Am I all right?

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Hi, I'm George Wilson. I just wanted to introduce myself here, and ask if anyone's had similar experiences with as few breaks as me. Does this experience remind you of your own, especially if you grew up when I did, or is it so unique advice is difficult?

I was born in Chicago, whisked away to rural France at 3, bounced from school to home-school to school in the countryside before going to an alternative elementary in the US in about 1995, moving back for a season at a private school in Paris, and finally returning to the US where I lived on the North Shore of Chicago and went to a regular elementary for only about a semester or two until I got dx'd with Asperger's (on top of an old ADHD diagnosis shifted to symptoms of the new one) and went to a therapeutic day school from grades 3 to 5. I had some behavior problems, largely preoccupations or jokes that I wore out too quickly, but my medication cocktail worked OK and I had good friends each place I lived, though at that age I could never tell how much our parents were pulling the strings.

When I was 11, I had my first and only sexual experience dry-humping a girl in our basement, but we had to stop 'cause our parents were getting ready to leave and we never had the opportunity again (nobody else knew for years). When I was 12, at the move to a new campus for the day-school from grades 5 to 6, I had a violent incident in a bored, stressful situation, the only real act of excessive force in my life (broken nose, aide didn't press charges). Although I had done exceptionally well at the school up to that point, we decided to leave as the middle school/high school wasn't working out. I had started having more tics and my psychiatrist claimed Tourette's as I spent middle school in home school, both me and my mother fearing that junior high would destroy me as someone different and introduce me to the first full-fledged bullying of my life at the worst time of it.

After New Trier wouldn't accept my standardized tests and the rent got higher, my mother decided to move us to Galena, a podunk town of 3,000 near the Iowa-Illinois-Wisconsin junction, in about 2002, on a property that had an orchard, since she thought I needed more exercise (I had been using the Internet avidly since our return to the US, but I wasn't obese) and saw a workshop for developmentally disabled people nearby that she feared I might need when I grew up. I disliked the work and felt panicky in the new setting, eventually getting somewhat different meds and still having to cross the state every few months to see my psych in Chicago even though I had a therapist in town. Around this time, my parents, who hadn't seen much of each other since my birth around the time my Dad got a Paris university teaching job, got divorced, but he kept supporting us until he was forced into retirement in about 2006. Meanwhile, my Mom hadn't kept a job since trying to teach in France and being treated like crap for her egalitarian, American approach to teaching English (her specialty).

Somehow, probably because of a great principal who saw something in me, I guess, the football-crazed, 300-student public high school let me in. I used a testing room from the beginning due to anxiety and increasingly difficult writing (basic essential tremor would be added in a few years to my dx's), at first only taking baths the night before a school day and by now wearing glasses which I've associated with bullying and isolation ever since. By a month or so in, I had started taking showers and quickly proved a leading student on the high honor rolls, but my social life never really got laid down. I had no connections in the area, so I bounced from one acquaintanceship over lunch and classes to another, largely with girls, while crushing on other girls that I insisted on greeting every day for awhile and was too forward with, which they tried to get me in trouble for by calling in the counselor to be their honorary dean (stalking charges that were never really prosecuted but humiliated me just the same). I guess I wanted the girls I couldn't have, but I'm not sure the girls that never invited me to do anything but talked to me at lunch would ever have responded much anyway. The first girl who got "uncomfortable" eventually proved a nice acquaintance when I later worked with her as light-board operator in drama club (she was slightly quirky and a lead actress, so I guess I overestimated her commonality with me). Meanwhile, a bunch of boys in my grade bullied me by insulting me and sometimes pelting me with harmless objects like spitwads, which I didn't really do much to report since I felt nothing could or would really be done. I joined the scholastic bowl team (a quiz bowl team that usually didn't get past regionals and wasn't popular at all), became the top scorer as a freshman on varsity, and took the team to 4th in state my freshman year, but the older teammates still left in future seasons would ditch the team for band dates and leave me with freshmen who didn't have any of the advanced courses the elders brought to the table, so we never got past sectionals again. My first group of female acquaintances (outside of quiz-bowl and drama club) ditched me after they started taking drugs and one of them lost her captainship at JV scholastic bowl to me, coming back and leaving twice more as they manipulated me. The second were volleyball team members that decided my complaining about one of them gloating at me over a badminton victory in PE (another humiliating daily experience after first semester) was grounds to ditch me, and from then on I counted on upper-classpeople, including other athletes for the first time, as my main substitutes for friends. My grade totally ostracized me after the first year, so it didn't look good for the future.

