How Did You Explain Your Social Difficulties to Yourself?

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I thought I did have friends, but now I realize they were just hanging around because they wanted something (a ride, beer, money). Whenever I needed something from them, they were nowhere to be found. Basically, I was happily unaware that people found me strange.

When I was growing up, people always told me that I was just shy and that in time I would grow out of it. I just thought that social interaction was something I never got the hang of. I've spent all my time trying to fit in with everyone else. PArt of the problem is that I don't want to interact with people. My brain seems to split people I meet into two groups.... Those I can talk to and those who I can't. I find that I can hold semi decent conversations with the first group, but when someone from the second group talks to me, I just switch off. This is going to be interesting cos my future manager at work is in the second group and I find him boring as hell!! !! !

I've decided that from now on that I'm just gonna be myself. If people don't like it, that's their problem.

In 1998, I was a geology student and I was mapping in Ireland with a friend. She noticed my eccentricity and I for the first time I carefully self-examined myself without knowing anything about AS. These are my thoughts that I recall…

1. I find it very difficult to feel part of a group. I'm either on the outside looking in and observing people or I'm the centre of attention as a clown making people laugh at my unusual character. I do not understand the reason for my sense of alienation. People seem to know what is going on, psychically, but I’m left out all the time.

2. I have unusually strong interests, that have to do with science, especially collecting minerals.

3. In particular...I stand out by finding it very easy to remember facts and statistics, whereas other people don’t know and can’t remember facts and statistics like I can.

4. I tend to talk at people rather then to them because of 1. my difficulty in groups. I tend to tell people facts about science. The fact begins with “Did you know?”. My sudden statement acts as an attention grabbing introduction, that introduces me into an conversational interaction where I can talk to people (Back then, 50% of my sentences started with “did you know?”, a habit that began in childhood).


I believed myself to be mildly autistic, not knowing that there was such a thing.

I saw a TV program children with classic autism play on their own, this was described as unusual and distinctive to autism…however, it was how I played…by my myself and I saw felt it was “normal.”

Diamond Dave

wow diamond dave, you described me too....

Ditto

except # 2
insert my special interrest (which are different from yours) and it would be 100% me. Total and complete. I find that eerie.

in the future, i intend on taking advantage of the section of the site where members can hold thier own personal diary ( i forget the exact name this moment).

Recently i came accross a ton of my own writings during a seven year period of my life from when i was a horney Jr in HS, through my first Love/Broken Heart into the step of becoming a man. I was amazed that many of the introspections i had then (15-20 years ago), that i still hold those views very close to my heart, today.

Anyways the point is, you made a comment about trying to fit in with everybody else and that triggered the prior muse. Your comment was one of my main themes in most of my writting. Trying to figure it all out.
The conclusion i came too was that i wasted so much precious time TRYING, to fit in with everybody else. And i also concluded that i was lying to myself to try. It just isn't me. i have many more important things to waste my time on.

It was very hard for me. I'll tell you that.

My Journal.

thats what its called.

now i may change my obsessive focus now that thats all cleared up.

During most of adult life, I explained my social difficulties as a reaction to the lingering fear that I felt from having been bullied most of my childhood. I saw my social difficulties as part of my fear of new situations and meeting new people. I moved around a lot during my childhood, and I would think that if I moved to a new place, the bullying would stop, and the new people would be nicer. Unfortunately, everywhere I moved to as a child, I was bullied. I was also afraid that if I got to know people better, they would tease me and make fun of me. In college, the problem was not so much bullying, but "friendly advice" from nosy roommates who wanted to know why I was spending so much time alone. I was afraid of embarrassment or rejection.

However, I now realize that shyness was only the tip of the iceberg of my social difficulties. I realize now that from an NT standpoint, I am not one of the easiest people to be around. I constantly feel compelled to talk about my pet obsessions, usually either politics, history, sports, or theology around born again believers. I have trouble turning my speaking volume down--some people have to tell me to keep my voice down. Many times, people joke with me, and I have a hard time knowing when someone is joking. I tend to be on the serious side--I am not comfortable around people who joke around all the time. These were problems that I have become aware of since I have come to realize that I might have AS. Also, I tended to be a loner during my childhood years, and that is why I got bullied a lot.

Bland-I'm an idiot because I posted my response to this thread on page 4 sandwiched between other posts. Why? Because I'm a technological idiot!! I'm new at all of this stuff, having only owned a computer for a few months. My kids taught me how to use it and take great joy in telling me how stupid and inept I am concerning technology. But I'll have the last laugh! I'm now secretly lobbying to have the abortion limits extended to age 18!! If this comes to pass there will be much more respect around here!! !!

I blamed my shy and introverted nature for my difficulties with social interaction. I was also homeschooled and I thought that played a role as well. However, I was out of the house much of the time and still had problems talking with people. It wasn’t until I was in my late teens that I began suspecting autism at all.

Before diagnosis I grew to feel that my social life was somehow very precarious, that I could easily lose the few friends I had. I had a nagging idea that there might be something wrong with my behaviour, but I also blamed others a lot for the problem, for having a lot of silly expectations.

I didn't have a clue why I felt so different, or what to call it, but I was acutely aware of everything from about age three onwards. As a really young child I self-gaslit and told myself I was defective in some way. I used to picture that God made all the babies on an assembly-line up in the sky. I remember looking at the clouds when I was maybe five or six, and deciding that God must have assembled me wrong by forgetting to pull a lever or add a squirt of something that other humans had. I even decided he might have added too many squirts. Either way, I knew I wasn't formed "properly" on the inside and that led to feelings of profound alienation and shame.

When I was in eighth grade I was so obsessed with figuring it out I decided I would grow up to be a child psychologist so I'd have access to the best research on child development possible, in hopes of understanding my own plight. It was kind of my life goal to label what was wrong. There's a lot of clinical depression in my family but that didn't seem like enough of an explanation because it excluded all my other eccentricities like the sensory stuff. I had no clue that was related to my "problem" but assumed it was a secondary problem of equal magnitude. I didn't know to connect those dots.

As I got older still I assumed all the typical things like Social Anxiety, Social Phobia, GAD, and Introversion, and I was diagnosed with some all of them, but the diagnoses continued to feel lacking, and the meds or CBT activities didn't help. For a while I wanted to blame my parents, as if they just didn't raise me properly or teach me how to interact with people, but that didn't seem fair. It had to be my own fault somehow.

When I was around 40 I took a whole day off work with the intent of scouring the internet dawn to dusk, and searching for anything that remotely described my personality. Again, I didn't know that the sensory stuff was related so I only looked for descriptions of people who felt self-conscious 24/7, as if their brains and bodies weren't integrated together or even integrated to planet Earth. The best explanation I found was something called Indigo Children, but that seemed like New-Age hokus pokus, so it couldn't be right.

I went through hell trying to figure it out, and no matter what the process involved a lot of negative self-talk.