Just had my first appointment, need some help.

Hello Hope

You are mostly right in everything you say but I recognise the fine line between 'proper' Aspie behaviour and Aspie-like behavioural traits. I am not self-diagnosed but seeing my psychiatrist for the second time in 11 days. If I ever said I find it easy to make friends I meant this with some caveats. I have always lived in small towns and villages and my mum always forced me to get involved in social activities. All my life I've had to learn people's 'languages'...I stand back, see how things seem, and then join in on their terms but I have never been absolutely clueless about social interaction. By that I mean completely lost, looking on and not understanding anything. That's why I even questioned seeking diagnosis as my partner's experience has been different. Yet I took the spectrum idea seriously and went ahead anyway. But people have always said I was rude or said inappropriate things without me understanding why. And then there's so much other stuff...

I actually found some old diaries recently from when I was 15 until about twenty and all that time I thought I was being sociable, I was actually spending a lot of my time alone. People, often friends, seem to phone or call on me but I rarely seem to be seeking them out. I also found some of my truly bad school poetry (it wasn't on the curriculum) and there's lots of poems about being alone, people not understanding me, about insincerity of people, of being haunted by a shadow-person, and in the diaries there's some stuff which comes across as a bit stalker-y in connection with one girl I thought I couldn't live without.

The sad bit in the diary, for me, comes when I leave school, and get slowly dropped by my old school friends as without the structure of school, I found it very hard to cope with daily life. The 80s were an awful time for jobs and it took me a long time to find one. Anyway, a long story told short, when I met my Aspie love ten years ago everything changed and I found the person I was looking for.

Having looked around the net, I know I have some small aspects of social anxiety disorder but I think this is just part of a bigger generalised anxiety disorder. I definitely have problems with impulse control and this has gotten me into a lot of trouble in the past. At my first psychiatrist appt, I knew my psy'ist was looking for the developmental narrative but I can't tell a story to save my life so I think I came across as a rambling, bumbling mass of social anxiety but there IS a developmental narrative lurking in there. I know it's atypical to you and I am not longing to be an Aspie to become some sort of Aspie power couple with my partner but I want some sense of what has happened, what has gone wrong, because there has recently been a re-appearance of many of my old problems which at my age are now much more serious, so I feel I have to get some form of professional opinion, one way or another.

I wanted to thank you for taking time to reply and now I've gone and written way too much. I'll wait until the 17th and see what happens. I don't intend to be a regular here anyway but I am glad that this exists because for many, many generations of people it must have been so much worse before the internet. On that topic you've chosen a  very appropriate name for yourself, even if you are advocating for the devil at times...

Hello Hope

You are mostly right in everything you say but I recognise the fine line between 'proper' Aspie behaviour and Aspie-like behavioural traits. I am not self-diagnosed but seeing my psychiatrist for the second time in 11 days. If I ever said I find it easy to make friends I meant this with some caveats. I have always lived in small towns and villages and my mum always forced me to get involved in social activities. All my life I've had to learn people's 'languages'...I stand back, see how things seem, and then join in on their terms but I have never been absolutely clueless about social interaction. By that I mean completely lost, looking on and not understanding anything. That's why I even questioned seeking diagnosis as my partner's experience has been different. Yet I took the spectrum idea seriously and went ahead anyway. But people have always said I was rude or said inappropriate things without me understanding why. And then there's so much other stuff...

I actually found some old diaries recently from when I was 15 until about twenty and all that time I thought I was being sociable, I was actually spending a lot of my time alone. People, often friends, seem to phone or call on me but I rarely seem to be seeking them out. I also found some of my truly bad school poetry (it wasn't on the curriculum) and there's lots of poems about being alone, people not understanding me, about insincerity of people, of being haunted by a shadow-person, and in the diaries there's some stuff which comes across as a bit stalker-y in connection with one girl I thought I couldn't live without.

The sad bit in the diary, for me, comes when I leave school, and get slowly dropped by my old school friends as without the structure of school, I found it very hard to cope with daily life. The 80s were an awful time for jobs and it took me a long time to find one. Anyway, a long story told short, when I met my Aspie love ten years ago everything changed and I found the person I was looking for.

Having looked around the net, I know I have some small aspects of social anxiety disorder but I think this is just part of a bigger generalised anxiety disorder. I definitely have problems with impulse control and this has gotten me into a lot of trouble in the past. At my first psychiatrist appt, I knew my psy'ist was looking for the developmental narrative but I can't tell a story to save my life so I think I came across as a rambling, bumbling mass of social anxiety but there IS a developmental narrative lurking in there. I know it's atypical to you and I am not longing to be an Aspie to become some sort of Aspie power couple with my partner but I want some sense of what has happened, what has gone wrong, because there has recently been a re-appearance of many of my old problems which at my age are now much more serious, so I feel I have to get some form of professional opinion, one way or another.

I wanted to thank you for taking time to reply and now I've gone and written way too much. I'll wait until the 17th and see what happens. I don't intend to be a regular here anyway but I am glad that this exists because for many, many generations of people it must have been so much worse before the internet. On that topic you've chosen a  very appropriate name for yourself, even if you are advocating for the devil at times...