Hello. I'm Kythe and I just joined this site today. I'm really nervous about joining because this looks like a big site, and I'm already feeling overwhelmed even though I haven't really done much but read the posting rules. I'm also really nervous, because historically, I tend to not get along very well with others on the spectrum, and this applies to interactions that took place before I or the other person were diagnosed as well as interactions where I was aware of my and the other person's diagnosis.
It was suggested to me by a speech therapist that I should try to find some sort of support group, even if it was only online, so I guess I'm going to give this a try. I can't promise that I'm going to be super active on this site. I suffer from from fibromyalgia/cfs on top of the Asperger's, so I usually don't have a lot of energy for social interactions. Yet I suffer from the catch 22 that I tend to become extremely lonely, so I'll do the best I can.
A little about me, I found out I had Asperger's as an adult in 2011. I was in my late 20s at the time and I'm 33 years old now. My entire life I've had trouble with social interactions. I usually like to have a lot of alone time and have memories as a kid of spending a lot of time alone on the playground during recess, attempting to telepathically communicate with the trees. There were times when I would refuse to play with the girl living across the street because I wanted to read. In fact, my mother has told me that when she enrolled me in a toddler group at 18 months old, I'd refuse to participate in group activities and would go off in the corner to look at books.
I like having a few close friends though, as long as I can socialize with them on my terms. Unfortunately, I've always had a very hard time making and keeping friends, and at this point in my life, I don't really have friends anymore, or at least no one close that I talk to on a regular basis. The vast majority of my socialization is with my immediate family that I live with, and I feel like my relationships with them are quite strained, so I tend to feel very lonely and isolated. My fibromyalgia/cfs has rendered me unable to drive and I live in a semi-rural area with almost no public transportation, so getting out to meet new people is virtually impossible. Not that there's really anything to do around here that I'm interested in anyway.
In addition to the social difficulties, I also have a big problem with sensory processing. When I was a kid, this mostly manifested as difficulty concentrating in school. I really can't read or write while someone is talking or if there's too much background noise. My third grade teacher was convinced I had ADD, but I was never diagnosed. In my mid-teens I started having a lot of trouble with sensory sensitivities to pretty much everything, but I think I struggle the most with noise and smells/chemical fumes. This seems to have coincided with the onset of my fibromyalgia which I think I developed after a very nasty bout of Fifth's disease which kept me out of school for a month in the 10th grade. It may just be a coincidence though. I'm pretty sure my father is on the spectrum, though never diagnosed, and he definitely has noise sensitivity issues as an adult that weren't present when he was a kid. Or at least they weren't according to his sister. He would always ignore me anytime I tried to ask him about it directly.
I would definitely say that I have "special interests". Some of them come and go over time and others have remained fairly constant. I suppose my current obsessions are knitting/crochet, birds, space/astronomy, and rocks/crystals. I like sci-fi and fantasy in general, but more specifically I'm obsessed with the TV show Forever, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, and the Discworld series(as well as the MUD game based on it). I've also started enjoying historical period dramas more in the past couple of years. I do enjoy reading and writing quite a bit, but I really haven't had the focus/energy to do those things very much for quite awhile. Not sure this really counts as a special interest, but I'm very obsessed with the color blue, specifically dark midnight or navy blue shades. I wear dark blue clothes a great deal of the time and try to surround myself with this color as much as possible.
Sorry this ended up being much longer than I thought it would be. I'm naturally very verbose and often find that by the time I've said everything I've wanted to say, posts/emails end up being much longer than I'd originally intended. I think this tends to put people off, or often times it seems that people miss the point of what I was trying to say, even though I think I'm being perfectly clear, but I hope these things will be less of a problem on a site like this.
15 May 2017, 2:18 pm
It's a huge site but it has a ton of friendly people. I hope to see you around!
