Hello all. This is something of a first for me, posting in a forum of this nature, so forgive me if I stumble into faux pas unawares. My name is Alexis. You may call me by this or by my screenname, I don't really care. Hell, you can refer to me as OP. No matter how impersonal, a welcome's a welcome, and would be appreciated regardless.
So. Like many of you, I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome only after many years of stumbling through life without a clue of what it was that made me so.. odd. Or.. no, no, what made everyone else so odd and so incapable of understanding anything I tried to say. I was clever, after all. I proved it over and over again in school, and all the adults I talked to called me a little prodigy. Surely, then, it was everyone else my age (or, later, everyone else period) that was so excruciatingly slow. I fancied myself simply more mature - I thought on a higher level. It was lonely at times, but I felt confident that I'd eventually find people I could speak with on my level.
It was.. around entering middle school, I think, that I began to suspect that perhaps some of my weirdness was just that. Weird. What explanation could I give, really, for the near constant back and forth shaking of my foot? Or the way I pinwheeled my arms when I ran? Or how damned much the school lights bothered me, or the way I'd get so rattled at the sound of someone dropping a textbook that I'd snap at or strike whoever did it? These were differences between me and the rest of the world that I couldn't rationalize as superiority. I was... an odd one out. And slowly, surely, I began to notice more and more that all the stupid things that baffled me about people... everyone else seemed to get them! There were conversations going on without me, somehow, but I couldn't hear them. It was as if everyone else just had some... some psychic ability that I didn't. Add to this horrifying realization of ineptitude, something I'd been so unforgiving of in others, that for the very first time in my life, my teachers didn't fawn over me. In fact, they were constantly... disappointed in me. They said that they could tell I was smart, that I could do better than this if I just tried.
...but. I was already trying. I was.. I was trying and failing. And I couldn't.. I..
It hurt. A lot. I stopped trying for a while, I think, or did it intermittently. I was diagnosed with Social Anxiety Disorder at some point, which I suppose was accurate, but without the root of the real issue the knowledge was extremely unhelpful. Every time I socialized, particularly in a setting more than one-on-one, there was this horrid, haunting feeling that I was missing something. That something was expected of me and I was not delivering. And the more nervous I got, of course, the worse I did. And oh god, my first panic attack! If nothing else I feared I would die of mortification.
Years passed, I flipped back and forth between that haughty superiority and oh-god-I'm-not-good-enough panic. They fed each other, really. I was better, therefor I HAD to be better to live up to my own expectations, and if I wasn't? Utter failure and inadequacy.
Finally, a couple of years ago, the diagnosis came, and it was so f*****g obvious that I wondered why it had never occurred to me. Or, rather, why I didn't pursue my suspicions when it did. Or.. No. I knew the real reason - I feared I was being a hypochondriac, or that people would assume I was. I'd tried so hard to figure out what that nagging wrongness was so many times before that I feared not being taken seriously if I cried wolf again. So I just.. put it out of my mind, and waited for someone else to come up with it.
And here we are now. I have Asperger's syndrome, and I display the symptoms so blatantly that I might as well tack a flashing neon sign onto my head.
The problem that has me troubled enough to post here... well. Knowing what was wrong with me was supposed to be my panacea, you know? And.. it wasn't. I still flip erratically back and forth between feeling superior and feeling defective; I just have a name for my oddness now. There's never an inbetween. Never simple acceptance that I am different, and that is a neutral phenomenon. I am.. okay.
That's what I'm seeking here. The ability to accept myself as.. well, if not normal, then an acceptable deviancy.
Um. That's.. that's it, I suppose. Sorry if I bored you to tears. TL;DR: I'm an Aspie and not sure what to make of it. Wazzup?
02 Jun 2008, 2:31 pm
