Seems I need some help again

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awes
Deinonychus
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01 Jun 2015, 2:19 pm

I didn't write anything here for a long time,
but just recently I more and more realised again, how my Asperger Syndrom is influencing my life:

I am getting along very well with other people, it is easy for me to win new friends and partners and because of this hardly anybody would ever take in consideration to think I'm having problems.
And indeed I am having huge problems that restrict my freedom immensely and make me despair.

Since I was a child taking the public transport in the morning rush hour meant incredible suffering to me.
To me it is like being tortured EVERY DAY and whenever it is over I know it is going to repeat again on the next morning.
And when I arrived in school I was so consumed and burnt out from it, that, even though I always used to enjoy school, I just simply could not concentrate on anything anymore and being forced to still hang in was even more of a torture.
Nobody ever understood my problem and my parents always just interpreted my words as laziness.
The good old "everybody else is going through that too" was a standard argument.
I believed them. I believed that I'm just lazy. And I pitied everybody else and respected them for being so brave to go through this pain and suffering as if it was no big deal at all.
Noise everywhere, the floor is moving irregularly, hundreds of smelly people, hundreds of voices, hundreds of shoulders pressing against you, homeless people full of bacteria in winter, constantly being forced to stay attentive to not miss your destination, constantly worrying to not be late, getting out of train1, getting heading to train2, same procedure, getting into the bus, same procedure just with worse air quality,... then arriving in school, totally f***ed...

I always told my mother I want to go to the school on the other side of the road, she forbid it, I must go to the one she likes better, 35 minutes of public transport away.
When she stopped driving me when I was 12 my mental state worsened more and more.
It was visible.
Now when my family was moving to an outer district which made my way to school 1 hour and crossing a busy train station after the shortest time I developed schizophrenia, on my way to school and from school I always just wished to just stop walking, fall on the floor and die. But again the words echoed in my mind "everybody else is doing it too". So I kept on going through it, believing it was totally normal.

When I was 16 I ended up going to psychiatry (willingly), I was heavily psychotic and constantly hearing the ringing of my alarm in my ear everywhere I went and I also was heavily suicidal. I actually only wanted to be released from life but I thought there is a chance they could help me.
So they diagnosed me as psychotic and having atypical autism and gave me medicine. I always used to know myself and know what my real problems are, but everything people around me said about that, considering how I'm not going through anything anybody else isn't going through either, I thought I might need that.
And, seriously, I read the Asperger Syndrome diagnosis-definition before the interview and just repeated it convincingly, because I necessarily wanted to be excused from school because I saw it as my only chance to have a break from all the sensory-overload torture on my way to school.
My psychosis more and more became schizophrenia, erasing the borders between what I knew and what people, now even including the doctors, told me.

I stayed there for three months, the medicine was horrible and messing around with my brain and psychosomatic functions.
I didn't have to repeat the year in school.
And even though I often did not appear in school in the following 2 years and spent much time on teaching myself to play the piano playing out my sorrow and longing for relief, I came to the point where I could do my graduation in minimum time.
Now I had 4 weeks to practise for it ALONE AT HOME, all the lessons I had missed, 4 years of maths that I never learnt.
I had 4 weeks to practise it ALONE without the public transport stress and graduated with A average!
I had learnt EVERYTHING in 4 weeks with ease when I was on my own, I had learnt NOTHING when I was forced to fit in!

Nevertheless it changed NOTHING about my parents. As soon as they had accepted the Aspergers Diagnosis, instead of rethinking their prejudice and their habit of ignoring that I ALWAYS concretely expressed exactly what I knew and what always turned out to be right in the end,
they from then on just started to interpret all my problems as deriving from my "social problems".
So when I was suffering from sensory overload they ignored my words and replaced them by "he's sad because he has social problems".
It was at times where I was the most popular guy in my school and 50% of the girls in my class had told me they had a crush on me. They might not have known that, I didn't talk about such things, I had much bigger problems to worry about, but if they would have understood me at least 1% they would have seen it can't be my "social problems" that made me so suicidal.
As if such trivial s**t could make me suicidal.

Well, now my graduation is 3 years ago, two attempts to study at the university ended up in a burnout.
Now it's no longer just the public transport, now it's also the crowded lectures and the waiting and pushing to get a seat before the lectures.
I have been living alone since I was 17 because my mother was abusive and violent and my father is working in another city 5 days a week.
Until I was 20 I attempted suicide two times. Now, with enough distance from my previous life and the acceptance of
what I must avoid to be healthy and a one-year break from studying I achieved full functionality and mental health again.

I am widely considered a universal genius, but I know, that without somebody to help me with everything I have no future and would die soon.
Now I am expected to go to the university again in the next term.
If my new music project won't be successful soon I really don't know what to do.
I can't imagine that anybody of you knows a solution for this, but it's already kind of calming to write it down here.
Thank you for reading it.



starkid
Veteran
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03 Jun 2015, 1:06 am

I can relate to your issues with public transportation. Public transportation is huge sensory overload and gives me migraines. Ditto with being alert for stops. This is one of my biggest problems with being away from home.

I don't know what you are studying or where you are, but your options may include online classes, night classes (less people and noise on campus), classes at a smaller (and therefore less overwhelming) school. If you have a diagnosis and the school has a disability services office, you can get accommodations such as a note-taker or recorded lectures (so that you have less on which to concentrate while in class). What would be most helpful depends on your exact problems.



Evam
Deinonychus
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03 Jun 2015, 2:04 am

There is definitely a big link between Asperger and schizophrenia, and I think that sensory overload plays an immense factor here. Not with all Aspergers though, sensory overload plays such a central role. See http://txtopia.tumblr.com/post/99407947 ... the-autism.

You know that anxiety makes everything worse. Some Aspergers might shut out this emotional side more than you do; seems an easy solution, and for them it is some kind of solution, but it does not necessarily make things better.

There is one thing that you might be less aware of, how much anxieties depend on emotions of other people. Maybe it is good for you to know that for very NTs people emotions, their own emotions as well as those of others, are much less scary and upsetting, because they understand most of the time where these emotions come from, or if they dont understand them fully, they are confident that there is a reason for them. Sure, there are bad things going on in this world, but understanding everything better, makes it easier to stand them, and the idea what kind or short-term alleviation or long-term remedies are necessary comes with this understanding, and this has a big calming effect, too.

I imagine it to be difficult to get part of that confidence as an Asperger, but it seems vital to me to get it and to accept that it is somewhat "second-hand".

Dont expect too much understanding from your parents. They seem unable to develop it. Many people cant appreciate others in their difference, or not that much. Be glad that they dont blame it only on your "laziness" now, even if their idea about what is going on, is still very annoying.

Some people can understand you better, either, because they are similar to you, or because over time, they have acquired the cognitive empathy to get it.



Evam
Deinonychus
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30 Jun 2015, 2:20 am

You wrote: "I was heavily psychotic and constantly hearing the ringing of my alarm in my ear everywhere I went".

Was there also some "tinnitus" to it? Or if not: how do you/doctors make the difference between "tinnitus" plus excess of anxiety, and "psychotic"?