Hello everyone. I feel quite lost and lonely, because I think I´ve tried everything, using all my energy, to fit in. This has been the story of my life since I was about 5 or 6, when everything turned from awesome and exciting to scary and weird. I slowly turned from sociable an enthusiastic about knowing people into a socially awkward kid, and I always thought it was because I was dumb, or ugly, or simply ashamed because of something I never quite identified. I was supposed to be smart, because I learned to read at around the age of three, and had this sort of great memory and kind of easy learning way. But in terms of getting along with people, I have always been so out of place, trying so hard to be like the rest, but achieving exactly de opposite. It has been always so confusing, because I can tell that my life has been pretty normal, except from my social clumsiness. But the thing is that everyone aroun me except my family has put distance from me, for one reason or the other. I have been almost convinced of being a bad person myself, but if I check the events of my life, I cannot find anything that I could have done, to deserve others being mad at me because of something bad I could had done. I just cannot understand how to behave, how to engage in a conversation, I always force myself to laugh at jokes people make or to find the right thing to say, but I almost never succeed, and it is also really emotionally exausting. I actually do not find what people usauly say interesting, or funny, so it is like faking all the time, which makes me feel like a hypocrite. I have just recently realised that maybe it is something deeper than just a social anxiety or clumsiness, but that I have so insistently tried to control that I have built this "normal" appeareance, that makes people think that I am just shy, or dumb, or mean. To be honest, I cannot even be sure anymore about how people may see me. Sometimes I feel like I have been living a dellusion my whole life, and that people around me just think of me as a weird guy that it is better to avoid or ignore, even though I know that my life is much more common than that. I just go through hell everyday trying to be normal, to overcome my anxiety and start acting like everybody else, but it seems to be unlikely. I am a Clinical Psychologsist, and when I was doing my undergraduate studies I found aspects of autism so familiar that I thought it could be my case, but the fact that it is just around my social life, but not in motricity or language (apart form a slight difficulty in articulating some words, maybe out of anxiety) I dropped the idea. Recently I have been thinking a lot about it, because it is so frustrating that the more I try, the harder fitting in gets, and learned about hiperempathy, that I can totally relate to, which I read that could be something common in autism too. Despite I find it so hard to interact with others, it is not that I am not aware of their feelings, but the opposite: I am oversensitive to them, and it is common that I find myself suffering deeply if other people feel bad. If I accidentally make someone feel uncomfortable or sad, it is like an obsession to me, i feel awful and cannot find relief, until Iget to know that the person is ok. And even then, I would still be thing insistently in it. I think that findind out that what I am has anything to do with autism would be like a salvation to me, because I hate this feeling of being so different, so atypical, and not having any explanation to it. I would like to know if all this I have written sound familiar to anyone here somehow. I tried to live with the idea that I am just a loner, or that I have a personality disorder, or that it is just anxiety, but none of this feels like the truth. I cannot believe that after all these years of effort, failure is due to just lack of intelligence or that I haven´t just done enough. I refuse to accept that I do not fit literally anywhere. Before I go to a professional, I need some kind of sign that this is the truth for me, I guess.
