Hi all. My apologies if I've picked a screen name that might be similar to someone else's. I couldn't think of anything else better. I'm lousy at "hellos," so please bear with me.
My status: early 40s, female, college-educated, married and have kids. I've had problems fitting into society as far back as I can remember, and considering my personality, I'm probably lucky I ever got married at all. I've been seeing a therapist for some time now and my doctors think I've got avoidant personality disorder or possibly Aspergers. Apparently, it's going to take quite some time to figure that out. In the meantime, I'm going through therapy because in recent years I've been finding people increasingly harder to deal with. I can't read them and they instantly dislike me anyway, so I've stopped even trying to get along with them. It gets depressing because I want to fit in and be able to talk with people, but it takes a lot of energy for me to work out the right things to say and do. At 42, I'm honestly too tired to try anymore. This realization had me depressed this past year to the point of being s----dal, and those thoughts are still with me to this day.
I've been going through my old journals from my teen years (I've documented my life happenings at least once a day going back to the age of ten) and the ongoing theme from each written page is the same: people hated me within 5 minutes of meeting me and I have no idea why.
No matter what I tried, I was always picked on and marked as a social outcast. After 20+ years, this hasn't changed. In fact things have only gotten worse. I can't seem to go anywhere without small noises and the sound of people talking really irritating me. I've had to quit the last three jobs I worked at because I simply can no longer deal with the everyday chatter and noise that occurs in an office. One day it was so bad, I began to cry in front of my boss like a complete idiot and I couldn't even articulate as to why I was crying. I then tried working from home by starting my own business, but that only made things worse. The amount of work I had to do coupled with keeping track of my own payroll and books was too much for me to deal with and I let that go, too. Even going to church has become difficult. Just a few weeks ago, I started crying there, too and my husband chastised me for "making a scene." I believe I'd started crying because I suddenly noticed that no one would come up to me and shake my hand during the part of the service where parishioners are supposed to greet each other. They ame up and talked to my husband (who is is very outgoing), but avoided me. I tried to smile at them, talk to them and such, but I end up saying something stupid every time. An example of what I said was when an elderly lady walked up to me and said, "Where you folks live?" I replied, "We live right next door to the Mayor." She blinked at me and smiled, then walked away. It didn't occur to me until later that the lady might not know where the Mayor of our town lived and that a different answer was required.
Now the only thing I want to do these days is sit in the dark and in total silence. I don't even go online anywhere near what I used to. I'm taking meds at the moment, but like I told the doctor the other day, I want not just to be treated for anxiety, social phobia and depression, I want to know what's causing all of this. That's why I'm giving them my journals (all 50,000 some-odd pages of them).
As to why I'm here: I'm interested in how others have coped and perhaps overcome this sort of social isolation, so I'll be mostly lurking (my apologies in advance).
Thank you & God Bless
E333
07 Mar 2010, 11:40 am
