Despondent aspie, struggling to fit in and enjoy life

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Hello Wrong Planet,

My name is Harold. I'm 17, I live in Calgary, Alberta, and I've lived with Asperger's for as long as I can remember.

One of my reasons for joining Wrong Planet is because I've been feeling a sense of emotional instability that's gradually building up, and it's beginning to overwhelm me to the point that I can't bottle it up any longer. However, I can't seem to release these bottled-up feelings because I feel like it'll only humiliate me further than I already have been and that if my family knows that I feel that having lived at a group home for troubled adolescents for a whole month (back in March and April, actually) did not help me, then I'm probably going to be put back there again, if not to the hospital or an institution outright. On top of that, I still feel all these negative thoughts about myself and others from every single instance of humiliation I've ever felt in my life, including things that happened on the internet as far as 2-4 years ago. Not one instance over or under an another, they all make me hate myself and hate people at the same time equally.

I've been turning into a complete misanthrope on the inside, it feels like. I try to make it seem to even myself that I'm not turning into a complete misanthrope, but it just feels like a fact that I'm becoming a misanthrope. Deep down somewhere, I feel scared of people. On top of that, I feel like I've been descending into sadism as well, and I don't want to be. I have all these terrible thoughts of inflicting so much suffering on people that I don't want to have. I don't want to have thoughts like that, I mean. But yet, it feels like some sort of twisted justification for all the humiliation and social rejection I've gone through.

Even then, I feel certain that even other people diagnosed with Asperger's have brought me humiliation as well. And it feels terrible knowing that even other people with your condition don't like you either, right?

I don't know.

I just feel like this isn't anything compared to what I feel that I'm going to go through. I feel like it's going to be so much worse than right now, and very soon at that. It feels like a year or two from now, when I'm 18 or 19, my life is going to be decided for me. It'll be decided whether I'll have at least a reason for myself to keep living or not. I can't help but feel that my already weakening reasons for living will be taken away. I just feel like such a bad anomaly on this world that even people who themselves feel like anomalies themselves (other aspies) reject me too. It just feels like I never had any real future to begin with, like I believe someone once said to me. And no matter how many good things people say about me, the negative things always feel like the most absolute truths and facts above all else.

What scares me the most above my own death in this is the fact that I also feel like I won't be the only one losing their life if (or when) I do decide that life isn't worth living. In fact, maybe that's what's been my motivation for living through this, yet feeling like I've realized that I've only continued to live for the sake of suffering emotionally even more makes me feel like I'm continuing to fragment apart, and I want to end it all more and more.

And it feels like I've gotten into these paradoxical cycles where I feel like things can get better and things won't get better; where I want to die, but I don't want to die, and so on.

On top of this all, I've also had lots of trouble with memory and concentration, and I've been feeling like I might end up developing such a strong sense of paranoia and delusions that I won't be able to logically or coherently talk about how I feel, thus taking away any chance of helping people understand my feelings so that they can help me. I also have had very disrupted sleeping patterns lately, knowing that it's just past 2:00 AM here, among so many other things.

I've just looked at symptoms for schizophrenia as well, and I can't help but feel that I might be developing schizophrenia. Maybe that's a short way of describing my feelings, but I'm not sure. I don't want to self-diagnose either.

...

I wish I could have written something more appropriate for the topic "Introduction" rather than "Distress" and saved this for a different thread, but this feels very urgent to me. I feel like I can't be holding things in like this any longer. If there's any rules against what I've written here that I've overlooked, then I apologize.

Other than that, I hope that I can fit in with the Wrong Planet community. I'm not sure what else I can say here though.

Hi Harold,

Your post compelled me to reply, because I am 35 years old, and I kept my writings from being 20. They were a lot like yours. I was in a much darker place, and the commonalities between your current state and my past state have compelled me to tell you some things.

1) Regardless of your spiritual beliefs or lack thereof, and regardless of whether you decide to NOT take your own life, there will be a day in the future (hopefully very distant one) on which your physical body will die.

So when you're in your darkest dark, utilize your logic and ask yourself this simple question - why end your life here now, if it will end anyway?

There is no benefit to doing so. None. So when you're feeling borderline suicidal, just tell yourself to wait. This too, shall pass.

2) You are not f'd up. Chances are, this message is like a tiny pebblestone bouncing off the Castle of Self-Hurt you built, and it isn't getting through. Chances are, it won't get through for a number of years. But let me seed this truth now, for when you get out of the fog, you will see it too.

YOU. ARE. NOT. F'D. UP.

3) You are a highly sensitive person (HSP). Your past bullying gave you PTSD. If you walk down the street and see laughing happy people walking toward you, and a pulse beats in your head - THEY ARE LAUGHING AT ME, THEY WILL HURT ME - then you have PTSD.

I had PTSD at that age from all the horrible humiliation and beatings in school. The faces and behaviors of my past attackers were superimposed on everyone I met. I was afraid that the new people I run into would immediately sense the deficiencies in my behavior, the "missing pieces" of my humanity.

It is HEALABLE.

You need to find an activity that will let you heal those areas of your psyche. Mine was Aikido.

Traditional martial arts are a godsend for Aspies, IMO, because

a) you get to be in a room with live humans, but you all adhere to a strict, predictable, comfortable protocol, during which you're not encouraged to spontaneously socialize. You're next to people, but you don't have to exchange the how-are-yous or seem particularly pleasant. You just bow, follow the warmups, then practice the attacks and defenses shown by instructor, bow again, etc.

b) everyone starts off clumsy, you just learn slower than others, and that's okay. Nobody cares.

c) many traditional martial arts are not built on brutal competition but on more cooperative training with regard to mutual safety. They're not going to abuse your body and make you age faster.


