I've really gone and done it now...I've hit my lowest low. I'm just a child and haven't learned, the world is harsh, the world I rough, my skills, they're just not good enough. (paraphrasing Duncan Sheik lyrics) At the age of 40, I've gone and jumped off a bridge once again while attempting to create a sociological understanding with NTs.
This happened on social media while horribly drunk. See, I'm a closeted Aspie and don't see any purpose in telling people about my disorder because one, no one understands it, two no one really cares, and three...people in my life will be judgmental and harsh at the diagnosis. Like so many aspies, my story involves a fairly acute intelligence coupled with worldly failure which plummets my quality of life to far below average on any scale.
Also, like so many aspies, I don't have many friends or a large social network and really, I don't require one. I do however feel a need to have a handful of trusty companions who I care for and who likewise, care about me. Over the last couple of years, I've built a fair number of Facebook "friends". Almost all of these people are acquaintances more than anything else. A few are people whom I'd call "real" friends and a few more still are actually related through marriage or extended family.
So for the last year or two, I've enjoyed the superficial connection that social media like FB provides. I can look at my FB "friends" posts and get a sense that I'm connecting to them with likes and occasional comments, and some of them do the same to mine. Okay, normal FB stuff. It's good, healthy and completely appropriate. Now's where the horror show begins. I can't believe I did this again but my Aspergers is a part of what happened.
I'm gonna be vague here because I'll be writing a novel if I'm not. But basically, like just about all of us, my problems started post haste at puberty. That's when the real differences started and to make things better, my family fell apart at the same time. So now, I had a depressed mother who was trying to build a new life in middle-age and a now absent father who I didn't see much of for the rest of his life. In school, the differences between myself and the NTs were now causing social difficulty that I originally thought was just a lack of maturity on the part of my peers. I enjoyed conversation with my teachers and just assumed that I was prematurely mature. I had no idea that this was really just the start of typical Asperger social difficulty.
Again, this is a rushed explanation and I'm being as vague as can be. But my school social discomfort got so bad that I wound up having to leave my school and finish my high school education at night classes with adults. Shortly thereafter, my mother married a verbally and psychologically abusive alcoholic. (Much later diagnosed as bipolar) This man was cruel and threatening to me to the point where I had to leave the house and support myself despite having no real education. In doing so, I wound up working at a post office. There, the normal social difficulties continued and some people tended to pick on me a little (as is so common with aspies) but one person in particular crossed a line that truly angered me. But being that no one ever understands my opinions and often consider my reactions strange, I kept my frustration to myself...which is no surprise because it's what I always did. It's what I STILL do.
But being a nice enough person, I was invited to some social functions with my coworkers and went to a few occasions. I had a good enough time and felt I had done alright. (I still had no idea what Aspergers was) But then came a nightmare night. I drank on an empty stomach and wound up so shamefully drunk that I spilled every bean I had, including a plethora of rude comments about the one person who was particularly cruel to me. I guess I underestimated the level of friendship between this person and the others there because they immediately turned on me and said that I would have to apologize to this person. They would not listen to my point of view, which was that he was cruel to me and should be the one apologizing. When they didn't accept that, (mind you, I was basically black-out drunk) I started to talk about my sh***y life and social ostracization and how this person was making my already difficult situation so much worse and that's why I reacted the way I did.
But this was to no avail and some people started to make fun of me for my "sh***y" life. Now, I was really turning to a rage and started to go after them. I picked out things I knew about all of them that would make them feel "less than superior" and laced into them. The night got worse and worse and one of the non-hostiles gave me a ride home. What came back to me the next day was bits and pieces. Horrific scenarios played out in my head about completely embarrassing exchanges of argument and laughter. To this day, I am not sure exactly what happened. But I tried to go back to work on Monday to test the water. No one said anything but that painful silence around me hung over my head like Charlie Brown's rain cloud.
