You don't need to read this, I just want to get it down (but you can if you want)

WARNING - THIS POST IS OVER 1000 WORDS.

So here it is, I'm 27 and married, I live a relatively normal life, a fair share of my problems live in the past, I've had a fair amount of therapy for social and workplace anxiety, as well as general upset about the way things were in my childhood.

My childhood was a disaster. I had an inability to make friends, and tended to befriend teachers rather than kids my own age, a lot of the time I used to alienate friends by saying upsetting things to them (without realising) and attract bullies because I got upset easily, suffered from selective mutism and also had a habit of pulling my own hair out which left me with bald spots. Everyone thought I was a bit weird. Outside of school I had "tantrums" in busy places, usually this involved me throwing myself to floor and keep banging my head against the ground, it embarrassed my parents and let to me getting punished quite a lot. These stopped as I got a bit older and turned into panic attacks which I had until about 5 years ago.

Later on in middle school I was labelled as having behavioural difficulties, I would lash out at people when I felt threatened (which happened a lot), and wouldn't remember much about it afterward and also couldn't see what I had done wrong. I started getting through social situations by emulating others, sometimes this got me in trouble because I would emulate the wrong person. I would copy what adults were doing instead of children my own age, what women did instead of what men did. In the classroom I excelled in certain subjects (Maths, Science, History) and failed abysmally in others (English Language, PE, Handwriting, Drama). This led me to be put into a "learning support" group in my secondary school.

After getting a real hard time over falling so badly in my SATs I was made to write out the dictionary which was supposed to help with my writing and poor reading ability, I also felt this was a bit of a punishment for being stupid. The issue never was that I couldn't read, I could actually read very well, I just didn't understand what was going on in a story. I managed to get myself out of the learning support group by figuring out how to read aloud without processing or understanding anything I was saying, the stalling in my reading was me trying to figure out what just happened. I hated reading fiction and preferred reading volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Near the start of secondary school we had some multiple choice "reasoning test", during which I scored the highest the school had ever seen. The head teacher sponsored me to join young Mensa, and I had recognised IQ score of 158 (I did one as an adult more recently and only scored 152). This paved the way for great expectations of me, which all fell apart when I started having what was diagnosed as "cluster migraines". These cluster migraines were caused by me noticing, and subsequently freaking out at the fluorescent lights in all of the classrooms, my school must have had a dodgy mains supply, or cheap transformers because nearly every one of them had a high frequency flicker on which drove me insane. Eventually the sensory overload would force me to retreat from the world into the safe place in the back of my mind and wait for it all to be over, however when you look like your "no longer in the room" lots of people start to notice you, and you get a lot of attention that really doesn't look all that inviting, so retreating a little more into the back of the mind seems very appealing. Eventually I would be carted off in an ambulance, told everything looks normal, and sent home to be told off for interrupting my parent’s day.

I've had poor success in jobs, people generally don't like me and call me things like an "egocentric know it-all" and tell me I still have much to learn about "office politics". I generally moved on within a year, partly because I get bored easily, and partly because by that time people start to get used to me and actually want to know me in some kind of social way, which really bothers me. (I don't really feel attachment to people, I kind of look at things as some relationships being mutually beneficial, but don't see much point in continuing one when this is no longer the case). I do enjoy helping people though, it helps make me feel like a better person. People say I'm too honest, I tend not to "mince words". I say what I think and feel, this shocks a lot of people and people think I am just being rude. I think it's a shame that more people don't do this, it would make things so much easier if people stopped trying to subtly coat what they really mean in words that they don't mean and just get to the point.

So, my situation now is that I am in therapy again, I believe that it is about the right time to start thinking about having children. However before I make what I see as the biggest, most defining decision of my life I want to be in my best possible frame of mind, I also want better for my child than what I had. ASD has come up in therapy and I have decided to seek out information relating to it so I can better understand it. I am reading through this forum and gathering people’s experiences so that I can compare them to thoughts and feelings that I experience. From this I should be able to better understand if I am "on the spectrum" or not. I also need to ascertain the benefits of coming to some kind of conclusion, and decide the most prudent steps to take following this.

This post has turned into a little bit of a rant about my life, I won't delete it as it took a while for me to write. I’ll just change the subject. If you made it to the end well done and thanks for reading!

All comments are of course welcome, If I don't get any takers on this one I will try and do a more concise post with a more directed point tomorrow. You can of course ask questions if you have any.

Forest

Parents
  • ForestP said:

    I've not been diagnosed, It's come up a few times but a lot of people say I'm too "normal" to have ASD (I don't feel "normal" in the slightest). Diagnosis or not I want to understand things better, maybe in time I will feel in a position to make a decision about what I should do about things.

    From reading your posts I think it is pretty clear that it is likely that you are on the spectrum. Have you tried the free online test at aspergerstest.net/.../ ?

Reply
  • ForestP said:

    I've not been diagnosed, It's come up a few times but a lot of people say I'm too "normal" to have ASD (I don't feel "normal" in the slightest). Diagnosis or not I want to understand things better, maybe in time I will feel in a position to make a decision about what I should do about things.

    From reading your posts I think it is pretty clear that it is likely that you are on the spectrum. Have you tried the free online test at aspergerstest.net/.../ ?

Children
  • That's how I found out. When I had a properly serious Autism related incident of me directed oppression, I wnet and got my proper diagnosis, then started collecting tools. I have an Autism card now, chiefly for use with Authority figures, with which I can force a pause in certain conversations until my designated normie turns up.

    My kid had a lovely childhood, unlike me, and to be honest, the child in me loved having another child to play with, particularly one who was a bit genetically speaking like me, but who wasn't brutalised & ostracised from birth! Children either follow you blindly or challenge you (sometimes both in one day). I was overly disiplined and I new shouting and beating and getting angy at my kid just breeds distance, resentment, fear, so I didn;t do any of that. when she hit the terrible twos when they discover most parents can be off balanced by shouting and screaming, which is a traumatic time for many parents, I just (Instinctively) donned ear defenders, and laughed at her inabilty to take them off. For other challenging behavours I used a humourous gentle mickey takinig approach. Sometimes dark humour admittedly, but my child really seemed to apppreciate the (made very clear it's fictonal, by the delivery method) story of the bad child who got made into sausages... I don't think she is going to win any great prizes in life, but she is doing WAY better than me in terms of personal adjustment, quality of life, and quality of people she associates with. 

    I do enjoy the advantage of using cannabis regularly, and I think it may well make life much easier and safer for me than it would be without the stuff. It's far more useful to me in several areas, than just for gettiing high.

    And personally I thought you used just the right amount and type of words to say what you wanted to say. Apart from the bit about the flourescent lighting (how do you find then new LED lightinig, better or worse?) I and many otehrs here I believe could have written that word for word. Although still a special and unique perosn here, you are not quite so different from the people who normallly surround you.

    Even the members I find less to my taste, have still been through much the same experiences as you have.

    Here on this forum we like to give the bad ones a bit of an airing, and do a bit of complaining about the normies, which kinda contextuallises thigs a bit better, and occasionally we go hunting for the GOOD parts that also comprise this small (but sometimes exaggerated) difference we have with the rest of our fellow human beings..

    I could go on, (I seem to be good at it some days) but you get the ghist. Autism is what you make of it. But it's an awful lot easier to make something out of it, once you know you have it! WHAT you choose to make of it is down to you, Since it's cost me dear over the years, I choose to find a way to make it work for me now. Already I have been freed from a great deal of having to pretend, and that sits very well with me indeed.