I know I tend to drag things on a bit, so I'm gonna try to keep it brief. I am posting on this website for the first time and reading your stories is like reading from my memories. I was classed as 'gifted' in school, but I was never challenged enough. I constantly found myself with nothing to do, and consequently the teachers assumed I was lazy and attention seeking. I was bullied relentlessly in primary school (elementary school to my American cohorts, I'm British btw) and accused of attention seeking by teachers and parents alike. And seeing how the authority figures in my life were next to useless, I decided to take matters into my own hands and stop the bullying myself with violence. (For the record, it was a last resort as the bullying was virtually daily, since my bully lived across the street and I had no way to get away from him.) And for a while it worked.
It prompted a change in how people saw me, both for the better and for the worse; while it prompted my parents to get me checked out at a psychologist, and subsequently getting a borderline diagnosis for Aspergers due to my father sabotaging the paperwork, I never got a complete formal diagnosis. The worse part came in the form of the isolation - nobody wanted to be friends with the weird guy. I grew up feeling that nobody wanted to know me, so in turn I made little to no effort in getting to know them. High school was a similar situation, although there were other 'gifted' people in my class, they were gifted with social skills as well, so while I studied and worked my way to top marks on tests, they were getting top marks and having lives. Needless to say, it was disheartening, that they could have what I could never have.
As I progressed into college and eventually University, I set my sights on a Chemistry degree, hoping that I would be able to start living my life away from the stigma of Aspergers, believing it was holding me back. I focused all my studying into knowing everything about the subject, but after a while I became bored. And sadly, that was the start of my academic downfall. I started spending more and more time playing games and watching films than I did studying. This crushed my eventual degree into a 2:2 Bachelors of Science, when I was more than capable of getting a First.
After that, I lost all interest in Chemistry. I had no idea what I would do and where I could work, so I asked for help from advisors and government employees. Naturally, they didn't have the answers I needed, since they didn't know them either given the Aspergers. I eventually found employment in a restaurant, washing dishes; purely as a way of earning some money and getting some much needed soft skills. However, there is a catch, as always. My relationship with my management team was... rocky, to say the least. During interview, I didn't disclose my disability for fear of being prejudiced against; and I turned out to be spot on. When I told them of it when signing my contract, the general manager told me in no uncertain terms that 'had I told him at interview, he would not have hired me.' I was in shock, that not only was my fear actually becoming true, but that this guy was willing to break the law just because I had a disability that he never wanted to deal with. Over the next few weeks, things were uncomfortable between the two of us, despite repeated attempts to smooth things over between us from the rest of the team. And had it not been for my sister, (who led me to this site as a social worker btw) I probably would have quit within two weeks.
It has been tough working, particularly in such a stressed environment, but they do try to keep me calm, even recognizing when I'm becoming overwhelmed and/or frustrated with work. It is a good sign that there are people willing to care even a little bit about me. Lately though, I have been getting more and more frustrated with my life in general: I have less money each week as my hours are cut little by little; I have no money to afford anything that I would like, as I have to pay out for other essential things, like new shoes when the old ones fall apart; and my mum, whom I live with as I can't afford my own place is frustrated at how I'm always at home, never going out and socializing with friends, despite not having any in the area I live in, and having no money to spend on going to bars and pubs and getting drunk. Needless to say, I think it is finally time I started talking my thoughts out with other people aside from my family.
So much for brief...
23 Oct 2014, 5:36 pm
welcome to the club 
it is indeed hard to make a living for most of us.
