Hello

Post Reply New Topic

Hi everyone,

I;m not really sure how to start this... but I think I may have autism? There are several reasons behind my thinking.

I have always had social issues growing up. Not extremely serious I guess, but if anyone in the school were to be identified as a longer it was me. Often I just didn't know what to do/say and didn't know what was expected of me. I am very good in school also. Especially math, I was bumped up several levels in math classes before high school. In high school, I thought that maybe I didn't get along with everyone because of differences in intelligence level. So I applied to a magnet school. However, I found that when I went here, I was still a loner. I was smart, but I was not interested in Magic: The Gathering, Anime, playing hours upon hours of video games, and other pursuits that I considered very nerdy. This is where other things must be mentioned. Though not interested in playing Dungeons and Dragons, I was very interested in the rules and everything behind the game. For some reason I found all the statistics and everything to be fascinating. Anyway I got over that because I never bought any of the books and stuff. I refused to spend money on it, though I did borrow them from friends and study them for no reason at all.

Moving on. Though I was a loner I did have a couple goods friends. One in particular was just a normal kid from my hometown that I met in ski club. I am still god friends with him. Something that he has always pointed out is that I constantly say things that are inappropriate and would be better kept to myself. Not necessarily rude or gross things, just things like mentioning that we had hung out with his ex while in front of a girl he liked. I didn't know this, but I've come to the realization that if a girl is around that it is a girl he likes and just to not mention any other girls. Just one of the ways I have sort of gotten around my social awkwardness. He is not the only one that notices this.

Another problem that I have had is with an ex-girlfriend. Though I am often distant with my parents and even my friends, I was very close with her. She noticed that I would often say things that I did not intend, or things that are kind of rude, but I did not realize at the time. I attributed this to my mother being rude and failing to teach me the proper social graces, but it never really seemed like the whole picture.

Anywho, so I went off to University a year after I graduated. Because I was living in the dorms, everything was pretty much taken care of for me. They had a cafeteria, so I didn't have to cook and classes were close by. Everything was just like boarding school. I made dean's list both years I attended and won awards in physics and chemistry. I procrastinated a lot however, even on easy assignments. I often turned work in late, but thankfully my professors accepted them. I tried to avoid not turning things in, which was a problem in high school. However it was a mediocre school and far below what I knew I was capable of. I was skipped ahead a lot in high school, but was attending a college with people who got below 1000 on their SAT's (old version) and pulled mediocre grades. This just wasn't right. I want something named after me, whether it is an equation, a chemical reaction, a monument. Anything. This was only a road to mediocrity.

After two years I decided to transfer. I am now attending a University that is ranked in the top 100 in the world. Additionally I am now living on my own during the school year. However this has made me come to the realization that I am not necessarily as prepared as I believed myself to be.

During the first semester I was able to work off inertia from the excitement of living somewhere new. I made alright grades, but not necessarily amazing. During this semester I failed to turn in an important paper. This was due to procrastination. I could have turned it in half done, but I didn't want to turn it in half done. I have issues with perfectionism. The second semester was a complete wash though, I failed to turn in several assignments. Attendance started to become an issue also. Living in my flat also became a problem. I was not feeding/taking care of myself as well as I should. I would often leave laundry for too long and wear dirty clothes. (I'm trying to be honest, I wouldn't tell anyone in real life most of this.) Some issues that weren't apparent when I was younger became salient. One major one being my fixation with computers. I would often mess around with my computer to the detriment of myself. Though I should have been doing homework, I instead was doing things like learning 3d-modelling and programming. I have become fairly obsessed with pixel-art which is a problem because it takes up too much time. I have been doing it for about 6 years now (started in high school). I would stay of nights just working away at pixel art when I knew it wasn't getting me anywhere and I knew that I had other important things to do. Stress only exacerbated these issues that I have and caused me to waste more time. In the end, I understood all the material but failed all of my classes. This is extremely tough for me to admit. But that is the nature of the beast. However this performance can be attributed to other things also. I had a fairly rough time during this semester where my parents almost got divorced and many other awful things happened surrounding that. They have since reconciled.

