Hello all,
My name's Kenneth, I'm 26, and for the past half-year I've suspected I have Asperger's Syndrome - though I've known all along that I had something. It's just that until recently, I had never been able to pinpoint what it was.
I discovered this website/forum some two months ago and have been meaning to post here a LOT, but with my internet access being shaky at the best of times, it wasn't exactly a thing I could get to right when something I would want to post would manifest itself. Besides, I wanted to introduce myself first, and give some decent background on where I'm coming from.
My whole life, I’ve felt an odd detachment from my peers, and even from my friends, that I could never truly describe, and every time I tried, people would just throw it in my face and assume I was lying. The best I can describe this feeling was, well, a sort of sense of being on the outside looking in, almost like I was locked inside a different dimension or something and had no palpable influence on any others around me. I didn’t act the same way everyone else acted, I didn’t feel the way everyone told me I was supposed to feel, and I wondered sometimes if I was mentally ret*d in some way, because my friends could all focus on schoolwork like it was second nature to them, even when they hated the subject matter, whereas I simply couldn’t get my mind off stupid things like the cartoons I would be watching that afternoon. By the time I got into high school, my schoolmates could read books as quickly as they could breathe, but even though I had no trouble with the actual reading aspect of it, it would take me (and it still does) about five times reading the same sentence before it actually registered in my head, thanks to all the rogue thoughts floating around upstairs and clogging up my learning capabilities. I mean I REALLY couldn’t get my mind off my interests. To make matters even more awkward, many people around me could tell fun stories and anecdotes in the most impeccable manner, never missing a beat, and always staying animated enough to hold their listeners’ interest. I gradually realized (and it took my friends no time at all to notice this) that despite my personal passion for telling stories, I just couldn’t do it the right way. My mind would jump all over the place as I was speaking, and it was all I could do to stay on subject – which manifested itself by this awful, broken manner of speech that has plagued me my entire life. I eventually served an LDS mission, where this stuttering problem drastically hindered my ability to communicate anything to anyone, and a few years later, during my first semester at Utah State University, I received a calling to be a Sunday School teacher, which produced the same results. For the life of me, I could not figure out what it was that made me so flipping weird and separated from everyone else’s mindsets. I was in my mid-twenties and still watching cartoons (not just anime – I mean CARTOONS), and seemed to always be about ten years behind where my interests should have been. Shoot, all throughout high school I had the stigma of being a Power Rangers fan, and that embarassing secret weighed so heavily on me, I found myself desperate to meet anyone who so much as mentioned having watched it ONCE. And then Pokemon came around during my senior year, and… ugh, I’m not even going to open up that can of worms. Case in point: my interests have always been more of the stuff meant for kids than anything, and that’s why I preferred Ducktales to G.I. Joe, DragonBall to Cowboy Bebop, and MOTHER to Final Fantasy. You see, even among the nerds, I was a nerd. That makes for one hell of an inferiority complex, and I’m not kidding.
I tried looking into it countless times, asking counselors or just other people I knew and felt I could confide in, why it was I constantly seemed to be tuned into the wrong frequency. I had serious trouble finding jobs, because I didn’t know where on earth to start looking (I mean, heck, these things don't come naturally to me, and I'm terrified of job hunting). I was grateful to have friends, but whatever set of friends I had at any given time in my life never understood what made me tick, and so I kept my thoughts to myself most of the time (this I do not recommend). Basically, that is, when I say "friends" I usually don't mean friends in the neurotypical sense of the word. There are exceptions (mostly to be found in my beloved college town of Logan, Utah), but the majority of them are people who simply tolerate my presence and try to ignore my social blunders, but still won't invite me to any get-togethers or parties, nor go out of their way to make me feel welcome among them when I happen upon them at the campus hangout spots.
In any case, through what others had told me, I narrowed this devastating quirk down to a number of possibilities: I had ADD, I had depression, I was neurotic, I was bipolar… or as people often so unkindly put it, I was just plain selfish and needed to pull my head out of my you-know-where. Unfortunately, this whole list wasn’t very telling at all, because most of the possibilities seemed to fit to some degree, but something was seriously lacking in all these explanations. And I certainly wasn’t buying into that nonsense anymore that the counselors kept feeding me about my depression being due to a “chemical imbalance”. I had considered that some years ago, but the medications to fix that had only made it worse.
It wasn’t until about half a year ago when I found it. I was reading something about autism, and a link referred me to Asperger’s Syndrome. I was floored – it was like I was reading my own biography, and I couldn’t believe how I hadn’t come across this beforehand.
I continued to read more and more on the subject on different sites, and it only continued to hit home more and more for me. This had to be it. It couldn’t possibly be anything else. All previous speculations were dwarfed by this one explanation that anchored it all down in one fell swoop. Finally, finally, I had an answer. Here was the reason why I was so emotionally detached from everyone else. I only needed an official diagnosis (which I still have yet to get, but I’m working on it).
Learning about AS, after all these years, has not made my life any easier, per se, but I will say it still feels fantastic to finally put a name on whatever it was I had in my head that I just could not figure out.
I hope to be able to express myself freely around here, since I've been holding a whole lot of it in (I've tried venting on other forums and have gotten flamed reeeeeally badly). I have fears and worries that trouble me constantly, even when by all means, my mind should be on other things.
So that's me, in a severely-condensed nutshell.
05 Feb 2009, 5:11 am
