I am at D. And I will likely never try to get a formal diagnosis.
I am 63 and it has all just recently come together for me. My mother and my stepmother were both borderline personality disorder...a walk through hell. So there was no possibility of getting any attention on me. A borderline mother could never tolerate the loss of attention on her, of the "shame" of having an imperfect child. I had to go it alone. We all orbited their disordered, horrendous behavior. I knew I was different..the bullying in school was merciless. The anxiety was crippling, and i had an absolute terror I was "crazy" (as I thought of it then) like them. I actually went through a process many years ago with a therapist to confirm I was not BPD, Yet I knew there was something. Why was I having so much suffering around people? Why did it always go so wrong, despite my best intentions?
I recently met an Aspergers man who was very open about it with me and started me researching. I had been attracted to it before when I met many open Aspies in Mensa, and I felt such a resonance with them. But I was still believing being raised by a BPD mother had "contaminated me" and that was what made me weird, as my ex husband of 30 years was always so quick to tell me. And I thought only males had aspergers. I remember my mother always telling me "Honestly Carolyn, you do go off the deep end." and that I needed mental help. But it was always threatening and frightening and getting actual help would have been out of the question.
I have been let out of a dark dungeon I have been locked in all my life. I thought I had somehow "caught" something from my mother, and I knew from my youngest days something was out of synch. I remember a particular day walking to kindergarten and the kids in front spitting on me and pushing me away to make me walk alone. I was devastated. I wanted to just be like them and the confusion was like a painful darkness - why did they hate me? School was pure hell, every singel day. Some days the anxiety was so high I could not speak.
I am out of the country now living in Romania, so seeing someone to get a formal dx is not possible. I am not really concerned to get a formal diagnosis. The relief I am experiencing is HUGE! And the resonance with other Aspies, especially the other women is liberating...that is all that matters to me...understanding and coming to peace with it. I have been cataloging my life in light of looking at it through this new perspective and everything has clicked into place with a powerful settling down. The high IQ (found a lot of kindred souls in Mensa), the bullying, the constantly being misunderstood and told I am rude, when I know I only mean well. The physical awkwardness, dropping things, breaking things, repetitive behaviors, the obsessions and long dissertations about Marilyn Manson and astrophysics, etymology, the intense focus...
My high levels of anxiety and fear about being so different has evaporated. I am rejoicing. The social misery is still there, but it doesn't frighten me anymore, that there is "something wrong with me." Millie said it beautifully on her blog...
"This is what I call the GREAT GULF - the invisible difference in social processing and sensing that separates Aspergers people from others. By adulthood many of us have learned to get by and to cope. We may "appear" able to contend with daily life, we "appear OK" and bit by bit, as people come to know us beyond the learned and adopted social scripts we privately rehearse (obsessively and with effort and great strain,) our social communication deficits become apparent. We make the "offensive remark," or we query something or someone in a blunt manner that is out of synch with the social norms. And this is the hard and painful part of our adult lives. We interrupt. We want attention when it is an inappropriate time. We misread the social dynamics and make the typical Aspergers faux-pas's again and again. We say something "wrong." We "hurt" unintentionally. And finally...we disrupt the social fabric......."
Carolyn
14 Jun 2010, 4:45 am