No one said anything specific about that night but I could see a difference in their eyes. I could hear a difference in the words they spoke and didn't speak. Everything was changed. In time, little comments started getting directed my way. Weird little scoffs would be directed at me but no one would actually tell me that they were angry at me. I became almost pusillanimous in my demeanor so as to convey a message of, "I mean no harm." I apologized more often than was necessary and became know as a guy who'll do anything for anyone at the office. I became a genuine joke to these people. I tried to talk to people who were there. I inquired often about what had I said and had I been rude to anyone. The flashbacks weren't certain as "real" memory because I'd done things like this before and the one real friend I had at the time insisted that I do the same thing every time I get black out drunk. I wake up the next day apologizing profusely for things I hadn't done or said.
See, it's like my mind has a deluge of sorrow and hurt feelings in it that I want to react to, but don't. Then when I'm that intoxicated, reality and fantasy become intertwined. What made the situation at the office so hard was that I didn't want to bring something up I hadn't done because of the embarrassment it would cause me and the potential harm it would do to the other, but I also felt like I had to do something. But anyone I talked to who was there wouldn't acknowledge that I'd done anything wrong. They acted almost jovial about it. Like all I did was get drunk and act stupid. Inappropriate, but not unforgivable. But there had to have been more. The actions were too strange as more time went on.
Eventually, the guy who was the focus of my anger that night started acting stranger and more hostile around me. I said something I knew but could not take back. I'll leave out the details but it was the kind of thing that can not be made right no matter what is done. I still believed I hadn't said it but was worried that I did. And I didn't just lambast everyone else that night. I cut into myself as deeply as anyone who was making fun of me. Almost like doing so would assuage the harm I'd done and turn it back on myself. (trust me, even then I was full of self-hatred) If you're real aspies and you've read this far, you can probably assume what awful things I said about myself to everyone's listening ears. Our lifestyles are so often the same and I'm no different. I believe that I said more hurtful and humiliating things about myself than anyone else and these are not the types of things that could be forgotten.
The people at work got worse and worse and it became apparent to me that I must have said the things I have flashbacks of. It had to be real. Why else would adult human beings be doing things that were so unusual, in some cases threatening, and otherwise entirely rude without feeling indignant and justified? I decided it was all true and my relationships there were irreparable. I knew they didn't care about an apology. So I left that job.
Trying to keep this short, as I jostled through different jobs for the next several years, I remembers my mistake. I felt too comfortable around people I knew were different from me. At that time, I used to call NTs "conformists". That's what I started calling them around age 12. I worked another job as a laborer for a company for several years. Typical aspie problems happened there. They couldn't understand why I learned and acted differently from them and why my approach was always different from theirs and decided that I was stupid. They saw me as strong as an ox but not as intelligent as one. So I was great for labor, but would never receive an opportunity to advance or make comparable salaries to the more "skilled" workers. This was made perfectly clear to me as they hired people from outside the company and gave those workers more advanced positions, in several cases, granting them "on-the-job" training to do that work as I toiled doing the dirtiest, most physically demanding jobs that no one else wanted. A very well trained chimpanzee could do the heavy lifting and digging work that I was afforded. I was not being paid much or getting real raises. And the conversation my coworkers made was devoid of any intellectual value. Rather than discuss politics, philosophy, science, current events, the arts or anything meaningful, they spent most of their time making fun of one another's short comings. "HA HA HA, look how fat Benny is." "HA HA HA, look how short Joey is." "HA HA HA, Carl's wife left him for another guy." It was just constant crap like that or sports talk.
I hated every second of it. Trust me, I got my fair share from these guys. I couldn't believe how this pile of jacks believed themselves to be my superiors. But I also knew by now that I was innately different and that no attempt to rationalize with them socially will pay off. I was friendly with some of them and did attempt to make friends of them. I talked about my thoughts and hopes about life, but they just couldn't get it. They never understood anything because in the end, I'm an aspie and they're not. By now, I had learned about Aspergers and all the dots finally connected. I was shocked that when I mentioned the condition to my father, he said that he has it too, recommended the film, "Adam" and told me some more things about it. I was in shock. There is a definite genetic component to this "disorder". My father suffered from life-long depression and when I thought about his life, it all made sense. I can't believe that he didn't suspect that I also had it because he was aware of the horrible nature of my life and the difficulties I've always had. Needless to say, I knew that these coworkers, like the others at the post office didn't care about my problems or me and would never understand.
