Suspecting ASD... in doubt and in fear... help?

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alalia_17
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07 Jun 2017, 1:02 pm

This is very difficult for me as I avoid any kind of online interaction like the plague, but I've never felt so compelled to reach out to people as I do now. It seems that I have been struggling for so long. I have been dealing with horrible thoughts about myself for so, so long. I am compelled to reach out. With tears in my eyes. And this forum seems like the best place to do so. I really hope that I'm not intruding and that this is not misplaced. :| Please forgive me if that is the case. Also, please forgive me for the length of this e-mail. I don’t do the internet thing (posting in forms, blogging, chatting online, facebooking), and I feel like this is violating some conventions. Garg.

Let me explain myself some. I have a cripplingly poor self image. I am constantly plagued by intrusive and belittling thoughts about how stupid I am. Most of this surrounds interacting with people. I feel like I cannot relate to people, like I'm a child wishing that he could sit at the adult table and talk about all of the things that adult people want to talk about. But I find it even difficult to talk about simple things, like the details of what’s going on in my own life, let alone more complex things that people want to talk about, because I forget basic things, the details, especially when put on the spot. I’ve got to stammer and hum and haw to get the right word, but often it comes out odd anyways. I find it hard to follow what people are often saying. I constantly need to ask them to repeat themselves. It’s embarrassing. (It feels like I’m deaf sometimes, but my hearing is not bad, at least not too bad.) And I'm hopeless at catching jokes - it seems that I’m always the last to laugh, if I laugh at all. It's embarrassing. I'm embarrassed to be myself. :(

Communicating and enjoying other people’s company seems so easy for those people around me. But when I try, I’m at a loss. I just have so much difficulty feeling like my message gets through, if it gets out at all. There is no satisfaction. There is never the feeling that I make contact. I just can’t read people - did they care? I don’t know. I’m never, ever, ever satisfied that I’ve connected with a person when I do make a statement - or if they’ve even heard me and found what I’ve said interesting or not. So I bumble a lot when talking. There's no feedback to know I making sense. I’m constantly at a loss for words. I cannot tell stories because I get details mixed up, go off on tangents, and so forth. (God I have a feeling this is going to or has already happened with this post.) Worst is when I get the deer-in-the-head-lights sort of shut down where my mind goes blank. Sometimes someone will catch me out or the stress will be high (e.g., a conference) and I meltdown and go silent. The embarrassment is intolerable when there are many people watching. It just makes me want to just kill myself. All the damn time. We’re not talking demanding tasks here, it could be anything. Just basic ordinary things like having lunch with people. I dread dealing with people so much that I do my best to avoid social interaction whenever possible. I avoid people I know and people I don’t know. I have a fear of people. Even seeing a person’s face, whether I know them or not, I see them mocking me. Some faces make me feel like this kind of fear that makes me want to vomit. Faces with these sly smiles - the faces of people who want to hunt me down in conversation and expose me and destroy me. Hearing people laugh, it sounds like they’re laughing at me. I never know. Kids in grade school would mock me and take advantage of me because I didn't know. And I still don't.

For me, avoidance works extremely well. I’m just peachy keen to not talk or interact with anyone. Just give me some music with headphones that have very good noise isolation and a bit of fun coding to do, I’ll go for hours and never miss it. Get me drawing or painting and I'm good. That said, it’s not that I don’t want to have a friend. And I can definitely see the value of friendship and socializing. It’s just I’m more than satisfied entertaining myself.

Despite my difficulties, somehow, by some strange twist of fate, I managed to find someone who can tolerate me. Someone who I know loves me, my wife. And I guess I’m OK interacting with my wife. But she’s so incredibly smart that I often find myself feeling like she thinks everything I say is stupid. I tell her this and she insists that she thinks I’m smart (enough). I never believe her. In conversation, it always feels like she’s pointing out all of the faults in everything I say. But every time I inquire about this, she’s shocked and denies it. Why can’t I trust her? She tells me explicitly that I can. From her viewpoint, our conversations are normal stimulating conversations that she claims to enjoy and she says she respects me as her conversation partner. How? I hear what she is saying logically, but I just cannot believe her - in my core. I’m an idiot and it feels like she's always pointing out why.

