A Weirdo's Experience With Asperger's - Looking to publish.

Assimilate · Emu Egg Joined: Sep 19, 2009 Posts: 2

Hello - I am fifteen years old and have been recently diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. This is a story I wrote about my parent's struggle - and my struggle - to find out what was wrong with me for nine or ten years. I am looking to publish this in a magazine such as TeenInk. If you know any other magazines that publish stories like mine, please tell me. Thank you.

I am also looking for constructive criticism. I love writing, and I really want to improve!

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For most of my life – fourteen out of fifteen years – I was (and still am, to some degree) known as the weirdo. The girl with the odd facial tic and the nail-bitten fingertips who would much rather spend her free time in class reading a book for people older than fifteen than playing 4 Corners with her classmates. The girl whose idea of “fun” is playing RuneScape and chatting on Skype while other teenagers think partying and chilling at the mall until 2 A.M in the morning is “fun.” The nerd. The antisocial.

The weirdo.

Asperger’s Syndrome is a relatively new condition – and extremely common, too, with some estimates being that 1 in 150 people have it. It’s not contagious, so you won’t be calling sick from work saying that you caught the Asperger’s. And I’m not a babbling idiot with facial deformities that jumps around shrieking about hallucinations of spinach pizza falling out of the sky and pillows wielding swords.

It is a social disorder where sufferers do not understand social cues; for example, if a person is getting sick of me raving about something nonstop, I might misinterpret their hints that I need to shut up as a sign to keep going. Also, people with Asperger’s can have either a very advanced vocabulary for their age or intense interests in something without knowing anything else about that particular field in general. People like me are affectionately called “Aspies.” Cute name. The disorder? Not so cute.

When I was five years old, I began attending kindergarten with a bunch of other children. Even then, I was not too social – all the friends I had had approached me instead of me approaching them – and I was very timid. I had an interest in books and art. While the other kids were playing 7Up (and eventually badgered me with “Come play, Samantha!” until I had enough and joined in), I was drawing stick figures in ballet shoes and smiles plastered on their circular faces.

My teacher, Mrs. Harrison, noticed this. I was “unusually” quiet for my age and seemed to have a bigger vocabulary than the other five-year-olds. So, a few months after I began attending school, she mentioned this in a conference with my Mom and Dad.

“She’s a great kid,” my Mom says she told her. “Samantha is always quiet and never gets into trouble. But she’s withdrawn and timid and she has a weird tic in her eye!”

When Mom asked if there was the possibility of me having A.D.D., Mrs. Harrison said that, no, it’s impossible, because she had taught kids with A.D.D. and I was the polar opposite of them.

My first-grade teacher echoed Mrs. Harrison. So did my second-grade teacher. And the third. And the fourth. “No, she can’t have A.D.D.; she has something, but I don’t know what it is!” they said. But when my fourth-grade teacher, a young man in his early thirties, repeated what my first four teachers had said (down to the tic, which had evolved from a twitchy eye to a twitchy eye, eyebrow, AND nose), my parents realized that it was not just “how I was,” but that something was “off” about me. I was a weirdo.

So they took me to a child psychologist who specializes in A.D.D. But even as a fourth-grader watching the other kids in the waiting room jump and shriek and run around and twitch like they were possessed by some evil spirit, I knew something was wrong with the pending diagnosis. I was quiet and more withdrawn! Yes, I had that cursed tic and I fidgeted a bit every now and then, but I wasn’t like these guys at all!

But after two visits, in which the second included some odd scan where they put little suction cups on my forehead and scalp, the doctor goes, “Your daughter has A.D.D.” He might as well have said, “We just labeled your daughter with a disorder that completely contradicts everything about her because we’re too lazy to conduct a proper diagnosis and know nothing about disorders and syndromes that have no relation to A.D.D. So have fun spending a load on a medication that’s going to do her no good. See you later, if we’re not playing Minesweeper on our computers instead of actually listening to your concerns about your daughter! Ta-ta for now, Mr. and Mrs. Dunne!”

Sadly, I can envision the doctor saying that.

Anyways, my parents thought he was wrong, but they reasoned that he’s a doctor and he knows better. They got me Strattera, which is supposed to calm you down. Except that I was already calmed down. So it just made me really tired.

It was also around fourth grade that I began to get picked on by my class, particularly this one boy that, even after all these years, I’m willing to sock him a good one right in the eye. Augustus, I think his name was. I mean, he and a bunch of kids in my class ragged on me every chance they got. Everything I drew was met by them with them sticking their fingers down their throats, everything I said got me called an idiot, and everything else got me dumped with whispers of “Weirdo.” There was one occasion where one fine, upstanding youth wrote curse words all over one of my notebooks and scribbled in half of the pages.

I bought a new notebook that time.

In fifth grade, my self-esteem was tottering. When I wasn’t picked on for a day, I felt good, and if I got picked on, I started to mentally call myself an idiot, screw-up, and other oh-so-lovely things, blaming myself for these scumbags bothering me. The Augustus kid told my mom, when she approached him, about why he teased me.

