Hello everyone

Page 1 of 1 [ 5 posts ]

Meridian191
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker

Joined: 8 Mar 2013
Age: 31
Gender: Male
Posts: 63

09 Mar 2013, 4:36 pm

Hi. I'm a new member of Wrongplanet, and I hope this will be the start of a lot of interesting conversations, humour, and maybe I'll learn something too

This is who I am. I'm a guy and I turned eighteen a few months ago. My earliest childhood interests included watching documentaries and acting out little 'movies' with my toys, solo. (The Titanic, for example, was my first special interest and I saw the James Cameron movie at age three). I hated daycare for two reasons: I was very attached to my mother, and the social aspect simply didn't work for me. One of the staff there noted (in good humour) that if a helicopter flew over the mess hall, I would be the dot sitting in the corner eating the same sandwich every day.

My parents apparently had no idea that I might have some sort of impairment -- they just assumed I was 'too smart' to act normal. I was quite popular in the first year of primary (elementary) school because the other kids were impressed with how I could direct fun 'pretending' games (running away from the tornado, running away from the volcano, let's save the world from aliens, etc. etc.) based on my five years of watching movies instead of socialising.

That childish stuff wore off eventually, and I began to see myself as generally 'unpopular' by about the fourth grade. I had a really good friend by then who I had many common interests with, so it didn't matter. There were still quite a few people who gave me the time of day and they were good friends too. As the demands of neurotypical interaction got tougher and tougher as we got older, my alienation slowly but surely grew.

Suddenly, I was in high school. I'll never forget that first day, standing there in an alien school and staring at those circles of conversation I couldn't penetrate. I didn't have the confidence, or the skills, nor did I feel I even had the right to.

I only ended up making a few friends during high school, most of which I didn't have much in common with. I thought I was socially awkward because I was naturally shy and had a tiny fraction of the *experience* most people have in socialising. I got my diagnosis at the age of sixteen years, seven months. One of my teachers, a very caring lady who specialiased in students with special needs, suggested I had Asperger Syndrome at a parent-teacher interview.

I'd been asked to stand away, and I thought she was telling my dad that I'd been a terrible student, because he was holding his head in his hand. Admittedly I had missed some class deadlines. Later that night, me and my dad were having an argument about how I wasted lots of time when I should have been doing work, and he said 'you know what your teacher said you might have?'. He showed me the piece of paper with her handwriting on it, 'Asperger's syndrome'. At that moment, I got that wierd bubbly feeling you only get when something very important is happening or you are in mortal danger. 'That one?' I thought. 'The one where people have really narrow interests and just don't get simple commonsense social rules? I have that?'

A trip to the psychologist cleared up a few things:
1. yes, AS does involve narrow interests
2. Yes, as much as I hated to admit it, my interests were pretty narrow
3. The main marker of AS difficulty in social interaction
4. Yes, I have had difficulty in social interaction all my life

The psychologist said that in her professional opinion, she is 95% sure that I have Asperger's Syndrome. Can't really argue with that. I'm not sure if that counts as an official diagnosis because I've never asked.

So there I had it, the reason for my 'difference' had a name. That was a relief. What wasn't a relief was the fact that my social difficulties were now part of a permanent neurological structuring that I couldn't change.

With the support of my dad, I decided to take it in my stride. He summed up a healthy attitude to this sort of thing: you can't fix a problem until you know what the problem is.

In my last year of high school (2012), I deliberately went out of my way to be more outgoing, funny and sociable, expending quite a lot of effort on trying to project confidence as a sort of method act. I never got a girlfriend or anything, but the first few months of that year were a comparative blast. Later on, the stress of making sure I did well in my studies got to me, and I went through a kind of social panic. I thought people were turning on me. As it turned out, that was all in my head. Today, the high school cohort is still quite fond of me, and I was recently invited to two of their birthdays through Facebook (which I had once dismissed as a neurotypical monstrosity but finally got after high school finished). I just hope they like me in a normal way, not in an 'aww, he's so adorably clueless' sort of way.

Now I've started university, and the first week was scary as anything and brought back mental echoes of early high school. But it got better, and I'm determimed that it's not going to end up like that first bit of high school.

I decided to join Wrongplanet because I want to be able to talk to people who actually have the same experiences I have, the same difficulties, the same quirks, and the same joys as well. I'm looking forward to being a member of the community.