The company deemed me to be permanently inferior to these people. Now I'm getting older and realize that my body will eventually get weaker as well due to age and the grinding nature of the labor, which was leaving plenty of marks on the inside and outside of my physical body. So I went to a college at night that offers healthcare degrees. ( I KNOW THIS IS TAKING FOREVER...TYPICAL ASPIE)
I'll start being very brief. At the college, I developed a core of "friends" who were mostly young ladies. I loved this group of people. We were about 14 girls and 3 guys. That's healthcare for ya. Because we all went through the same curriculum together, we got closer than you normally do at a college. Because of the closeness we all felt, I made an atrocious error, one that I should have known better. I knew not to do this since the post office but I guess, because it was all these pretty young ladies and we were together 4 nights a week and felt really close, I let my guard down and thought I was normal with them. DISASTER ensues. A couple of the girls really liked me, prolly more than just a friend, but I particularly liked a different one. Long, long story but everything goes south from here.
The couple who seemed to like me a lot got hostile, our class eventually got spilt up due to some people not passing classes and then it got ugly. Harsh words got spoken between some of the others and I was indirectly tied to it. I didn't mean to be. I just told someone what someone else said in trust because it surprised me. But, young ladies being young and catty or whatever, that info was leaked and I was deemed the rat for it. (which in fairness, I guess I was but it wasn't my intention, I just f****d up by trusting a young girl)
Rushing ahead again, this stuff is all so embarrassing and high school, which makes my part in it even more embarrassing, but that unity that I felt with that group was gone. I know it's silly but I really felt such an acceptance with this group of people and genuinely cared about them. I hadn't felt that type of belonging since I was a child and was so delightfully surprised that it had happened. And I truly felt sorrow and pain that it had all come apart. That terrible feeling of perpetual loneliness came back to me when it was apparent that our crew was no longer a crew. That lonely feeling is my natural way of life. It was only for about the year and a half that I got to know these people that I finally didn't feel completely alone like always. I wanted that feeling back but myself and some others were no longer truly welcome in their group. Not in the same way. Now it was more like formal civility when we interacted.
We went to internships at hospitals after we finished our academic classes. I wound up at a hospital with one of the girls who I think liked me in a more than friend way. She was one who essentially turned her back on me and a few others. But I figured that in 6 months of internship, I could repair the damage and make my peace with her. But that didn't happen. We started out kind of nicer to each other than the last 6 months of classes. Like the damaged shrew at the post office, I acted apologetic and overly supportive of her (I'm hypersensitive and ashamed of any hurt that I cause on other people) but something changed and she started being kind of mean to me. And it got worse. Toward the end, she was outright cold to me.
She didn't even want to take a picture with me for her smart phone like she did the techs in the office. She granted me a picture with her when I asked but didn't even ask me to send it to her. She never contacted me once after internship but during the time after internship and before grad ceremony, I started my FB account and sent friend invites to everyone including her. Most of the old group and the new group accepted my friend invites and again, I thought, great, I can rebuild our merry little group. A few months later, when graduation ceremony went down, I didn't attend because I hate those ceremonies anyway, but also felt shame and sadness of the way our group had split into two. I was closer with people from the new group and a few of the old crew who fell behind with me, but the core group was gone and we never became close like the original group. Rather than "friends", this new group really was just acquaintances and not real friendships.
But here comes the pain. That girl shared a ton of pics from the ceremony on her FB. And in them, I saw what was left of the old crew. They were all smiles as you would expect at a graduation. But here's the real pain, she included a bunch of captions commenting on things we all had talked about about how we'll stay friends for life and other specifics about our old crew. And LOL, to make it the worst, she included a picture of everyone who stayed together in their old crew and said, "I love these girls and am so glad to have met you guys"...and she also mentioned by name the one other woman who chose not to attend the ceremony. You get it right? She intentionally did that to snub me because she knew how much it meant to me.
