Hello. My name is Paul, I’m a 26 year old male from West Yorkshire, England. I found this site through references on the Aspergers LJ community. In some regions of my life I’m doing well, and not so good in others. I joined in the hope of getting some guidance in sorting out the second category.
My history follows, and it ran away with me a bit during the writing process.
I was diagnosed about twelve years ago. I had known something was subtly wrong for a while before that—I didn’t get on very well with other children, didn’t handle stress very well and was prone to tantrums. The diagnosis didn’t mean a lot to me at the time. As I got older, I started to become more uncomfortable with others, and more prone to offending others and prompting either annoyance or the other person quietly giving up on me.
I then moved on to university. Looking back, this was a serious mistake. I had the wrong attitude, believing that something would happen to miraculously change me into a socially functional adult—after all, that was what appeared to happen to everyone else. It didn’t.
After I graduated, I fell foul of not knowing what to do again, and spent two and a half years being almost completely unemployed. Overall, this was a low point. I felt useless and unable to improve my situation. Because my life didn’t bring me in contact with other people outside my family and I hadn’t any friendships to carry over from secondary school or university, my social circle shrank to nothing.
In 2004, I finally found the first of two long-term jobs. Though it was very unsatisfying on the whole (mainly due to a specific person, rather than the job as a whole), it did kickstart me in a lot of ways, helping restore confidence, giving me some degree of financial independence and giving me a foot in the door when applying for future work. Finally associating with people also gave me a chance to assess myself a bit, and see where exactly my problems were coming from.
Nowadays, I am consciously trying to change myself. I’m trying to strike a balance between expressing my quirks freely and unintentionally offending people on the one hand and mimicking normality and living in a state of exhausted tension on the other. Also, I’m attempting to become more familiar with myself, so I can predict my reactions to the world better, and cut off self-destructive behaviors before they start. Basically, I consider myself a work in progress.
My interests include reading, creative writing, philosophy, and role-playing games. On the physical side of things, there is karate, swimming and lately, long-distance walking.
08 Apr 2007, 10:08 am
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