Apart from my wife - and my brother, whom I’ve lost regular contact with - I had one other true friend, and he ended up killing himself with his wife. It was... brutal. We were very similar. We used to make music together. A lot of it was about dealing with suicide (sort of in the thematic vein of Xiu Xiu for those that know). He had a beautiful, raspy sounding voice. But the last thing he told me was “f**k you” (pardon the profanity) and hung up. I thought he was joking because he was kind of a weird guy. It turns out I couldn’t read him either. Good friends kill themselves on me. :(

So I do not really have any actual friends other than my wife. We try to socialize. The one thing that really works is board games. Board games provide an interface to interact with people, and that is satisfying (and fulfills my wife’s need to socialize, which is very much stronger than mine). I’m not very good at them, but at least it's a working solution for getting me in a room with other people so we can have a night of socializing. But often these nights will still end in anxiety ridden discussion about whether people think I’m stupid or not for this that and the other thing I said that was stupid.

My wife has persistently nudged (urged?) me to seek counselling support. After many months of trying, I finally made arrangements to see someone (my schedule is very busy, but, more over, I find it very difficult to incorporate new things into my routine because it causes great anxiety). But going to the counselor has been good and has caused me to do some soul searching and, naturally (like anyone would these days), Googling for ideas. I certainly had heard about autism and Aspergers and such before, but never in a moment did I think that these could ever possibly apply to me. I certainly could not be anything like the guy on Big Bang Theory (a show that I do not find funny and thus do not watch, but, for some reason, I was aware from the ether had a character with Aspergers in it [or so I had assumed before reading up on ASD stuff].) More seriously, I assumed I could not possibly have Aspergers because I am nowhere near being a “genius”. I've got quirk but not the intelligence (even average). That's what Aspergers was to me at the time, and I have no remarkable aptitude for things like math and physics or science or just general intelligence in general. This is the very antithesis of how I think about myself. (I am humiliated and embarrassed to be myself for being an idiot and this motivates my desire to kill myself.) On the other hand, Autism didn’t fit either because I never had speech problems as a child. Plus I was a rather oddly gregarious child, very much fond of handshakes - which remains today the one thing I can do happily with people in a social setting shake hands. It feels good. And I don't mind being touched firmly or given a good hug, too! That doesn't fit either, right? I though people with Autism do not generally enjoy social-physical contact (or so I'd heard).

But as it would happen, out there on the net is Simon Baron-Cohen’s AQ test, and I took it out of curiosity. (Being sure to retain a healthy level of skepticism.) My score was surprisingly high (~40). I took it several more times. I took other tests too. But... internet tests are about as stupid as I am. Why believe in that? I am very cautious about self-diagnosing (one needs to have an objective grounding at the risk of self-deception), but the questions on that test made a lot of sense to me - there was an eerie resonance - and it got me thinking about my experience through life. A life of never feeling connected to people despite desperate efforts to do so. A life of being crippled with anxiety about interacting with people for fear of not knowing what to do or say to make things “work”. A life of self-isolation and deep and bitter feelings of inferiority and stupidity and the impossibility of relating to other people. A feeling of being on the “wrong planet” (pardon me it that’s a bit on the nose).

Anyways, it’s since lead me over the past three days to one long continuous frenzied search through everything and anything I can find about ASD. The fit seems so strong, it’s pretty much all I can think about. There is honestly an excitement to keep finding more and more aspects about the condition. So much of what I’ve been discovering fits me. And I’ve even learned that quite clearly the message from the ASD community is that characters like Sheldon are at best a comedic stereotype and at worst a point of further grief for people who are already dealing with the condition but who don’t exhibit genius levels of ability in math and physics. That indeed it is a spectrum with a really wide range of ability and intelligence levels and manifestations. “Meet a person with autism and you’ve met one person” seems to be the word on the street. Not everyone with Aspegers is cut from the silicon-valley cloth despite what Temple Grandin would have you think (on the side, to be fair, everything she says about fear makes a lot of sense to me... I feel like a scared, hypersensitive, and easily startled prey-animal a lot of the time --- especially around people.)

