Okay. This is my second try at writing this post. The first one ended at around 700 words into my life story, meticulously edited, when I had only gotten through a couple of symptoms. I apologize in advance for boring verbosity, and lack of any kind of organization other than loose unconnected paragraphs.. I'm 15, and I'm in the process of self-diagnosis of what I believe is Aspergers Syndrome, but I'm not going to dismiss the possibility of HFA quite yet, and I guess that now I'm going to awkwardly list a bunch of things about me that have led me to this conclusion, and I guess I'd like you to comment on them if you have any kind of interesting thing to say. Anyways.
Starting at the beginning, during my early childhood, I was always running into trouble with the authority figure at school, or a parent, due to what I perceived as unnessesscary obtuseness, a lack of regard for my personal goals, and the constant wish to 'discipline' me, by torturing me with assignments that tested my ability to neatly copy things from one sheet of paper to another, a task which was often quite painful due to my later diagnosed essential tremor (my hands shake and my writing sucks) or, in the case of my parents, withholding objects from me due to the blockheaded fallacy that since I liked them, and I often acted angrily, that they must be causing my anger, (because A and B, A therefore B) and that when I was even more outraged at their taking of such things, that I was confirming their suspicions. (Chronological note: This is me at 11, max.)
I never made friends very fast (a total of two during 6 miserable years of grade school), and I found myself exceptionally isolated when going to summer camp; I would rejoice in the connected feeling, and the general friendliness among the people there, all wonderful, but I generally developed a crush on one or two girls, who I either didn't notice the receptiveness of, in the best of cases, or who eventually accused me of stalking them, neither of which I very much enjoyed, or in some cases, never actually talked to me, or whose names I never learned. I fell for people exceptionally fast at that age, averaging 4 or 5 intense crushes in a single year, of whom I entirely failed to even attract a scrap of attention from.
At a young age, I had a habit of using a certain different voice for sarcastic comments, mostly agreeing with the person to whom I was talking, ridiculing a point with a sardonic illustration of it's flaws, or talking in the character of another person in the style of a humorous caption on a picture. I've never had any trouble with humor, but it took me a number of years to realize that people didn't realize I was using a different voice for such comments, and were taking them as my own, making me look like an absolute fool or irrationally saying random things. Other times, I used a relatively large lexicon and confusing phrasing, leading a friend to remark that I was like a dictionary for my breadth and quantity of specific words. (well, he didn't say it quite like that.) I remarked that by his statement, I'd be much more of a thesaurus. In second or third grade, a special ed teacher testing my vocabulary said that it was at "college level", which I took to mean college level under No Child Left Behind's lax levels of testing.
I've just begun picking up on the whole "eye contact" thing, and I'm very much amateur at understanding where to apply it. I've gotten down the various places on the face where I should look for different effects, (business eye contact, friendly eye contact) but I've never really mastered the art of looking away at the right time.
My obsessive interests are generally related in some way to computing, and electronics, as I imagine is fairly common. In particular, I was for quite a while preoccupied with Nintendo, and for about the last 6 years I've been obsessed with Apple, but the iPhone and the iPad's lack of depth as a topic and as a product (no exploring file systems, no mods, just the ability to actually *use* the device) has put me off Apple as a whole, and made me center more on Mac OS as the center of my obsession. Last week I went to an Apple Store opening, and I got there early enough to be 18th in a line of around a thousand. Other obsessions have been smaller, and only lasted until a while after I've either decided that it's wholly impossible for me to acquire a device, such as in the case of a Palm Pre, where I spent months reading and understanding all the major carrier's wireless plans, or until I succeed in acquiring the object of my desire, and for a while after, such as in the case of my (spectacular) Grado headphones, which I took the plunge on after several disconnected nights of obsessive googling for reviews, etc. I love music, and I often find myself lying awake listening to a song with my eyes closed, and exploring the recording. I'm not easily bothered by moderately loud irregular noises, such as the sound from being in a car, but consistent regular pitches bother me to an extent; the fan on a computer, hiss on a bad headphone port, the spinning of a CD, locusts, I try my hardest to keep them all away from me,
Now, since three years ago now, I've been going to a Quaker school, (sidenote to any aspie parents out there: Quaker schools are wonderfully unauthoritarian and welcoming, and as far as I can tell, the best place you could possibly send your kid.) and I've largely stripped myself of fighting against authority. For some reason still unknown to me, I fell in quite amazingly quickly, with despite my comparatively lacking maturity and lack of hygiene, girls (none of the nice ones though :/ ) were literally chasing me and asking me to sit next to them. I didn't quite make it socially for a while, but then I got to know one girl really well, not by me approaching her, but rather by that I had just signed up for Facebook, and I put my IM screenname up for no real reason, and she contacted and got to know me. Love it or hate it, social networking is useful for a recluse. Long story short, she convinced me that I should try to get the girl I liked to go out with me, and it sounded rather exceptional, and all went to plan until winter vacation arrived and we had to communicate via IM, we eventually decided that we were in a relationship on a day in december, and then afterwards we met back up with a group, and with her wishing to keep it secret, we never actually acknowledged it again because I had no clue what to do, and we just both felt like crap with the ghost of a relationship we had, and then I went to scotland, and I was miserable, and I came back, and I was miserable, and she broke up with me and I was miserable and I had absolutely no clue why she did it. So yeah. You can check me off for mindblindness and dehabilitating awkwardness.
Finally. I haven't even mentioned the words "Autism" or "Asperger's" to my now more reasonable parents, because I have no clue how to bring it up.
There's probably more I'm forgetting, but I'm not too keen on hitting the character limit, if there is one, and it's 2 am, so I'll stop here, but there you go. Have a nice day/night, all.
03 Aug 2010, 1:15 am
