During my childhood, I never had any close friends. Whenever I went to school, I was always around my classmates, but I would just leave them alone & not say anything to any of them, or ever participate in anything they did. During lunch time or recess time, I would always just walk around the field all alone & pace, never saying anything or playing with any one. My teachers became concerned about me being anti-social & informed my parents. I also never played with my 2 brothers or any of the children who lived in the neighbourhood. My parents never understood why I was this way, so they sent me to a clinical psychologist when I was nine years old, who diagnosed me with Asperger's syndrome. A year later, when I was ten years old, my parents took me out of the mainstream public school I attended & transferred me to a small private school for special needs students.
I did very well academically at the private school, but I continued to be a loner & never made any effort to make friends there. Sometimes, students would talk to me & attempt to start friendships with me, and I would be nice back to them, but I was never interested being friends with them. When I was 12 years old, my parents signed me up for an after-school group for boys with Asperger's syndrome. It was a very small group with four or five other boys, but I still had trouble making being social with any of them, and I had trouble participating in their group activities & never talked. I was in that group until I was 16 years old, when my mother told me I did not have to go any more. I had been attending the group for a long time, and it got repetitive, and I was not getting anything out of it, so I dropped out of the group.
I attended the private school until the age of 14, when I was enrolled in a small private high school for special needs students. My teachers there worked very hard with me to be more sociable & they set social goals for me to improve, and I made progress to some degree. During this time, I started to change & started actually wanting to make friends. I had one classmate who liked me & wanted to be my friend, and we would sometimes get together outside of school, but being his friend caused me a lot of stress & anxiety because I still wanted to just be by myself & hang around alone. He graduated from the school a year before I graduated, and we lost contact until we re-connected online last year. There was also a female classmate that I had a crush on when I was 17 years old, but she was not interested in me, so I felt really sad during my senior year there. After graduation, I never kept in contact with any of my classmates.
When I graduated from that high school, I wanted to go to college, but my parents made me attend a transition programme for special needs students. I finally made my first real friend at that school, and I was thrilled about it. She lived somewhat far away from me, and my parents used to take me to her house, and we would also get together at the mall near me & go shopping. We stayed friends until I was 26 years old when I dumped her. I always had a crush on her, and I thought we were boyfriend & girlfriend, but she had been lying to me the entire time I knew her. After we broke up, she faced an uncertain future & died of pneumonia less than 2 years later. She was only 28 years old. I later lamented the fact that I could not have stayed a loyal friend to her during her final days.
Today, making friends is still one of the hardest things for me to do, and I am still reclusive with very few friends. I attend Meetups for adults with Asperger's syndrome, and I hope that I will meet some people that I will become good friends with.
07 Aug 2017, 8:44 pm