I have since passed the registry tests we need to do the job we're going into and to my knowledge, she still has not. I have info and means to help her to pass these insanely difficult registry tests. But she just has nothing to do with me. She stays my FB friend for some reason but will not communicate. Ironic because I could and would love to help her. But it doesn't matter.
That is a year ago. Since everything has happened, I've had horrible difficulty finding work. I'm not employed, I've had a few physical health issues and my mental health has taken a turn for the worse. I started abusing alcohol worse than ever before and anxiety, depression and that feeling of being "Cheated in life"...has hit an all time low. Now enter my FB account. I have since again accepted that as an aspie, we have a different way of socializing and contact with NTs and even other aspies will always be more difficult than normal people. I have accepted that being "normal", in the NT sense is an impossibility. And I once again live with the belief that life will always be somewhat painful. I understand this. But my drunken, borderline ret*d mind doesn't.
I don't know what particular thing set it off, but a week before it happened, I had a phone conversation with a guy from school and for some reason, she came into the conversation. And I told this guy how hurt I felt by her actions and attitude toward me. I am genuinely hurt by it. But it is what it is. They're NTs. We can't expect them to be concerned with our abnormality. I live with it just fine. I'm not happy about it, but I live with it. But that night, I got drunk...completely shitfaced just like the post office more than a decade before. And I remember typing onto the public post something about how, without mentioning her name, I lit into her actions making it all too obvious who I was talking about. But then it all goes black again. I don't know what was said and what wasn't because I erased the posts while still intoxicated. I probably crashed around 3 AM. Woke up at 6 AM with a desire to erase posts on FB so I woke up and did that...then went back to sleep.
Woke up at noon later that day. Got a call from that guy I talked to a week earlier. He seemed a little irritated and just guessed to me who I was talking about. I kind of confirmed it but said it was a generalized statement. He didn't seem to believe me. Then he said we could get together with some people again and the way he said it made me feel embarrassed. Like I was pleading with people to be my friend. We got off the phone and then I felt that tremendous sense of shame and guilt. I felt that sense of irrevocable damage to my social life. Not that there's much of one anyway. But alas, I started to come up with black out visions of things I might have typed. All kinds of thoughts. Weird random stuff that you don't tell anyone. Shameful details about my life and the complete hurt and failure of my life. I might have written about the reasons for the dissolution of the group in school. I might have said that my old company was full of complete as*holes who bent me over real good. (surprisingly, some of those people are FB friends...yah) I might have mentioned the post office.
I might have mentioned something about not having any real friends or future. I think I talked about the horrible way my sister-in-law treats me. (She and my brother have acted strangely around me since I posted that night and have made sneering, condescending comments about being a wussy and mistakes people make when drunk) I might have mentioned thoughts of suicide. If I said any of these things, I laid bare the completely pathetic nature of my life to so many people, including family. I made myself look like such a loser and now they all know it's true. It's like my rant with the post office people but for everyone to see. And save on FB if they like. I erased the posts but I guess they still showed up on my timeline and people saw them. But they're gone. They're deleted. This is even more nightmarish because of the amount of people involved, and the not knowing what was said.
But why I wrote on this thread. It's because the genesis of this nightmare was that feeling of having been cheated in life. I've come to realize that rage and shame are connected at the heart. I am ashamed of my life and my unfortunate current situation, both economically and socially. The rest of this was just a need to get this off my chest. I'm writing here because I have an idea that maybe other aspies will at the very least be able to understand, or at least not judge as harshly my unfortunate life. I've read so many writings of aspies on this site and others like it. Just reading other peoples stories helps ease the perpetual sadness of my life. Not because I want to see anyone ever hurt, it's just that there is something specific to us. There's something about the way life "happens" to us that is different from any other people, autistic or not.
19 Mar 2017, 7:26 pm
