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Unknown_Quantity's Blog
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Inhuman.
posted at 01:41 am on 09-17-2007
I feel that I was never truly born. The start of this life I'm living now, was like a slow and groggy awakening into awareness that took place around my sixth birthday. I have little to no memories before that time. Most unsettling, is the fact that as I became aware, as I awoke all those years ago, I already found it strange that I couldn't remember where, or who, I had been a few months earlier. I also felt, right from that gradual beginning, that I was somehow, misplaced, lost, alien and far from home.
Was it the wrong place, or wrong time, that I now found myself in, I couldn't say. But something was amiss.
Despite the blank canvas of my memories, my mind was already well developed. I knew things that a child of my age should not know. I had a familiarity for certain places that I had never been before, though I rarely, if ever, felt at home. Some pieces of music filled me with an eerie sense of an older, ingrained recognition. And depictions of strange worlds of imagination in the works of fantasy artists and writers seemed more like my native environment than the one I currently found myself in. I also found that I had, what some people told me was, a heightened sense of intuition. Instincts were particularly strong in me. But I was to later discover that those instincts inside me were not shared by the rest of my supposed species.
It seems that that sense of the alien I felt when around other people was also felt by other people when around me. I was different, I knew it, they knew – and they acted upon it.
I was bullied a lot at school. They tell children that bullies act out of fear and for the most part, that's a lie, most children are bullied by the ignorant and uncaring brutes who rule the playground as thugs because they can and they know no other way to be. But there are a few children, who are not only the prey of those handfuls of proto-alpha-males, as all children are – there are some who are fodder for all the children of the school yard. The strange ones, the outsiders, the freaks, those are the children who are truly bullied out of fear. I know because I saw it in the eyes of my attackers as they teased and punched and threw their stones. In the wild, we would have been driven out from the troop, forced into the wilderness, lest our aberration be passed on to the rest.
If I could have fled, I would have. But that's not how the world works now.
I existed on the fringes of society. The edges of the playground, with my back to the wall and my eyes darting back and forth, ears pricked and muscles taught, ready for the fight.
However, children can only do so much. It was the reactions of the adults that caused the most damage. Teachers felt it too, that sense that there's something wrong with this one. They weren't supposed to act on those feelings, but they did, and they had to do it in such subtle ways that would go unnoticed and be unprovable should they be brought to task over such actions. The cruelty of those old enough to understand the importance of manipulation and the consequences of witnesses is cold and brutal. I learned to lie and cheat, not from children, but from the teachers who were supposed to teach me right from wrong.
Not all the teachers I had were these despicable monsters, some were kind and forgiving, nurturing and understanding. But the fact that these few good teachers were so utterly out numbered by the bad teachers who inflicted themselves on me like witch hunters, caused my already highly defined sense of alienation to snowball into total hatred and fear for those of their kind.
When I acted out against their abuses, they showed it up to everyone as evidence that they were right all along. They were right to not trust me, they were right to single me out and brand me as a mistake of nature, because look at how he acts, look at what he does. I hated them for their manipulation of me and I hated myself for giving them the proof they needed to justify their actions.
It seems that there is a school of thought amongst these kinds of teachers that bullying serves a purpose, that it's somehow a valuable tool in the upbringing of children. That if a child exhibits a kind of difference that needs to be beaten out of them, and that the beatings administered by the adults are not sufficient to correct the child's strangeness, that the other children should be allowed to deal with the wayward pupil however they see fit. Those who hadn't thought to bully me before were given inspiration to by the attitudes towards me that washed over them every lesson from the teaching staff. And those few that dared, till then, to be my friends made their distancing from me known to all.
My childhood had become a self fulfilling prophecy of a frightful and alien creature that didn't belong where circumstance had left it.
To Be Continued...
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Asperger's?... Me?... Pffft.
posted at 05:49 am on 09-16-2007
I'm 32 years old.
That's pretty old! Well, it is when you're 32.
In all the years I've been on this ball of rock, I've never felt at home. As a child I never felt, quite, human. Well, at least, I knew I wasn't like all the human children around me at school, so I just, sort of, assumed.
Well, highschool was Hell, maybe I'll tell you about that some day.
Work, Hell.
Relationships, Hell.
I got married almost ten years ago, which has been a rollercoaster and ghost train rolled into one.
I finally get diagnosed with severe depression and I go on pills to try to fix it. Blah, blah, blah, I go off the pills, because they are worse than the condition they're meant to be treating.
So get this, I finally start making some headway a couple of years ago. I start to level out and gain more control over my life. I go to university and that helps give me hope and focus and a sense of achievement.
My marriage is now good and provides me with a stability I've needed all my life. I start to think I might, just might, be able to beat this thing!
Last year, the government finally introduces a program, where people with real psychological difficulties can get counselling bulk billed like other life saving treatments. I had my first session about a month ago and the doctor tells me something I never thought I'd hear.
"I think you may have Asperger's Syndrome..."
Of all the crazy diagnosis' and strange, jumped-to conclusions I could think of, this was the one I'd least expect.
I know about AS. I've read about AS. I've even told one person I thought he had AS and should get it checked out. But me? Pffft, nah...
Over the past month I've been reading more about Asperger's. Reading BETWEEN the lines. Applying it to my life, and I started to think...
Maybe that's why there were things I couldn't bear to touch as a child (like the rough surface of an egg shell, or the corrugated fibers of woven nylon on my raincoat). Maybe that explains why I never knew exactly what people thought of me, and I always thought the worst. Maybe this could explain why I felt that I talked funny, that I walked weirdly and uncomfortably around other people. Why I always felt... Alone.
There are so many reasons why this makes sense, too many to mention in just a single blog entry. There were a few things that cast a doubt, until I found that there are other "Aspies" that have the same exceptions to the rules.
Since then, I discovered Wrong Planet. What a great name for this site, I always thought I was on the wrong planet, this world and I didn't fit together quite right. And after having a few chats, I'm thinking that the doctor might know what she's talking about.
I have to wait till the 27th to get an official diagnosis, some sort of tests need to be done to determine for certain what I'm already suspecting to be true. But there's only one thing that bothers me...
I'm 32 years old. That's pretty old, at least, it is when you're 32 and just found out you might have Asperger's. So, why couldn't I have been diagnosed twenty years ago, back when it might have actually done some real good?
Unknown_Quantity
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