown OCD disorder per se, like some people can't stop cleaning their house and need to do it 10 times a day and sense an urge or something that pushes them and upon trying to resist it, it makes them almost crazy) but it also could be that you have an overly developed habit system, though I'd say more on the OCD side than a habit, but it's actually difficult to pinpoint it only through reading words. Behavior observation helps a lot in this but I'm not with you and can't see you to see how you act and when you do so. So don't take all I (or we) say in here a pure facts and bring more bias into your thinking. Most on here don't have degrees in psychology/psychiatry and help out with the knowledge they have about such issues, though a lot of have good knowledge due to pure interest in this or due to them having issues themselves and the starting digging through the pile trying to make sense out of their situation/condition. This combined with the fact that often words are insufficient in explaining a complex issue (especially when a persons' mind is clouded) makes it very difficult to diagnose a person by just reading what he writes. Expressed emotions (or lack thereof) in words is not the same as actually talking to & seeing the person before you...

As for being orderly, to a higher extent so am I. I like order to be present overall (even on my desktop computer folder arrangements and where I store my files, films, music and how I arrange them, etc) but I definitely can't be classified as someone who's overly orderly and gets frustrated when something isn't like he thinks it should be. Order needs be, but it's also OK to sometimes just let it be as it is.. I don't have to double check things and I postpone things on a regular basis and bring them in order/like I like it, later on

And yes, there are cases where a person in his childhood has OCD (or very strong traits of it) and as he grows older, they mostly go away but some tend to stick around.

Peptron wrote:

dbx wrote:And yes, there are cases where a person in his childhood has OCD (or very strong traits of it) and as he grows older, they mostly go away but some tend to stick around.

In my case it seems that my SPD is some sort of anti-OCD. When I was younger I had a rather nervous personality; but over time it went away, and it's as if too much of it went away. Instead of becoming more calm over time, it's like my entire emotional structure just vanished in the void.

Yep, can't say same here, but there's high similarity to your situation. By nature, I am or was highly overly-sensitive, especially towards negative criticism, and worried often about what others thought of me or how they saw me. The older I got (currently 28 years old), the more insensitive I became. First time I noticed a difference in me was at the age of 17 and I had a strong suspicion (which wasn't based on facts but on instinct) that it was progressive and i'll only get worse. To counteract this, I got hooked up on drugs (both soft & hard) for a few years, until one day it hit me like a lightning in a clear sky and threw me into a server clinical depression combined with server social phobia. This kept me for 6 years locked in in my house (I absolutely couldn't face people on the streets AT ALL, got dizzy, felt like fainting all the time, thought all were looking at me and judging, got disoriented/delirious, had memory issues to the point where I recall once forgetting where I left my bike just after doing it a few minutes earlier and actually had to think really hard to recall where it was (luckily I did after a while), brain/thought process completely went blank as if someone erased it, etc) so the safes option for me was to stay inside. As time progressed, the clinical depression slowly transformed itself into dysthymia and the social phobia completely went away on its own (I did not take any pills or therapy during these years) but the realization of emotions being completely absent grew only stronger. Today, I'm mostly a meatsack/robot who all he can do it think, not feel at all. Indifference, derealization, depersonalization, sometimes deep and weird thoughts, high complex mind constructions, totally erratic dreams, etc are part of my daily life. I was in total only 6 months on meds (no therapy at all) if you know that all this started 10 years ago (in beginning of 2000) -- stopped with meds as all of them had negative effect on me & only made stuff worse (eg, suicidal thoughts to the point of me standing on the 18th floor and ready to jump). I have a pretty bizarre look at the world (even if I say so myself) and quantum physics (one of my hobbies) has made it even more bizarre and deeper. I keep catching myself trying to find ways to prove or disprove that we're not in a simulated world (as highly suspected by Holographic and some computational theories). The fact that I do such things, doesn't say I'm crazy or something -- I'm pretty clear in my thinking, can hold up convos for hours with "normal" people and no one would ever even think of me being kookoo. Just have a very different view compared to the average person out there (those that all they do is work, watch stupid TV, sit hours at the bar/club, etc)... So yeah, that's me