Hi everyone! I just stumbled on this forum a couple days ago and I'm blown away by how much similar my situation is to so many people on here. I'm a 25 year old guy from the US who's between jobs at the moment, likely due to many of my own symptoms.
I apologize if I end up rambling, but I figure I should try and get my own situation out there and there's not an easy way to dive into everything, aside from just laying it all out. To give a little background, I've had AS symptoms for most of my life, and these affect my social interaction in a lot of different ways. These include an inability to read other's body language, poor eye contact, awkward movements, poor conversational skills, and even an inability to carry on long term cordial relationships. This has lead to me not having very many close friends....of course, I have a lot of "friends", people who I speak with occasionally and keep up with, but they haven't penetrated what I call my "bubble". Most people don't go out of their way to include me in their social clique, and depending on the person, my presence in a certain place or event can even be awkward or unwanted. (Of course, this is something I've had to train myself to notice, as I was completely oblivious to until I went to college, and first heard about Aspergers).
I have a Bachelor of Arts and I spent two years studying graduate level Philosophy, though the triviality of the field drove me up the wall so I decided my career interests lay elsewhere. Unfortunately, a study of the humanities doesn't provide many practical job skills, so I'm trying to figure out where I want my life to go from here. I'm thinking about going back to school to earn a Masters degree in computers, since I gravitate towards the internet in most of my free time, and the idea of spending hours and hours in front of a computer screen is actually a relief.
Despite my social shortcomings, I am married and have been involved with her for several years. My AS traits have caused some tension in the past, and they still lead to some rough patches here and there but she is very supportive of me and has stuck by me through thick and thin.....I count on her a lot to point things out to me that I would otherwise never notice or realize. She's very much a down to earth person and is very sociable so she gives me a lot of insight into the social world. Most of what I've taught myself about dealing with NTs I've learned from her, so I consider her to be a huge part of my life (which is very remarkable since I tend to be very aloof with 99% of the population). Initially, when I was in school, I was fine with others and didn't find dealing with people to cause many problems, but this changed once my AS traits began causing problems and led to me feeling excluded and put down. Most of the time I wasn't even aware of why I was being treated differently, typically by my peers and even by teachers at a few points. This led to a lot of resentment on my part so I became very asocial by the time I entered high school. Sure, I had some people I socialized with on a daily basis, but I only had one or two friends, in the truest sense of the word.
This changed a lot in college, though, as I fell in with a group who shared a lot of the same interests and were very tolerant and accepting. This was easily one of the few times in my life where I felt that I really belonged somewhere but it only lasted for those four years. Once I went to graduate school I was faced with the same hard-nosed attitude so I fell back into my shell again, and that continued through my most recent job. I'm getting very discouraged by it, though, which is why I'm thinking a career in computers is a good idea. I understand how a computer works much more than I do NTs, so I figure it's not a bad way to make a career. I'm not sure yet how well I'll do with programming, so I'm not sure whether networking or programming is my best option. I just figure I'll wait till I take some courses and see how it worked. Of course, I taught an introductory logic course in graduate school and took a graduate level on formalized logic and ate it up like candy. It was very challenging but I loved every minute of it..
Anyway, that's my story....I'm hoping to get to know you all as I share my own experiences, and maybe we can give each other some guidance.
14 Apr 2010, 6:57 pm
To WrongPlanet!! !
