Hello everyone, I am new to this forum (just found it today) but I been around on the net for longer than I can remember
Now, everyone has a story. Not every story starts at the beginning, sometimes it starts not quite at the middle, gets near the end, then relate to things in the beginning before it can reach its end.
My story begins in the mid to late 80's, back in my middle school years. This is the time I was able to realize more on what the psychological tests the school has been giving me. This one test in specific included an IQ test. I don't remember what my IQ score was, but I do remember being told many times that my IQ at the time was a lot higher than the psychiatrist the school employed to help the special needs students. At this point in time I was labeled as having ADD (without the hypertension), it was indicated I was passively resistant and could hyper focus but only when I wanted to and only on what I wanted to.
Now to go back in time a bit. Here I can only reflect on what I have been told by my parents. When I was in preschool my parents were told I would be a very difficult child to raise. they couldn't explain how I would be difficult but my behavior was abnormal enough that they knew I'd be more than a handful.
Through elementary school my memory on things and events are spotty at best (I do remember the principal's name was hard enough to pronounce that I always called him Mr Spagetti). Like many others with similar problems I have dealt with considerable levels of school bullying. One of the worse moments I recalled was being pulled by a group of peers behind a boulder, being held up while another peer kicked my armpits multiple times. A behavioral memory from this period of time I recall tearing pieces of paper into tiny pieces to blow at peers as they walk by my desk. I have vague memories of some speech therapy involving both pronunciation and meaning of "Tongue" and "Thumb". There have been periods throughout my life where words sort of switch places with similar sounds. Like, about 10 years ago I did that with "Tractor" and "Trailer" (at the time we had a garden tractor and a pop-up camper). Another memory I constantly had was it was almost a daily instance I'd be coming home with another "Bad Note" from the teacher. Now what I don't recall that happened in these years is they did test me to make sure I wasn't ret*d. Luckily for me they realized I was not ret*d in any way they categorized retardation at the time. how many low-budget schools worked in those days is if someone's needs were documented at being beyond what they could handle I could have either been institutionalized or we'd have to move (since my parents at the time wouldn't be able to afford any sort of private education)
Now, as a side note, ADD/ADHD was an extremely common label given to kids/teens who had attention difficulty even when they didn't quite fit the label, because with the label many of these kids could be medicated to a point where they are a lot easier to handle in large classes, and the fact that though Aspurgers has been known since the 70's, it has always been difficult to diagnose and in smaller school systems still unknown even through the 80's. Now as a note I can say I am happy kids & adolescents aren't beaten for odd misbehavior like they were a few generations before mine
The next segment of my story goes back to my High School years. In high-school I was in mostly normal classes, but i'd have a few special classes. Thinking more closely on it, it was more structured like a form of group and behavioral therapy crossed with a study hall. (back in the day that school was one of the top schools in my state, but since has fallen drastically in it's rating) I never said much on it mostly because i didn't really know how to explain how I knew ADD only could explain a few things and even those it never felt quite right. Luckily even at this time I was never medicated for any of my problems.
Now during both Jr High and High School slowly emerged a new interest: Computers & the Internet! Reflecting back to the day I was highly obsessed with computers & if it weren't being pried away from the computer i'd not do anything else after school. I remember trying out the k-12 program which was an early form of the internet free of charge to school-aged children. You didn't have WWW or anything, back then it was gopher. Best way to describe gopher is it was a time when there was far less on the net, most of what was there was hosted at collages, and when you log into the internet you'd be at the local collage page, and you'd have something similar to a link (but differant) to tunnel to other pages,from which you could then tunnel to yet another page (but if any of the sites you tunneled to went down you'd loose connection to that page and any site you tunned to after it and you'd either wait for it to come back up or see if you can tunnel to the end destination though another school's site).
I remember in later High School trying out a few trials on AOL through Windows 3.1x, and for a while my family used Prodigy since my father had a free account through work. (In those days most web access was gained though massive BBS-like services such as AOL and Prodigy though Prodigy was later bought-out by AOL, and they usually metered access to anything outside their private network after you been on a certain period of time)
Now I mention the significance of the internet because it was in my mid- 20's that I started exploring both myself and what it is that I actually have. I been on several social networks (I do have a lot of social problems but I do best on-line in small groups, groups with similar intersts/problems, or one-one's) and I have started meeting a lot of individuals who were very similar to me socially, and many of these individuals mentioned at some point in time or another they had aspergers, or refering to their problems as high function autism. After that, on and off i'd be looking up any information I could find on Aspergers.
Then the next important point in life happened: I lost my job. Long story short, I was basically the equivalent of a tier 2 in an internet call center. that all went fine since computers have always been an interest point to a point where I am super-focused on. What lead to the loss of my job is the telecommunications company I worked for was having a lot of financial problems. One of their moves to cut costs was instead of having groups who specialized in each individual service, they wanted everyone to be an expert at everything. For me the problem was that by adding both telephone and cable TV to my responsibilities, and basically having to learn more about the operations than a normal employee on the phones, was more than I was able to mentally handle at a time, and there was too many things that at the time I could not mentally break down into smaller chunks to properly deal with, especially when handling a call involving more than one service.
After that job I helped my mother for several years at a family buisness, eventually that buisness was shut down due to a combination of not having enough money to pull through a severe recession, my mother's health problems, new building codes, and new laws in regards to providing benefits. (most businesses in general closed down if the owners were not wealthy)
After this, I was qualified for a free state-provided health insurance, and with the documentation from my grade-school years, I was able to get onto disability. (it's harder now with the world economy but even ADD/ADHD in some cases qualifies one for disability)
Now to finish my story, about 7 years ago I sought out a psychologist and got the proper diagnosis on paper.
Over the years I have grown a lot, I have chat with more people with various disabilities than I can even count. One of my growth area's is I no longer need days to weeks to observe a forum or group to know how it works, and I have known for years how to write a post with a lot of information about myself yet not be personal to a point where people will either read it and know who I am, or see this post and know who I am as the poster.
I won't disclose much information but Aspergers does somewhat run in my family along with other disorders.
I could go on about more things but I do not wish to write a book so I'll finish this post with one last statement:
It doesn't matter what you have been diagnosed with. You are still the same individual before and after a diagnosis. Don't let it run your life, but instead learn and/or develop methods to take more control over your life. Also, everyone is different so what works for one won't work for another.
11 Jul 2014, 9:26 pm
.
