SammichEater wrote:
Alright, I give up. I've thrown every last bit of logic I have into this discussion and it hasn't gotten me anywhere.
Maybe you are right. Maybe I don't really have AS, but I'm on the BAP. Maybe I have more impairment than I think I do but I just don't see it. Only time will tell.
You've kind of gotten a lot of negative responses in this thread and I feel kind of bad for you! I don't know if you're still reading this, but if you are, could I ask you a question? What made you think you had AS?
This is my reason why. If you don't feel like reading my self-indulgent nonsense, please feel free to skip. I'm placing the nonsense in a quote and bolding the important parts of what I really have to say down at the bottom.
Quote:
For me, I've always felt different from other people, but the feeling really intensified through middle school and high school when I started to really see the differences between myself and others. But all teenagers feel awkward and different, it's simply a fact of life. My incredibly NT sister and my fairly NT brother are both teenagers now and getting into that "no one understands me!" mindset. Not that I mean to belittle your feelings. I'm belittling my own, actually. I knew that all teenagers have these stereotypical teenage issues, so I decided that I wasn't going to make a fool of myself by saying that I thought I had a problem and I thought I was different when I knew everyone around me would just tell me that it was my "hormones talking."
So I kept a journal and did my "woe is me" thing there, and carried on with my life. Then between my junior and senior year, my parents got divorced. I went from being a 16 year old who didn't know how to operate a dish washer or a washing machine to a 17 year old who made sure both of her siblings made it home from school and their after school activities OK, got their homework done with them, fed them dinner, cleaned the house, and put them to bed. I'm not trying to paint a sob story here. I'm very aware that I'm lucky compared to some people. I'm only trying to illustrate that my life changed hard and fast. And this all was on top of my parents getting divorced which involved it's own struggles like watching my dad cry, learning my mom had an affair, the constant arguments, and so on. And that was compounded with the struggles every high school senior has: keeping up with school and extra curriculars, getting into college, worrying about the future, and of course maintaining a social life.
By the end of my senior year, I was in a horrible state. I'm sure the clinical term would be "depressed," but I don't like to call it that because when I think "depression" I think "locking yourself in your room and sitting under a dark cloud of listlessness, shut away from the entire world." But it wasn't like that. It was like running on auto-pilot. I felt like I was one of those bridges you make out of matchsticks in science class, and then pile on weight after weight until it snaps. I was falling and waiting to hit rock bottom, just so I'd know things couldn't get any worse. I was worn thin. I thought it was obvious that I was falling apart, but nobody seemed to notice. Not my parents because they too concerned with settling their own affairs, not my siblings because I was trying too hard to be strong for them, not my friends because (as I now know) I shut people out when things get bad instead of relying on others. I was self-destructing. I wasn't sleeping because the few hours I had alone at night were the only times I could relax. I was driving recklessly. My grades were dropping. And I kept waiting for someone to notice how bad off I was and come to my rescue, but no one ever did. The only thing I had to hold on to was the thought that I'd get to college and things would be different. It was going to be a fresh start, and things were finally going to be better.
I lost all my friends thanks to a combination of my emotional state, my AS, and the fact that I didn't have very good friends in the first place. I started college without any friends, but that was OK because this was my fresh start. My parents had finally woken up and started being parents again. I had adjusted to my new responsibilities at home and I ended up at a university that didn't make me feel like a complete loser. Things were looking up.
Then about two years later I realized I'd actually gone nearly a full year without having a conversation with anyone outside my immediate family. I mean I didn't even do small talk with my classmates. I may have said hello to people who said hello to me, but that was pretty much it. Thanks to things like limited eye contact and an inability to make small-talk, I was unintentionally scaring off the people who tried to approach me without even realizing it. In college, you don't make lunch buddies because there's hundreds of new faces every time you walk into the cafeteria. If you don't arrive with someone, you eat alone. It's like eating in a fast food restaurant. In class, you don't talk to the people who sit near you because there's no "downtime" in class. You don't sit around doing worksheets. You come in, sit down, shut up, and listen to the professor talk. Then you leave and every person in the class goes in a different direction. You don't see the same faces in the hall every day. You don't make homeroom buddies because there is no homeroom in college. You show up for class then you leave. I was a commuter student. I lived about 45 minutes away from my school because it was cheaper and my parents still needed me at home. In college, the social life isn't connected to the classes. They're two completely distinct loops that just so happen to occupy the same space. In grade school, friends just seemed to fall into my lap. It's like I was passed from friend to friend. When one person stopped being my friend, another was there to fill the void like magic. I was incredibly lucky in this regard, even if most of those friends didn't turn out to be the best of people. But in college, friends don't come to you, you've got to hunt them down and then stick them to you with an industrial adhesive.
