Let's try this again...

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Joined: 6 Oct 2009
Age: 43
Gender: Female
Posts: 5
Location: Oklahoma

28 Oct 2012, 10:19 am

I think I registered and posted a "Hi" thread a looooooong time ago, but I immediately got tied up with other stuff and WP fell off my radar until recently. So - take two!

I'm Aeryn, a 29-year old woman who was only officially diagnosed with Asperger's about four years ago. This came after years of social struggles, meltdowns, depression, weird tics, etc. which invariably led me to being labeled just plain "weird" or "rude" by peers and teachers, and my mother being fully convinced my behavior was all somehow her being a horrible parent. It was she who first planted the "autism" bug in my ear some years ago, but I shrugged it off - I knew what autistic looked like, my young cousin who couldn't stand to be around people at all, couldn't stand to be touched, could barely function as a teenager. That wasn't me, I thought. Sure, I wasn't wild about being around people and had some touch issues, but... not as extreme as my cousin's. But she persisted, and eventually a counselor I was seeing for depression told her that right from the off she thought I had Asperger's. I went to the bookstore and read up on AS... and it was a revelation. It was like the story of my life being laid out before me. "Oh God. There's a NAME for what I am. It's not just me." Eventually we were able to find a specialist willing to do the diagnostic tests - I went through a full day of cognitive/spatial tests/questionnaires and interviews, and it was deemed my results were consistent with Asperger's. I was relieved, and my mother perhaps even more so - she'd spent decades thinking she had screwed up parenting me.

But with my diagnosis have come new frustrations, though - aside from my mother, and maybe to a lesser extent one of my aunts (one of her kids, my other cousins, tutors Asperger's kids) no one in my life really gets what Asperger's means. My father and sister have had the most hurtful responses: my Dad's response to my diagnosis was a blunt "So?" I suspect my dad likely has Asperger's himself, which would explain a lot of his absent-mindedly hurtful behaviorisms, but that hasn't made it hurt much less - it's like he doesn't remember any of the nightmare that was my childhood and adolescence, the isolation and tantrums and meltdowns.

And just this week, my sister told me that one of her friends, a sports psychology major, thought I was "odd" and that I was just using my Asperger's as a crutch for not trying to act normally - and she agreed with him, saying over and over again "I just don't understand why if you know there's a problem, you don't try to FIX it." This hurt so much that I haven't really spoken to her since. I'm not sure which hurt more - that she trusted some uppity TA who's only spoken to me at length twice and only read about Asperger's over her own sister; or her belief that I HAVEN'T been struggling, trying, sweating blood every blasted day for nearly 30 years to try to "fit in." That Asperger's is just some erroneous thought process that I can fix if only I would "try harder." I had thought I was actually doing fairly well, and this development has me questioning just how well I actually have been succeeding in acting "normal."

So... in any case, "Hi" again! I hope to stick around this time.

-- Aeryn