4) STOP BEATING YOURSELF UP FOR HAVING NEGATIVE THOUGHTS. STOP TRYING TO SUPPRESS THEM. Just observe them. Acknowledge them as part of you. Don't let them get a rise out of you, or make you feel like a bad person for having them. This is a stage in your development, and it is as necessary as any other stage. Let it be.

5) The "paradoxycal cycles" you get into where things feel better and then they don't - these are not circular. You are in a spiral, you keep running into similar situations, but your abilities expand slowly with each iteration, propelled forward by your keen self-observation and powerful will to get better.

It's hard to notice such progress within a short interval of time, but it becomes noticeable when you look back in a year. It's impossible to just jump out of the gravitational pull of everything that you are, that's why you're doing an expanding spiral.

6) You're not going to develop paranoia or delusions. Stop looking things up on the Internet, because eventually you'll end up diagnosing yourself with pregnancy. This cyber-hondria is disconnected from reality. There are so many symptoms on the Internet which actually have a very different meaning given the context of other symptoms.

When you go to a real doctor they have real-world experience. They know probabilities of certain things, typical signs, they will dispel most of the BS you find on the Internet. Especially psychological BS.

7) Depression is the inability to see a future. When you think of a future and just see a brick wall, or an endless well you're falling into, that's depression. However there's no need to give depression the gravitas it deserves. You just have to reframe your flawed perspective on what's happening.

You are not a psychic. You may dry-run the general idea of a future in your head, and it may be somewhat accurate, but the details will be different, and so will the alternate paths that open along the way. As sharp as your ability for simulation is, you will never catch up to this. It is a waste of your brainpower, and it generates false results.

What you see as an exact projection of your future, is an illusion.

You probably developed this analytic ability to develop highly detailed scenarios because you can't adapt to dynamic events in realtime very well. However this ability becomes your enemy when you look into far future.

So don't.

____

If you feel that some of this was helpful, then feel free to private message me if you need to talk more.

Wow. That's some pretty good advice from Monsterland. I can't add to it; I could only state how much I was like you when I was younger.

I used to have dark, dark thoughts. I never saw them through because I didn't know how to get my hands on explosives. Eventually, those thoughts dissipated as I got older. They did resurface when I was unfairly fired from a job, but again, I didn't act on them because I didn't have a samurai sword or ninja equipment. (Yeah. Real dark thoughts).

I guess what I'm saying is these thoughts pass. They didn't, though, for a lot of people, including Adam Lanza and James Holmes. Those guys are extensions or symbols or what I could have become. I'm not sure why I didn't go full on postal. Maybe I had a conscience or maybe just lacking in equipment was a deterrent. I'm not 100% enjoying life but at least I'm free and not in prison. At least that's something to celebrate.

Lots of good advice above

Welcome in any case

Harold, as with one of the other respondents, you mirror the way I felt when I was your age. My family life was so awful that I've been on my own since I was sixteen. I think one of the reasons I had such a hard time was that when I was your age, there was no such diagnosis as AS. I was born with high intelligence, and my parents thought I was going to Harvard or Yale. When things didn't work out as planned, my parents began to hate me and made my life a living hell. Everybody told me that I was just lazy, and that if I just tried I could do well. I internalized this poison since I had no idea what was wrong with me.

I went into the Navy when I was seventeen, and that was pretty much torture, as there was no way to escape people or be alone. It was so awful that I began planning a life alone, thinking I was uniquely defective, and didn't deserve to be a part of society.

What I did was work, go to school, and save every dime I could get my hands on to buy land in a rural location where nobody could bother me, and I succeeded. I also structured my employment around my special interests and the same need to avoid people.

It all started to come together in my late thirties (I am fifty now), and I love my life as an aspie.

What I'm getting at is that if you hang in there, and plan your life around your needs rather than society's expectations, my guess is that you can do the same. If you are anything like me, you are not normal, and normal life plans won't work for us. We need to blaze our own path. If you can do this, your life won't change for the better immediately, but it will get better once your plans begin to fall into place.

It's all too easy to tell where you're coming from about the sense that everyone around you is referring to you specifically. I can barely sit still when I inevitably hear people discussing (probably) someone else's AS tendencies in public. It's not a logical leap at all, assuming people you've never met could be talking behind your back, monsterland was beyond almost any doubt in stating this is a function of PTSD. However, occasionally it gives you the right sense. I wouldn't say I've seen it at the level you wrote about, but I also wouldn't say I absolutely haven't. I can't really buy a decent coffee lately without noticing some group of twenty-something therapy students or mothers or a book group going at it in a debate over what really happens IN MY HEAD. It's difficult to sit still when you keep noticing snippets of your private life at the corners of your perception.

PTSD can mimic other problems, especially symptoms of schizophrenia. A female friend of mine is especially cautious of people and sees "shadow people", but does not find herself as being "magical", she was diagnosed with PTSD due to that, stemming from being raped, her mother attempting to murder her, and her grandmother after that tortured her by killing her animals. Abuse/Shock can be very traumatizing and bring out all sorts of things, but they are treated with different medications and rehabilitation techniques.

I was wanting to write a more detailed response to the replies in this thread, but I can't seem to muster up the words I want to say. I hope that my honest appreciation and a simple thank you will suffice.

I'm not feeling as emotionally troubled as I was the night I posted this, but I'll be going over both my opening post and monsterland's post with my mother when I can, since I told her how I was feeling and she doesn't seem to impulsively want to send me back to a group home or the hospital like I was thinking. I think that the feedback I got here could be useful for myself and others in my life.