Asperger's the Great, really?

Hello

I am so fed up of reading about how great and special it is to have Asperger's. How it means you have special talents and oh how you have so much potential to be amazing and that you'll have a wonderful life once you figure it all out and just accept who you are- your amazing ASD potential.

Can we talk about the tragic/dark side hardly anyone - especially the media - want to talk about.Tony Attwood touched on some things but even then in one of his videos he too talks about how amazing it is to have Asperger's. I can't believe it's just me who feels it's a travesty. As far as I'm concerned there is a reason it's called a 'disorder' for me it is, it is not a 'condition'. It's ruined my life. It's the reason I've failed at everything I've tried to achieve. It's living in a prison in your brain and your body. That prison is this 'block' that's been there my whole life. It's knowing you do indeed have great potential but that block which is your prison stops this ever progressing. So everyday, your'e dragged around by this brain and body that just wants to keep you in the same old routines and patterns over and over again. Looking outside of your prison window onto a world around you that you'll never be part of and a world that will never be able to see you in your prison.  I grew up thinking I was just a bit stupid but now I know what that 'block' has been all my life in terms of trying to learn and understand. I later on in life wondered if I had some kind of learning disability when I was of the maturity to realise this wasn't actually plain stupidity.

I've lived my entire life seeing my 3 other siblings all have the lives I've tried desperately to have myself and never been able to achieve. Never actually knowing what it feels like to experience happiness, contentment, peace, satisfaction, fulfilment, meaning. I'm a pessimist I admit but my pessimism is all logic to me and I find it hard to see (in fact, can't) how anyone can see the world we live in in any other way. I've asked myself and professionals if this is depression. When I read Rollo May's famous quote that 'Depression is an inability to construct a future' that instantly made me realise therein was the problem for me. I have an inability to even think about a 'future' so how could I possibly be able to construct one? In one sentence my entire life's difficulties had an explanation.

I was told by the team involved in my assessment and diagnosis this is a very common ASD difficulty but they relate it to the imagination, how can you construct a future if you can't imagine it I think is the theory. But how do we know if it's depression or the lack of imagination? I'm not sure if it's possible to have depression your entire life. So my trail of tragedy and missed opportunities (the latter of which ironically I can only now see looking back) has a name called Asperger's Syndrome and I don't even understand where that may have been the reason for some of this.

I even wondered if I was schizophrenic or had a split personality because I couldn't explain this way of being, of feeling I'm trapped inside my brain and body that just drags me around with it all the while me being absolutely powerless to change it, to do anything about it. 

It's a living hell and an absolute travesty of a life. There is not one day goes by without me crying. Life = just waiting to die. I can't even kill myself because this body and brain won't allow it. 

This is what having Asperger's Syndrome is like for me.