I previously just thought that I had severe social anxiety disorder (hereafter, SAD --- which I have actually been officially diagnosed with), but ASD fits details that SAD does not. SAD does not account for things like my reaction to bright lights or very loud or sudden sounds. For example, when an ambulance comes down the street, it makes me feel nauseated and I’m forced to plug my ears with my fingers (even though doing so always makes me feel embarrassed). (But really, I never thought much of those things - who enjoys bright lights and loud sirens, they're supposed to make you feel sick, right?) Insects that move very quickly cause me great distress - enough to make me scream out like a little girl sometimes. SAD also does not account for my clumsiness. I drop and break things all the time. I have difficulty throwing things. And gym and sporting activities were always just a joke to me; no interest in that stuff whatsoever. My preference was to create my own games or do absurd things like throwing the shot put backwards. No one got that, and it enraged my gym teacher. The thing was, I just couldn’t move (read, gracefully move) like other people and keep up with them to have fun at it, so I had to make my own fun. SAD doesn’t explain why I must crack my nose and put pressure on the bridge to derive a kind of soothing and calming pleasure from it. Or my leg shaking - always with the bouncing. It drives people nuts and they let me know, but it is distressing not to do it when I need to. SAD doesn’t account for my somewhat odd tendency to repeat what people have said, to repeat certain phrases or things uttered on TV over an over and over and over again, my penchant for making strange sounds, or my proclivity for imitating other people’s voices or voice qualities in public (and my wife just hates this). And SAD also doesn’t explain my obsessions, fixations, and fascinations --- and the one talent that I’ve always permitted myself to acknowledge (in a mental sea of doubt and shame about being stupid): I have an great ability to focus on things that interest me. When I focus, everything else goes away, and it becomes very difficult for me to keep track of time. These things are not often very practical for me either. Once I read the dictionary, just because. Another time I decided to read through all of Shakespeare’s plays... because. Or teach myself calculus (which, btw, I suck at but still find very fascinating), while on a family vacation in a tropical location. Now I'm learning Japanese for no apparent reason (I mean, it's not like I could actually have a normal conversation with someone if I some how learned it through my methods, which is impossible). But it's a thing I must do. (Just like I must check if my office door is shut fifty times before I can leave work.) They sometimes make some sense to me, but never much sense to the people around me. My wife especially bears the full brunt of my obsessive focus on these things and she has expressed her irritation with me for bringing them up all the time. I know it takes a toll on her, and I feel bad about being so focused, but I cannot help myself. She wishes that sometimes the focus would go to her, I know. And I try my best.

But more than anything, from what I’ve been reading, it seems like ASD might go a long way in explaining the most frustrating aspect of my life: my horrendous difficulty with communicating and connecting with people --- getting people! I am especially hopeful/intrigued about the linguistic problems - linguistic problems that seem to be so difficult to identify and explain to people but which haunt me all the time, and my terrible anxiety and embarrassment and self-effacing and self-destructive behaviour that I have in connection with this. From what I’ve seen, things like difficulty finding the right word (so simple a task it would seem, but so very impossible), difficulty telling a story in a direct and logical and non-tangential sequence, difficulty with auditory perception, difficulty talking about autobiographical aspects of my life, difficulty talking slowly when I get excited about a topic or knowing when it is appropriate and how much of a topic to talk about when I do get talking (generally I avoid this, but when I teach it can be very difficult not to get rolling, although the enthusiasm is something students appreciate, which has oddly worked in my favour), problems with remembering what I was going to say, problems understanding what people really mean, knowing when people are being ironic or sarcastic, not assuming that people are always laughing at me, hours and hours spent analyzing the smallest aspects of "what went wrong" in my communication or things that I said that brought derision and mockery and shaming down upon me.... the list goes on and on it seems. Why bother talking?

So my tentative conclusion is that some ASD things seem to fit me. But maybe I’m horribly wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong. I cannot trust myself for not making stupid mistakes. Maybe this is just another fleeting fantasy. The problem is, there are somethings that don’t seem to fit or I’m just not sure about. And it just would be so helpful to have some feedback on where I sit there. If you have ASD or know someone with ASD, please let me know your opinion. The Internet sucks and people lie, but I am being honest, honestly. This is my story (or chunky shards of it). For what it is worth, my wife tells me that I am indeed different from other people, not ordinary at least, but that this is something that she loves about me. Not sure what to make of that.

Through recent inquiries with my family, I have discovered that I have a first cousin with Aspergers. This person hates crowds and attention being drawn to them. I can relate to that! (Ironic that I'm writing this then?)

