[quote="Basagu"]Congrats on the diagnosis (Its good to know whats up) and welcome to WP!
If you give us some information on how old you are and in what kind of situation you are i could offer more help. Also, can i ask you something? I`ll be super anoyed if i knew something was wrong but i didn`t know what. So what made you go get the diagnosis, curiosity?
Oh, and welcome, again <3[/quot.e]
Well, I'm 33, married to a mostly very cool NT man. We have three kids (10, 4, and 2). I self-diagnosed at 19 and actually started seeing a therapist about it because the isolation had become really depressing. She wasn't much help, as the only thing she seemed to know how to do was explain how I was broken and encourage me to become as NT-like as possible.
I did pick up a few good tricks-- forced eye contact, a mental log of the probable meanings of some of the bigger nonverbal cues, the understanding that I would have to feign and force interest in sex if I wanted to have a relationship with a man, the idea of limiting myself to a certain number of sentences when discussing things that interest me, the concept of speaking only when spoken to directly and answering only the question asked in the fewest words possible in unfamiliar social situations-- that have allowed me to get along with the NT world.
I got the diagnosis because I got severely depressed for the second time in my life. Some of it I'm sure is neurochemical, some of it is grief surrounding the death of my father, but a lot of it is low self-esteem from having AS, reading all the awful crap the experts have to say about us, worrying that my husband feels like "a rose in an emotional desert" and my kids are growing up deprived in some way I don't understand, generally seeing myself as some kind of monstrosity. I figured if I was asking people for help, they ought to be playing with all the information-- so I told them what I suspected, they did all the cool neuropsych testing (it was fun-- the psych student administering the tests and I really cracked up over the memory tests and the facial recognition tests-- we had a real good laugh) and it turned out I was right (big surprise--NOT!!)
I learned to tolerate a lot of stuff NT people take as a matter of course-- changes of plans, changes of routines, loud noises, bright colors, flashing lights, tons of traffic, multiple people talking at once, not being able to do what I want to do when I want to do it (as long as I know I will get to do it eventually, and some idea of when). I've learned to force myself to have sex and act like I like it (oftentimes I even fool myself, which I suspect means I've learned to actually enjoy it).
I have other problems. I wonder if it's even fair to my husband for me to be married-- if we are really capable of being good spouses, if a lot of his self-esteem problems couldn't be cured with a therapist, a divorce, and a nice new NT wife. If I can actually be a good mother, or if I'm not as incapable of empathy as the experts say and my kids aren't going to end up horribly scarred in addition to possessing "defective DNA." If it's OK for me to pursue things that interest me when I know I have a tendency to perseverate and to become "too interested". If it's OK for me to ask for what I need, to take the world on my terms at least some of the time, or if I have to force myself into the NT box all the time in order to be fair to others and a good human being. If the prevalence of really nasty judgments against us (both as potential psychopaths and because of misunderstandings with clueless or nasty NT folks) don't just add up to the fact that difference really is deficit.
They can medicate me for depression. They can teach me about cognitive distortions. They can help me learn not to fixate on negative thoughts. They can help me learn a few more tricks to appear neurotypical. What they can't do is answer the questions about whether or not it's OK to be me, whether that's fair to others, at what point it stops being fair to me, if I even have a right to consider "fair to me" at all or if AS doesn't make me so idiosyncratic that what I want, what I think shouldn't even be on my radar...
In short, they can't seem to help me figure out who to be, who I ought to be, who I have a right to be. They can't help me develop what my husband calls "a sense of self" or decide if it's even OK for me to have one (whatever "a sense of self" really is). They can help me get past being depressed, but they can't help me figure out "What now??" And "What now??" is what got me depressed in the first place.
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"Alas, our dried voices when we whisper together are quiet and meaningless, as wind in dry grass, or rats' feet over broken glass in our dry cellar." --TS Eliot, "The Hollow Men"
29 Sep 2011, 12:16 pm
