Hi everyone
When I was a child, I got in a lot of trouble. I didn't get on well with rules, and being told what to do by teachers, so I was often yelled at, told off, sent to the headteacher, etc. I was intelligent, and as I grew older and turned into a teenager this often manifested as being a "smart-***", telling teachers they were wrong (and not understanding why that meant I got shouted at) and correcting everyone's grammar. However I had a decent collection of friends and was generally able to "get along with anyone", mostly because I had been shouted at for so long that I had absolutely zero fear of teachers - after all, I knew that their escalating "punishment" strategy had a cap on it - they couldn't do anything worse than shout at me, and I was well used to that already. A few teachers cottoned on and were able to get alongside me and try to mentor me, but I was pretty far off the deep end of being totally disenfranchised with academia by that point.
Side-note: I've been told I'm extremely verbose, and ought to work on concision.
My mum, who has her own (undiagnosed) mental health issues which cause her to be extremely volatile and abusive towards those around her, as well as manipulative and callous, had a bit of a problem with my teachers constantly complaining to her that her child "lacked discipline" and needed to "respect authority" so she tried (in vain) to instil discipline in me. She tried everything - shouting at me, removing privileges [like my xbox and PC], even hitting me didn't work (I have a high pain threshold). Once, she sat on my chest, pushing all the air out of my lungs, causing me to fear for my life - but that still did nothing to make me want to do my homework!
After exhausting these parenting techniques, she decided that there must be something "wrong" with me and sent me to the doctor.
About five psychiatrists and several GPs later, I was awarded with a diagnosis of "borderline" Asperger's Syndrome. I don't think the psychiatrist meant to imply that I had a mixture of borderline syndrome and asperger's, rather that my asperger's was "on the border" of being diagnosable.
This has always left me with a conundrum: did my mum simply "shop around" to get me a diagnosis that massaged her ego, proving to herself that she wasn't to blame for my poor behaviour ("there's nothing I could have done, he has a mental disorder"), or do I actually have asperger's? Is it some mixture of the two?
Compounding this issue is the fact that, several years after the diagnosis, I saw the GP on my own and she suggested we remove the diagnosis from my records as I wasn't getting any treatment. I agreed to this, and my mum hit the roof when she found out. At this point I was old enough to leave, though, and around that time (or shortly after) I left the country and lived in Sweden for five years.
Here's the rub: I've always had problems with employment. After about two years of any job, I tend to get worn out and small parts of my teenage rebellious self start slipping through the cracks. I put up more resistance towards being told what to do, I can get abrasive with colleagues, and I get impatient with people working in sloppy ways more quickly. I'm a software developer, so this manifests as frustrations with people not adequately testing their solutions, or using "hacks" to lazily fix something that would take effort to fix properly. This is slowly happening at my current workplace, but the COVID-19 lockdown disrupting my normal working patterns seems to have accelerated the process and exacerbated the problems I'm having.
So, I'm AsparagusMaybe - because I may be an asparagus (but I may just be a naughty child who was misdiagnosed due to an egotistic mother not wanting to admit to herself that she might be a bad parent).
Ask me anything!