If you go a year without speaking to someone, that's a real problem. That's a sign of a social disability. That's not just being different, that's a sign that something is definitely wrong. I didn't see it as one then, but I do now. Then, I just finally started feeling like I had to do something. It took me a year to start feeling lonely, but I finally did. And my mom was really on me about making friends to the point that I made friends up and made up pretend outings with them. I tried making friends but only succeeded in making acquaintances. I joined a greek fraternity because it was the only thing I knew that college students did. I tried joining clubs, but they were all so small it felt like walking into a closed circle of friends where there was no room for me. I magically lucked out again in winding up in a fraternity that is practically tailor-made to my AS social problems. I was literally assigned friends, and the events my fraternity does aren't purely social, but service and education themed, so they're actual events instead of parties. I sew blankets and clean up trash when I'm out with friends. It's not perfect by any means. I still struggle socially because of my AS. But now I actually have a social life.
The point I'm trying to make here is that the problems AS causes you don't have to be so incredibly obvious as extreme sensory issues or problems with school/work. I don't have sensory issues for which I need accommodations. I don't need accommodations to get through my classes. But my AS does cause me some very real problems, especially socially. But (and perhaps this is because I'm mildly affected compared to most) I think I could have gone my whole life thinking the way I did in high school, that everyone feels different and that if people don't notice I'm having a problem than I'm not.
Sometimes it takes falling completely on your ass before you wake up and see you've got a real problem on your hands.
And sometimes things don't see like a real problem because you don't understand what your mistakes are and that you're making these mistakes because of a real problem that's going unaddressed. For instance, I missed out on a great opportunity in high school because during an interview process I was asked what my plans for college were and I replied that I didn't know and that my parents probably needed me at home to watch my siblings. It never occurred to me that there was a
meaning behind that question. It never occurred to me that this question was meant as an assessment of my character, so I just told the truth. Most high school students know how to sell themselves when interviewed, but the entire idea of "selling myself" is completely counter-intuitive in my eyes. This isn't a big problem, but it's a real problem because my poor interview skills caused me to miss out on some great opportunities. I once told a friend that people had a party because she wasn't at school one day because in my eyes it wasn't a big deal. I wasn't glad that she wasn't at school, so thanks to my mind-blindness I didn't understand that other people were
actually glad she wasn't at school, and not just joking. I thought it was just a funny joke, so I blindly assumed that my friend would see it the same way I did. I was horribly, horribly wrong and caused some fairly severe drama among people who had to see each other for several hours each school day. This, again, is not a severe problem, but it's a real problem, one that is going to keep appearing every time I have to work with people. I went to senior prom without a date because I didn't understand when some girls came up and asked me if I'd go to prom with a certain guy, that it meant that guy actually wanted to go to prom with me and the girls were using subtext to probe me in advance on his behalf. Again, this isn't a severe problem but that doesn't make it any less real.
I think that if you do have AS, you've got regrets like this, things you wish you never would have done, things you look back on and say "how stupid was I that I didn't understand something so obvious?" And I think if you get diagnosed later in life, you're going to have all these instances where you look back and say "if only I had known about AS, I would have done things differently!"
These are signs that your AS is causing you problems. It's not about wanting to change who you are. It's not about wishing you were different. It's about all those mistakes you've made and never want to make again. People with AS make social blunders. It's part of the packaged deal. And it's not always because the world doesn't understand us, sometimes it's because we don't understand the world.
Anyway, this is just what I think. I hope some of it made sense.
09 Aug 2011, 5:07 pm
