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It's interesting (and not really surprising) that out of 14 responses so far only two said they found out from a professional who figured it out, instead of them having to figure it out themselves.
As a young adult, I went to see so many counsellors and mental health professionals that I lost count of them. I went to see them because of depression and because I was having great difficulty coping with normal everyday life. But the main problem that came up time and time again in these sessions was the particular difficulty I have in relating to other people. I realise now, that what I was describing week after week was me experience of living with undiagnosed AS. And yet not one of them seemed to pick up on what was the root cause of my problems.
The first time I heard about Asperger Syndrome was in late 2000 and it was in a 'That's Life' magazine. I read the problem page and there was a letter there from a man who said, among other things, that he had AS and that he lived quite a lonely life because of this. In her reply, the agony aunt thanked him for writing in as he had, in her words, given her an opportunity to tell other readers about the condition he 'suffers' from. She then went on to say that people with Asperger Syndrome have difficulty communicating and forming relationships. Well that sounded like the story of my life. I had other important things going on in my life at that time, my youngest son was about to start school and that was a really big thing for me. But I decided that once I had some time to turn my attention to other things, Asperger Syndrome was something I needed to look into. I wasn't sure at first, because I'd been hoping to find something that would explain all my difficulties, and the rather brief descriptions that I initially read didn't do that for me. But the more I went on to read and to find out about AS, things about myself that had never made sense before, things that I had felt a lot of shame about and had at times given myself a really hard time over, suddenly started to make sense.
I was finally diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome in early 2003, after a lifetime of feeling like a freak. If I hadn't been the one to finally pick up on what was really the cause of my problems, I doubt that anybody else would have.
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Sometimes it's the very people who no one imagines anything of, who do the things no one can imagine.
From The Imitation Game