Oh, I'm definitely HIGHLY neurotic, and I can relate to virtually everything in the OP. It's something my family good naturedly teases me about some of the time, and gets very annoyed about other times when I regress to very childlish behavior under durress and call them up crying over one thing or another, and just generally acting irrational. I have severe anxiety, and a number of phobias. Failure and rejuection are a big phobia of mine, especially since I have far too much experience of that, and I don't bounce back easily at all.
I'll give you an example: I don't want to get into all the details of my experience, because that would involve reliving it, and that would make me physically ill. Suffice it to say, I had a bad experience involving failure and rejection last fall when I was already in a gragile place emotionally because of other things that were going on in my life at the time. This past summer, I had to go back to the Subway Station gone to when travelling to/ from this place in the past because I needed to catch a train to the airport, and that's the station I needed to go to to get to the train. On the way to the airport, I managed okay because I just rushed through the Subway Station to the AirTrain. When I was coming back from the airport a few days later, things were not so simple. I had to go back to the Subway platform where I'd had to get off the train, then come back to wait for the train again in the days of what I like to call The Incident. It was 11:30 pm at that time, so the trains were running at slower speeds. I had to wait on that platform that brought back so many bad memories for what must have been at least fifteen minutes before a train mercifully arrived to get me out of there and home. It was a very long fifteen minutes, and I spent ten minutes of that time shaking, crying and hyperventilating from the bad memories that were brought to the surface.
Just this morning I had an experience that would have been simply aggravating to a typical NT, that was harrowing to me. Growing up, I was bullied pretty pesistently for being so odd and different from my peers, and I still haven't managed to let that go. To this day, I find myself regressing to that frightened little girl when faced with a bully, and my typical response to bullies is to run and hide. Anyway, I have a downstairs neighbor who will sometimes ring my doorbell to harrass me about every small noise. She will insult me, and threaten to report me to management to get me kicked out of the building. After the fourth time, I just stopped answering my door. Once, she did her thing while my boyfriend S was there with me, and we ingnored her, at my insistence, though S wanted to go to the door to tell her to go away. A little later, we headed out of my apartment. We went downstairs to find her waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs, waiting to acccost me. My boyfriend gave her an angry earful while I stood frozen. After that, she didn't bother me again for months. Since then, she has started up again. A few weeks age, she started ringing my doorbell at a quarter to one in the morning while I was sitting at my computer typing. When I determinely ignored her, she yelled up, "You just keep on making noises. I'll be here all night." By that time, I'd reached the point where I flinched every time I hear a doorbell, even if it was on TV. The next day, I wrote her a very diplomatic note requesting that she take any complaints about me straight to management, but to please never ring my doorbell, or bang on her ceiling (which she has also done) ever again. Just a couple of weeks ago, she yelled a lengthy tirade up to me, at 7:30 on a Sunday morning, yelling all sorts of crazy things to me.. The part that stuck with me most was the part where she yelled, "What's wrong with you anyway? Are you normal?" I've heard about a thousand variations of that question over the years, and it never hurts any less.
This morning, my doorbell started ringing every thirty minutes, with her style of persistence. I was terrified to even come to the door to peer through the peephole. I didn't even want to see her face. After the third of fourth time, I wound up calling my parents in a panic, begging them to pick me up and bring mee to their place, as I was afraid to leave my apartment alone. Shortly after that, as I frantically looked for my keys, I discovered that I'd left them in the door when I came home from work yesterday. Now, I don't know what the ringing of my doorbell was really about, but I'm still shaken up, and I'm still at my parents' place now. Of course, I will need to go home eventually, and just pray that no one rings my doorbell any more.
I also tend to worry obsessively about the possibility of certain things going wrong, to the point when it can sometimes impair my functioning. I also often fear that I've alienated people when, more often than not, I turn out to be mistaken. I definitely have anxious/ obsessive reactions to things that are disproportionate to the situation at hand. I'm not sure my neuroses are related to AS or not. Of course, my mind's tendency to "get stuck on" certain things, my difficulty in "letting things go" is most likely AS related. Fears and worries do tend to become more intense the more I go over them in my mind. Additionally, my history of being bullied and feeling persecuted does relate to my being different from my peers, socially and otherwise.
There may be some relationship between AS and neurosis, but then, plenty of NTs can be neurotic, too. My mother is a glaring example of this. It's difficult to pinpoint what the exact relationship is between AS and neurosis.
I'm sorry if this is incoherent. I had a rough morning, and I'm still not thinking very clearly, or functioning very well.
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"And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad./ The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had."
04 Nov 2009, 5:39 am
then i guess u can understand how annoying life is sometimes lol