On top of these, when I am at home with my parents, I spend lots of time in my room on my computer. I try to talk to my parents, because I know that it is what is expected of me. However I find it difficult to find subjects to talk about. Often I just come back to my digital world on the internet where I always find ways to keep myself busy. My mother and I make jokes about some of the stuff that I do when I go through my life. Often they are very little things, and I joke about how I have a mild form of OCD or something. Examples are putting peanut butter on bread (must be a uniform layer and must cover the top completely with no edge showing. For this reason I prefer creamy), plastic wrap on things (must be pulled tight so that there are no wrinkles), Measuring things (I always use measuring spoon and a knife to level the top. I will search the silverware drawer to find the flattest knife to use because I want perfect measurements), organizing colored pencils (according to rainbow in the box, and by saturation per color). There is a laundry list of other things that I do, but I can acknowledge that they are all equally useless and unnecessary, but I simply can't help myself. I believe that my pixel-art is a natural extension of this desire for order and perfection. I also believe that my affinity for mathematics is also attributed to this. It gets to the point where when people know me well, they know what sorts of activities will set me off organizing or being perfectionist on.

So now I am kicking around on on the net and read something about vaccinations causing autism. So I look up autism in wikipedia (obviously not the best source). But anyway, I'm reading through and it is kind of bothering me because I realize that most of what it is saying applies to me quite heavily. As I do more research I find that I share a lot of the problems that are faced by adults with autism. I have found ways around many of the social problems that I face. Meeting new people is still difficult, however I have studied interactions between other people very heavily, along with social ettiquette, and asked friends constantly about what to say and what not to say and what is appropriate. So because of all this I can get by socially, however it is kind of a memorized set of instructions rather than the natural flow that appears in most other people. I used to have problems remembering important dates (birthdays and the like) but I used google calendar to keep track of my classes and put everything on there so that I won't forget.

Anyway. Coming to the point of all of this. Whether I have autism, asperger's or nothing at all, I am finding that I am having many of the same troubles in my life right now that are faced by those on the spectrum. I am hoping that by coming here I will be able to find advice and maybe a similar outlook on life that will help me to become more successful. I have one year of University left. I want to finish well. I also want to be capable of living on my own effectively. Living with my parents for the rest of my life is simply not an option that I am willing to entertain.

Goals:
Stop my computer hobby from overpowering more important things in my life
Manage to hand in my assignments in and on time
Get my studying done instead of waiting to the last minute
Create motivation to take good care of myself, peanut butter with a spoon is not a meal. I know this, and yet my actions don't reflect it. Not washing clothes/changing sheets is also an issue that I need to change.
Have better sleeping patterns. I stay up far too late wasting time on stupid stuff. I often will be up at odd hours because it means that I can be alone and not worry about anyone bothering me.

I believe that if I do have it, then my parents failed to recognize it, and most other adults failed to care. Now that I am an adult I project the outward appearance of being completely normal. I take good care of my body because of fears of being obese because both of my biological parents are (I'm adopted). I try to take good care of the way I look because I realize that though I may not be a smooth talker I can at least be interesting and good looking, because I enjoy the ego boost that it provides for a girl to tell her friends she thinks I am cute. This is due to me being the greasy/nerdy kid growing up and just being a among a number of greasy and nerdy kids at the magnet school. I am not always crappy at social situations, and can sometimes be called funny or charming, but usually this is because I have copied what I have seen someone else do. This is good for someone you are interested in impressing once, but it is not a facade that can be kept up for long.

There is way more to this than I care to go into detail about, but procrastination has caused a huge amount of problems in my life. I hope to live a productive life. I want to do something amazing and go into the history books, however I need to find a way to get over these problems that plague me and hinder my ability to succeed.

Thanks for listening.

Welcome to WrongPlanet, and welcome to my time warp.

To WrongPlanet!! !

Hello Felipe, welcome, enjoy your stay on the Wrong Planet!

Hello, and welcome greetings to the WP neighborhood, Felipe.