Hello. I am someone who is very wary of self-diagnosing myself but when I read about the manifestations of aspergers I am confronted with many of my own personality traits and problems. Hopefully by providing a brief history of my life you can get a better idea of whether I am right in thinking that aspergers can explain how I've always been.
From a very young age I felt very disconnected from other kids my age. I couldn't understand them and was unable to play with them. My first distinct memory of feeling this way was on holiday when my sister and cousins were playing by the pool. Feeling isolated and bored, I decided to leave the pool area and managed to find myself walking through the streets on my own. I was eventually found by a police officer and taken to station where my dad was waiting to punish me. I was 4 years old at the time.
Throughout my childhood, I had very few friends and those I had bullied me. I rarely went outside when not in school, obsessively played video games and found comfort in categorising, collecting and repetition. Any interruption in activity would make me lash out and almost inconsolable. I carried on running away during family holidays when forced to do things I didn't want to do, angering my parents in the long run.
I had little interest in talking to people about anything but my own interests, had no social skills to speak of, tried to avoid people as much as possible and was bullied for it. I found making eye contact almost impossible and walked around school and in public with my eyes rooted to the ground hoping that nobody would pay attention to me. Unless I was playing video games, I had no interest in spending time around other people and would even hide in my own house when people occasionally came and knocked on the door.
When I reached the age of 14 I began trying to socialise more and suddenly desired acceptance and friendship that I hadn't cared about before. However, my social and physical awkwardness, clumsiness, lack of motor skills (I was terrible at football, handwriting, using a scissors, drawing, even tying shoelaces) and struggle to pick up social cues led to the bullying to intensify and expand to a larger group of people. I would say inappropriate things, talk without realising whether people were interested in what I was saying and sometimes not realising when I was being made fun of. However, a lot of the bullying was so direct (verbally and physically) that I couldn't be mistaken as to what was happening.
At around the same time I began drinking. It gave me social confidence that I never had previously and made me feel happier than I ever had around people. However, I had big problems with self-control which still affect me to this day. I have blacked out too many times to remember and my impulse control problems have manifested themselves in other ways too (gambling, purchases, other substances).
In a desire to be accepted as 'normal' I have unlearned many of my social behaviours and to a lot of people (at first) appear to be a well functioning sociable person. However, in work environments when prolonged social interaction is forced upon me I fall apart, leading to me having never held down a job for longer than 10 months. I have a very small group of friends and tend to lose a lot of friends through my inability to maintain social bonds. As I live in my own world to such a degree and spend my days obsessively keeping up to date with my interests, I rarely talk to people over social media and periodically delete my FB or delete large group of friends in fits of self-hatred or bitterness.
Over the years, I have tried to pursue a lifestyle counter to my instinctual behaviour in order to see if I could change myself. However, each attempt has led to intense emotional distress, erratic behaviour, mood swings and anger issues (directed at myself). Finally, I've decided to try and accept who I am and what makes me happy rather than trying to accommodate myself to a world that has proved hostile to me at every turn.
Though I don't 'feel' empathy, I can intellectually perceive right and wrong behaviours and have worked hard to better myself. It really angers and upsets me that I can't feel more (hence the substance issues) and I've often felt like I'm a worse person for not being able to feel more deeply than I do. In social situations, I have learned to mimic behaviours of people I meet in order to make them feel at ease. This means talking very little about my own interests, allowing them to expound on theirs and generally doing what I can to hide my natural habit to talk about inappropriate topics or start ranting about an issue that means a lot to me. Around closer friends, the 'real' me comes out more.
Sadly, by 'tricking' people I have seen a lot of friendships fall by the wayside when I no longer feel able to maintain the performance and people often are very confused as to how my behaviour has changed from our first few interactions. I could count on one hand the number of close friends I have and even then, if I never saw any of them again it wouldn't really bother me. That upsets me a lot but I can't force myself into feeling these emotions.
Through a lot of trial and error, I have learned to untrain my brain (to an extent) to take things so literally and through a lot of studying of people's subtle emotions in films particularly, I feel I have a better grasp of social cues and facial expressions, though I also feel I overthink them to the point of maybe thinking people are bored or upset or angry when they're not.
As a British person, sarcasm is a second language so I had to learn to perceive that. Again, it wasn't something that came natural but bullying will make you dedicate a lot of time to changing your personality in order to stop the abuse. Certain traits are still ingrained in me such as struggling to know when to enter a conversation which leads to a lot of unintentional interrupting on my part, being very fidgety, talking to myself out loud a lot on my own and even in public (if I don't think people can hear me), and 'going off on one' as my father would say meaning that I struggle to maintain focus on a particular point and end up making little sense.
Abstraction in painting, music, film and literature is very hard for me to understand even if I read reviews about its value. I still try and engage with abstract art to try and understand as i know the issue is with me rather than the art itself. However, I just can't work it out. Activities that require on the spot decision making are a minefield for me; I often crumble under the pressure and suffer great anxiety when forced into these situations.
My long term memory is fantastic and I can remember things people said years back however mundane but I really struggle to process information quickly which means I have to be shown or have to try something many times before I pick it up. As I have mentioned, my motor skills are quite poor. Something as simple as tying my shoelaces took me a long time to learn and even now I'd struggle to tie a knot well. To this day I have no idea how something as simple as using a scissors causes so much difficulty for me.
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If you managed to read this whole post, I appreciate it. I recognise that it's quite a scattered post but I wanted to make sure I mentioned as much as possible. Be as honest with me as possible. I am yet to see a doctor about this but if enough of you feel I may be justified in my belief that I may have aspergers I will feel emboldened to go and talk to someone about it.
07 Oct 2016, 9:44 am
