Hey there
I'm nearly 36 and have had a LONG history of Aspergers symptoms. In my childhood - as an only child, I never fit in, was constantly ridiculed, found it hard to make friends and participate in the class. In my later schoolyears, I was the computer whiz. Back when we had, like, 5 computers in the whole school, I would be generally hanging out with a couple of deaf students in their class at lunch playing games on the computer while my so-called peers played sports and did typical NT stuff. When I hit puberty, I let my weight (I was pretty chubby!) define me; I withdrew as my peers found the opposite sex; I found girls to be strange alien people. I left school and worked in IT, not really knowing why and who I was and where I'ld end up. If I wasn't an expert in a subject I'd find myself stumbling, feel like a foolish mess that just awkwardly lolled around in a social circumstance. While I didn't share their extreme interests (like dungeons and dragons, LAN parties or anime) I seemed to feel at my best with the type of people that enjoyed those.
In my late 20s I escaped my home town and moved, hoping for a new beginning. I am still in here, love it here but still find it almost impossible to have friends. My only close friend is my partner who finds me incredibly hard to deal with at times and I met on the internet.
Now, in my mid thirties, not being able to dull the questions about what the hell I'm doing in my life and where I'm headed and wondering what could have been, I've started wondering what else is wrong with me. Psychs ruled out bipolar, borderline, psychosis and more over the years and the best I've been offered is "severe depression" or dysthymia or (get this) an "unspecified mood disorder". Treat the symptoms, they say. A diagnosis will not change the quality of life. Yet I'm no happier than I was when I first started taking anti-depressants in my late teens.
That was until around now. I can't recall how I found out about Aspergers a few days ago, but I did so as I blankly stared at my ipad, tapping random links, while I was on the train home from work. I stumbled across a site called Aspie from Maine - and actually cried (right there on the train!) I was overcome by how the stories there felt so much like mine. So here I am, discovering, learning, searching. I'm not sure whether diagnosis will help, or even how to go about getting it, any advice is appreciated. I just know, right now, that I feel more connected to humanity now in the past couple of days than I have for months.
08 Apr 2013, 7:25 am
