It's been 10 years or more since I spoke to the internet about my personal problems, so you'll have to bear with me. So far as I can tell, here are characteristics of myself:
Normally, I'm afraid of new social situations (right now I'm terrified.) I have trouble making friends. Sometimes my sense of identity, rather than being a concrete whole, is this inconsistent, broken up thing. Like I'm a collection of reactions, ideas and passions. Finding a unifying whole is an ellusive nightmare. I realized the other day that anxiety and awkwardness are a major aspects of how I experience the world at large. I feel depressed and have felt depressed for 15 years or longer, but this depression feels alien to me. I know there are things I'm upset about, and continuously upset about, but at my heart I think I am -or I'm supposed to me- an upbeat happy guy. I find change terrifying. Loud noises frighten me and hurt my eyes. Socializing with large groups of people has never appealed to me. I prefer my own company, though I am often desperate for social contact. Right now, I am starving for it. Nearly ever person I have ever known has known me as "the weird guy." The world seems made up of aliens. I have a variety of brief and long lasting interests that are often all consuming and intense. I have trouble understanding my emotions, and often feel like I lose track of how I feel about something or someone unless its right in front of me. In social situations for a long time, I have done everything in my power to understand what the other person is thinking and to understand what they want from me, and modeled my behavior in response. I don't know if making eye contact with people bothers me. I am loyal and support to a fault. And whatever I care about, I care about fiercely.
I take a great deal of comfort and relief in the glaringly obvious connections the above has to the more common traits that appear on the autism spectrum. That in reading the stories of people with autism/high functioning autism, that in learning about them I am learning myself. That in some sense, after a lifetime of not knowing who I am, I have found myself.
But while my being different has often been a source of strength and pride for me, I've think I've spent the majority of my life also working from the standpoint that my personal hurdles and anxieties are wrong. That the areas I struggle in that most people might find easy, means that I am broken or less than good.
This negative stance has strongly impacted my self esteem and my ability to take care of myself, but I reject what seems to legitimize a lack of manners and lack of awareness of myself in relation to the world outside of me. I reject what seems to explain why the world outside of me has always seemed so strange and why I have felt lost all my life. It seems that admitting this -that I am somewhere on the autistic spectrum- as much as it relieves me, it seems to steal a major part of my identity. That rather than being who I am because I am a unique product of my experiences and personal effort to understand and create myself, but that I am who I am because of differences in my neurological wiring.
Its frustrating coming from the standpoint that I've seemed for most of my life to be a fickle person with my interests and things identify with. I jump around a lot. That I might be now -with this admission and my identifying with it- that I'm just jumping onto the next thing. But then, I ask myself if I actually feel that way. I also wonder how big a thing this admitting would be. I've honestly spent so much time pretending to be normal, I think some of its actually sunk in. But then, to those who get to know me I am fantastically odd.
Gosh. I am clearly at war with myself. And my life in the day to day sense is a mess. I don't know or care how many people I'm fooling at pretending to still be okay, but I think I'm not so far away from a mental breakdown. I have panic attacks every day, and when the hell I had a legitimately unselfconscious good time, I have no idea.
And boy am I uncomfortable talking about that to the internet.
Good afternoon
02 Dec 2013, 9:36 pm
