First of all, my profuse thanks to anyone who can read all of this. It's a long story, and probably not the greatest entertainment. But I hope you all can help me... It's been a long, lonely road with whatever is wrong with me... and this seems to be the place to ask.
I swore to myself I'd never post on one of these sites, mainly because I'm not the type to seek help, therapy, support groups or even something as anonymous and benign as a forum such as this. I did not really want to consider that something might be wrong with me. But I can't really deny the facts, there is something off about me, and there always has been as far back as I can remember.
I have random and seemingly unrelated intellectual obsessions. It might be the 1000 year history of the Byzantine Empire, or perhaps a driving need to understand everything relating to Geology. Typically I become obsessed with a thing for around 6 months to a year, but some obsessions are lifelong, and I've had more than one at the same time quite often. I must know everything that I can learn, I immerse myself in the subject and come out at the other end with a ridiculous level of understanding. I've been doing this since I can remember. As a 5 year old, I had a bizarre need to understand astronomy and physics. As a senior in high school, I couldn't put down Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which would take any sane person months to read.
As a child I had the social skills of a box of rocks. I had periodic emotional outbursts after other kids would constantly make fun of me, which I am ashamed of to this day (I display almost no emotion now, but it took a long time to do this). By high school, I had made something better of myself, becoming a class clown, always saying some pithy phrase, playing a prank on someone or otherwise making a nuisance of myself. I wasn't popular, but I was at least free of being picked on, and was something of a king-figure to the geek population. Among the geeks I was well-liked, my intellectual obsessions were less of a problem, and I could at least communicate with them on some fundamental level. I aced all of the hardest classes without even thinking about it, because for the most part, whatever a teacher wanted to teach.... well I had been obsessed about it at some point in my life and had become a veritable expert in it.
I couldn't, and still can't, read body language, facial expressions, moods and other non-verbal signs. These days I have some intellectual understanding of them, which I had been lacking as a child, and it's enough to get by generally... but it holds me back a lot at work. I've never had a review that didn't end with "needs to develop better working relationships" or "needs to work on social interaction with coworkers." These same reviews show absolute perfection in everything else. I also have to work ten times as hard as my coworkers to prove myself. Everyone wants to tear apart my work and find flaws in it, not because I screw up, but rather because I am not social and not well-liked. If anything my perfectionism with my work makes them MORE angry with me. I might say to myself "Well if my coworker arches his eyebrow in such and such way, and leans back this way, he is feeling this way." But it's always a guessing game, and I'm wrong a lot of the time, no matter how much I try to figure it out. I've learned that what I say can often inadvertently insult people or cause trouble, so I've learned to keep my mouth shut as much as possible, and that generally avoids conflict. But I wind up in a position where I will never get the promotions, I will always have to work harder and longer to compensate for others' dislike of me, and I will rarely find friends in the workplace outside of geeky areas such as the Technology department or the Graphic Design department (I am a graphic designer and programmer by trade).
As a child my parents knew something was wrong with me, and tried a number of tests. First they tried ADD, which came back negative. The psychologist said something to the effect of "something is wrong with that kid, but it isn't brains and it isn't an inability to focus." I wonder if the guy knew about AS. They tried therapists and such, and all that did was make me mad. I mean who the hell wants to be known as the kid that has to go see a shrink. They tried medications; Ritalin and the other usual suspects. In the end nothing really helped, and I just began to despise psychologists, a feeling which persists to this day.
I began to understand what was wrong with me without having a name to attach it to. I called myself "socially blind" and figured that there was something I was missing somewhere that everyone else had. I once jokingly referred to it as "booger hanging out the nose" syndrome, where I compared it to the fact that if one has a booger hanging from their nose, no one is likely to tell them about it because no one wants to be the one to say it, so the guy just walks around looking like an idiot because he doesn't know about the booger. I figured no one would tell my I was a social idiot just because they didn't want to be the one to break it to me, and here I was walking around making a fool of myself, entirely oblivious.
Eventually I came to adore Wikipedia, I suppose for those with AS it can be like a candy store. Lots of information on whatever random obsession might come about. And I came across AS. This was years ago, and despite the near perfect match I didn't want to entertain the possibility that I had a mental disorder (thats how I thought of it). But with my career stagnating because of social issues... it's time to face the facts. I'll never walk into a psychologist's office again, but I did take all the online tests I could find... and they all pointed to AS. Nonetheless I won't accept the "self-diagnosis" without some outside help... and that's where you all come in. Given all that I just wrote... is it true?
10 Oct 2007, 7:29 pm