I’m living in a place where getting a diagnosis could be very difficult (and very, very expensive). But I cannot any longer just look inward on this. If this is me - if I have ASD - this gives me a new narrative about my life. A narrative that I actually I am not stupid at all. That actually I just don’t mesh with other people because I am not like other people in the way my mind operates. It seems like maybe it could be an opportunity to get my pride back. To restore my shredded self confidence. It could give me strategies for dealing with people. Maybe I could talk to people more confidently about my interests? Or maybe at least it could help me cope with my nearly daily, multiepisodic suicidal ideation. :cry: This is a sh***y and painful way to live. I hate it. Maybe it can give me hope that I’m not alone. So this is me, laid bear and honest, and trying desperately to reach out --- Oh terrifying, terrifying, terrifying and cruel Internet. (But at least the trolls will not have much meat to pick on... as myself confidence is non-existent. :skull: )



Last edited by alalia_17 on 07 Jun 2017, 1:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

BTDT
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07 Jun 2017, 1:10 pm

The most practical thing to do may be to lurk on this forum and try out coping strategies and techniques that work for the Aspies on this forum. Unlike, say, Down's syndrome, it is hard to say what will and won't be useful. We all have different strengths and problem areas. Some people even say they don't have any strengths. :( But, with a bit of trial and error you may be able to make small changes that make a big difference in your quality of life.

For instance, a ticking drives some people nuts. I have an analog Seiko silent wave clock that is really, really quiet.



kicker
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07 Jun 2017, 2:44 pm

Self actualization can be substantially terrifying and exciting, especially given a logical mindset, when one doesn't want to make a mistake or capitulate to false hope. Especially when one identifies with the unique nature they have often noted for themselves over the course of their lives actually has been identified and cataloged elsewhere. I would advise against sampling individual accounts as comparative markers though, as some confirmatory biases may beguile you to believe you're mistaken. I think you are already aware of that, however I realize you may need and or appreciate reassurances to that affect.

One measure you could take that would be beneficial in actualizing would be to find videos of confirmed ASD cases within the category of high functioning and observe the behavioral patterns and approaches. I found that to be extremely useful. There are interviews and documentaries available for viewing online that would help present you with a fuller view than written personal accounts. I believe you will find certain behaviors you have are stereotypical to the overall set. However be aware that certain behaviors and ideation you have mentioned or which spilled through your narrative are indicative of depression and anxiety.

Gifted individuals struggle with appropriately identifying their giftedness and often underestimate their abilities while normative individuals tend to overestimate theirs. I understand the need to cater to the room so to speak, however you do as well a job as I do...that isn't a compliment for either of us. I'm sure you've been spoken to in derogatory terms with regards to your intelligence and attempts at social interactions however attempting to pander only makes fitting in more awkward and frustrating for both you and the listener. While relatively rare there are individuals that are able to keep up with you at full steam.

I hope that eventually you will be able to decide if autism is an applicable fit for you and when you do you are able to finally begin to start going easier on yourself. Whichever course you take will be a struggle, however I think you are well apt for the task.



Stoic0209
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07 Jun 2017, 3:00 pm

Your story sounds a lot like mine. I haven't been around for quite as long, but the significant disconnect I feel between myself and others... the inability I feel to engage in meaningful conversation... I feel for you so much.

As a note, I am also not formally diagnosed. I am quite confident I am though, I am so very sure. I could be wrong, yes, but I've been operating of the assumption of ASD, and it's held up so far.
I laughed when you said, "... internet tests are about as stupid as I am". It's kind of like the old adage, a computer is only as intelligent as its programmer. And essentialy, when we take a test we are programming a piece of code to give us an output based on our inputs. Quite a true statement you have there.

Anways, welcome to Wrongplanet, you have a lot of friends here. We'll get through our ups and downs together.



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07 Jun 2017, 3:36 pm

It seems you might be autistic but it doesn't mean you don't have SAD. You do and it's a really bad case.

Autism/Asperger might be what caused it to develop but SAD is what gives you most your current life problems and is curable. You don't feel like dieing of fear and embarrassment while interacting with people for autism/Asperger alone. I have Asperger and I don't experience it. Sure, interaction is difficult and sometimes just don't feel like saying anything because I am overwhelmed (for example today listening to a boring lecture and loud music "killed" me so much I was irresponsible for a half of hour afterwards - shutdown) but I don't experience fear or embarrassment most of the time, only on occasion when I have a real reason to (I actually said/did something stupid) and in that case I do my best to control the feeling(I focus on what I see in front of me and don't let negative thoughts feed on each other, it's probably called "mindfullness")