Between my first and second school years (2004), our neighbors suddenly decided my mother was scum when their daughter claimed (falsely) that my Mom tried to cheat her out of girl scout cookie money. From then on, my mother became conscious of our not being welcome in the community and feared our neighbors' junk-hoarding habit in their yard a threat to her property value designed to get our land on the cheap, as the earlier owners had dealt with, and she made calls about zoning violations, so eventually one of the family next door threatened to run her over with a front-loader, after which she held up a clump of dirt and backed away. The state's attorney wouldn't press charges, and the neighbors had police friends, so it came as no surprise when my Mom and my grandpa (living with us with health issues since we moved in) were in a car on the way back from dinner and stopped amidst a drunken house party spilling out onto the street, that the police were called and she was eventually arrested for parking where the neighbors always did illegally and "battery" (the officer, much stronger than my mother, claimed that she had scratched his arm with her keys as he dragged her out of her car, using the wrong arm for the situation as "evidence"). The doctor refused to let Mom use the bruises she got from her beating for her case, and a lack of local lawyers willing to take her case (including the local defense attorney who was denied her in jail) led her to spend $40,000 on lawyers who all used her only to make a guilty plea that she only was able to expunge a couple years ago. My mother's reputation ruined, I had an even harder time getting anywhere with my social life, and in my whole time there, no student ever invited me to do anything outside of school and extracurriculars; even my scholastic bowl teammates only visited and vice versa on our parents' initiatives, so no partying ever took place. When the principal who helped me get established died and was replaced by the gym assistant whose son went to the school, late in my second year (2005) she and her athletic director brokered a deal to allow the drama/scho-bowl coach, already tired of riding downstate every season, to relinquish the senior captain, son of some of the town's aristocrats, to the band director, in the presence of the kid's parents. As nice a guy as he could be, he went along with it and the rest of the elders on the team went with him. We didn't know about this until the last semester of my junior year, when people's increasing unfriendliness and life in this town in general led us to leave for home school again (the school wouldn't let me have shared enrollment and accused me of lying about the mix of bullying and exclusion that I faced), and the mother of team captain confessed it to my mother on the phone as the latter said goodbye. Nobody ever contacted me until I Facebooked some kids in freshman year of college, and I bid my time in total isolation as they went through proms and graduation, all the while remaining a virgin and never getting to be valedictorian as I surely would have by now. After passing AP exams from online credit for French and English Comp. and Lit., I got my GED and went to a small liberal arts college in Dubuque in 2007 that I'm graduating from this May.

I tried making friends again from scratch, and hung out with one guy, but others never really invited me into the inner circle. It was at best lunch chat, as in high school, and the guy transferred after upsetting the apple cart with his liberalism at the Catholic college. To make things worse, I dissed a home-schooled junior on Facebook after she acted friendly but then backed away when I wanted help fitting in. I pretty much just called her mean and said she was an attention whore and a fake on a board post and a wall, but one of the guys in a straight-edge group that I also criticized in the post brought it to the student life office's attention and probably to the girl's, thus getting me a no-contact order. I tried apologies but was forbidden from them, and the girl made sure everyone she could tell knew what happened. Feeling like I was f****d at making friends once again, I got depressed and was prescribed, in true psychiatrist shill form, with a mood cocktail in addition to the blood-pressure-regulating stuff that I'd been using for anxiety for a long time (I've had more frequent urination and less energy since taking it, and I seem to get sicker and put on more weight, but everyone just emphasizes the benefits and it kind of frustrates me). Next year, I met another girl who transferred a semester later and never really kept in touch as much as I would have liked. Facebook communications with old and new acquaintances never really amounted to much, and I remained the guy whose Facebook wall, message box, and cell phone were always empty of messages unless they were replies. I met another guy, but never was able to get to where he gigged, and a third guy who was on the soccer team and invited me to parties twice, but I hadn't gotten my drivers' license (just shy of the hours I needed because Mom didn't like how I talked in the car when she wanted silence and I wasn't driving) and so was driven by my mother to school, a huge embarrassment for me that was hard to get around. Even when I moved to Dubuque last March, I still was too far away to just walk without getting exhausted with my muscles (I'm not obese, but I think I have stubby arms, I've never been good at sports, and my legs can often tire easily), and there were complications with trying to work out on campus. One girl in my major (Spanish, with a history minor) was kind of cool and talked to me a lot in class, but we never saw each other outside of it and she ultimately got mad at me when I told her I didn't like her not responding to my messages ever after I didn't see her anymore.

I'm no longer wearing glasses, but I don't want to wear contacts and can't afford LASIK after my Dad stopped sending his alimony after firing and my Mom failed to get a job. I've only had one job through a make-work program, basically shredding and stuffing envelopes for the workshop where my Mom thought I'd be a customer. I'm graduating summa cum laude, no trouble there, but I hate writing no matter how good I am at it and have ruled out grad school full time for now. I don't really have see-each-other-regularly friends, though I haven't really had any invitations since puberty, and I've never had a girlfriend of any sort. I'm 22 now and will have a B.A., but what of it? I now have sort of a nonchalant, enjoy-life attitude, preferring to be interested in things like music, history, and the media and to politely carry conversations when people engage me, but I feel like heavy efforts haven't gotten me "in" so far and I just can't get women to see me as boyfriend material. I really don't mind being alone or being single, since I've realized that being real and not taking in whatever fake things people believe, as well as my intelligence, is a gift, but I sometimes wonder whether this world will crush someone with my inexperience and lack of one-upmanship or hostile ambition. As I graduate, I wonder whether any of the experiences I've missed out on can ever really be had on my terms, or if changes in youth trends, money problems, and age-of-consent laws and the like will keep me from ever really "living young." I want to look forward to the future, but my past has been pretty glamour-free by conventional people's standards.