Greetings. I've been diagnosed with borderline personality D/O and non-verbal learning disorder/hyperlexia, which shares a lot of traits w/ Asperger's. Recently, an acquaintence 'diagnosed' me w/ Asperger's, saying that I was a lot like his brother, who has it. I'm a 49-year-old woman w/ no mathematical/technological inclinations whatsoever, but a lot of social problems--my oddities inspire the rejection of others, even this far into so-called adulthood.
I've had a lot of problems w/ drugs and alcohol, and have been abstinent for about three years. As a kid, I learned to read pretty early--2 or 3, according to my mother--and reading, preferably words on paper, has been an enduring, favorite escape. I also took to writing stories fairly early. My vocabulary might impress some people, but overall it's useless. About the only positive input I've received from teachers, professors, and various others has been about my writing ability, and my musical talent, which I seem to have gotten from my Aspie-ish dad.
At 21, on speed, I produced a 'novel' for a writing workshop conducted by a PEN-Faulkner-award-winning writer I admired immensely. (I stole his first novel from a library, and still have it; it was published when this guy, now an ivory-tower Mark Twain scholar, was 25. That fact alone impressed me.) That professor could be nasty, and seemed to assume that I was just some kind of nearly mute fashion punk sort of person until I turned the project in. In short, he offered to show it to his agent if I made some necessary changes to the thing.
I've not written anything of note since. I did spend way too much time accumulating drug/drinking-related "experience", which interfered in a huge way w/ the development of any social/relational skills and successful participation in ongoing outpatient therapy. I naively assumed that my writing ability would magically reappear shortly after I put down the benzos and the drink 3 years ago (the benzo taper was pretty harrowing, but I'm now on gabapentin for the anxiety). It has not. My subject matter remains limited; what I know of the way neurotypicals relate to one another comes from the idiot box and the novels of other people; my internal editor quibbles relentlessly over matters of punctuation and word choice; and I never get anything done.
I don't place a lot of stock in way-posthumous psychological necropsy--say, James Joyce was an odd duck,. and perhaps drank too much, as did Faulkner and countless others, mostly men, but being odd and drinking to smooth over social/relational distress doesn't automatically make one an Aspie. I've had some problems composing academic papers as well--citations; the flow of ideas; what is plagiarism and what is not--and learned to do THAT by commandeering a scholar's critique of a modernist novel and pinning my own words to the thing (and getting a B plus along the way.) At my age, hoping to win an SSDI claim so that I may live modestly and never ever be homeless-a wretched experience I would recommend to no one save those younger neurotypicals who bounce and flow with ease--I don't know what to do. Technology has completely deformed the process of writing the story/finding the agent/selling the hard copy manuscript/doing the book tour thing. Sometimes, I feel as though I killed the gifts I may have once had, and that I'd be better off burying my head under the pillow, emerging only to watch more TV. Thoughts?
04 Jan 2014, 1:23 pm
