Reintroduction

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Reintroducing myself. Sorry for the long post, but I was under the impression that rants are welcome here

One day while eating lunch at the lab (I am a graduate student at a university, in the neuroscience department [comical? I think so!], I picked up a Science magazine which had an article on autism. Being that pyschology and especially abnormal pyschology fascinates me (and pretty much any abnormal biological process/state); I decided to read through it before getting back to the bench. While I was expecting some string of heart-wrenching stories from families of autistic people (or the individuals themselves) mixed in with some biological information and a little bit of hope; I was not expecting to hear my own voice in their narrations…

Generally speaking, I have been very introverted and depressed to varying degrees all of my life; though never to any great extreme as I am still here and all. I am a very hard worker; I have this innate need to be industrious, which I think lends itself to my occupation of choice: lab rat. Being fortunate enough to have made it to gradschool; I think that this has been the saving grace in my life because it allows me to feel useful and to feel like I can contribute to something the same way anyone else can. I have always wanted to be a scientist, and though my areas of interest have changed, it’s always been the desire to integrate my thoughts and opinions into some greater collective (to belong?) that has kept me going.

Not to make it sound so easy… it’s a real struggle for me, and. I have to push myself, even when I think my motivation is gone. It’s very different at this stage of the game; whereas I used to find school so incredibly easy and boring, to the point of almost failing (which ironically got me placed into a magnet school) to now; where I am finding that all my quirks and unique approaches to problems don’t usually coincide with the highly refined scientific method. And it’s not that I don’t understand things ~ I can be taught ~ but I have been coming to my own conclusions for some time now, that something is different (wrong?) about the way I think and I am always trying to find ways to compensate for it without letting other people see the unorthodox ways I have to bang the information into my head.

Call it Asperger’s or call it weird, but this is kind of what I’ve been dealing with lately (1.5 years now). I could keep going on about it, but that would be an entirely new thread. I suppose the main jist of this line of thought is that having something as intense as a graduate research project to focus on (I mean, I usually work 12+ hours, 6-7 days a week) allows me to gloss over my introspective side, and at least put off rehashing all my inadequacies because I have been unable to find an answer for what is wrong with me…

While this approach does somewhat diminish the phenotypes of my depression, it hasn’t exactly helped me to be at one with myself or society on any real scale. There are times (usually when I do something wrong) that I am smacked in the face abruptly with my demons and I just kind of melt, like a fuse that’s had too much current pass through it… I can still go to parties and have absolutely no one talk to me and every single time this happens; my hopes and dreams that “this is just a phase” are dashed to bits on the rocks (whiskey or vodka rocks preferably ). And this is when I realize that even leisure is work for me… that it’s more and more likely this will never change; I won’t grow out of it… and that I’d rather be back at the lab pouring over some test tubes rather than standing around amidst people chit-chatting without so much as a glance in my direction.

I realize that there is a spectrum of people on these forums and I am somewhat aware of where I might fall (saving my quirks/symptoms for another rant) on that spectrum (I didn’t even know what Asperger’s was till about a week ago)… I’m just glad to finally have found the right planet.

So, Hi!

Hello and have fun and remember not to smoke crack on a good day (this is infact a joke which never works with sertan people who are in the wrong mind-set).

Welcome aboard, again. It's nice to see I am not the only one who has had spats with the scientific method.