Apparently, the way I blow my nose warrants being nearly pushed into a rabbit pen, having my notebook vandalized, and getting called all sorts of unpleasant things. There are some things in the world that I don’t understand, and even if I encounter that kid and ask him why (after delivering a nice knuckle sandwich to his jaw, hopefully), I probably still won’t understand how blowing your nose differently means you should have the heck picked out of you. If I die and the Magical Pink Unicorn is waiting up there for me and asks me what three questions I want answered, that’s one of them. And I probably still won’t be able to comprehend it.

My fifth-grade teacher became the sixth to say I wasn’t normal. Predictable.

When two of my sixth-grade teachers scheduled a conference with my parents (I had been moved to a private school), they had an idea what to suspect. Basically, the teachers broke it to the parents that I was still a weirdo. Maybe they said it more tactfully, but that’s the gist of it. Bottom line is, I was still odd, only now I was biting my nails like you would eat beef jerky.

It was like saying, “Congratulations on spending hundreds of dollars on a useless medication. But your daughter’s still odd. And guess what? She’s biting her nails, which is a great way to cope with her nervousness!”

Nothing really happened up until my first eighth grade year except for me changing medication from Strattera to Lexapro, which I have been taking for the past four years, and my nail-biting issue developing into a full-blown bad habit. I still bite them. My pinky fingers bent inward, I get these nasty red spots if I bite too hard in one place. I give myself hangnails. It really is horrible, and the worst part is that I just can’t stop biting them—when I’m hungry, nervous, in deep thought, or just plain bored, I bite.

Then I found out I had to repeat the eighth grade. Not only was I a nail-biting weirdo, I was a nail-biting, stupid weirdo! By this time, my self-esteem had been killed as dead as road-kill. The “truck” in this case was my only friend in the first year of eighth grade turning against me for the other kids.

In this second year of eighth grade, about a week or so before I started, I started taking Abilify to go along with the Lexapro. This medication seemed to completely exorcise the evil spirits that are my tics, but it made me hungry. In six months, my weight went from a healthy 142 to a chubby 168 at five-foot-five. If there was any self-esteem left in the wreckage of that road-kill, it completely vanished by the time I stepped on the scale and read the number.

I wasn’t fat. Just chubby. But I felt like Porky Pig—that you could feed me to a group of thirty starving travelers and still have meat left over.

Noticing my weight (after half a year, but to be honest, I didn’t even really notice the gain myself) and attributing it to the pills, they switched me to Geodon. Change in weight? Yes, and for the better – I started losing the second I took it. Did I feel any side effects? Heck yes.

When I started taking it, I felt really sleepy right after I took it. I thought I had gotten too little sleep that night, but then it started happening every morning after I took it. I ended up falling asleep in class; I would be so tired I would just “drop dead” right in the middle of a lesson, particularly my science final. I started to take it at night and felt so much better, thank God.

It was around this time in April that I discovered Skype. I bought a microphone just for it so I could talk to some anonymous people – a group of about, what, ten people? – about MMORPGs and stuff, like RuneScape. I was a Runescape-playing, stupid weirdo that bites my nails, but hey, it was better than talking to nobody, right? Besides, my friends from one of my classes never picked up the phone except for the one that got a Skype along with me. So our group of ten or so people just sit around on our butts playing games or just fooling around. Fun, and I’m not exactly being sarcastic.

In late May, I visited my mom’s psychiatrist for the third time in my life. The first time was when I was eleven. Now, three years later, my tics were off the wall, my social life was little, and I was pessimistic.

The second visit I had with her was me spending an hour answering questions about my social life, my nervousness, and other things about me. At the end of the appointment, she said I might have Asperger’s Syndrome.

I just blinked and went like, “…I have butt burgers?”

I had heard about Asperger’s before, how people thought it was a sort of high-functioning autism. I had poked fun at the name before, but never thought I actually had it.

The third visit got me diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome and then Anxiety Disorder, which explained my nervous habits and general nervous “aura” I always carried around. I hate it, I really do – my social life was affected, my relationships with people, my weight and fingertips…I felt like I had been punished for not believing in God (my parents were never religious, and they had passed this onto me).

But at the same time – and, at first, I hated myself for it – I feel happy that I had Asperger’s. Relieved. For most of my school life, I had been known as a weirdo and my parents have looked for what I had for years. I had fallen asleep some nights wondering why I couldn’t be normal like everybody else, why I couldn’t just be born with a personality that attracted the popular people to me, and had sometimes cried on those nights.

Now I had an answer – I wasn’t some weirdo, and heck, it wasn’t my fault I found talking to people as hard as running a mile in less than two minutes. Anxiety and Asperger’s make for a very bad combination. The road-kill that had been my self-esteem rose again from the grave – maybe it was gory and broken and smelled like decay and had its bowels pouring out, but it was revived. And that broken road-killed-and-revived is healing. It’s a gross example, one of the grossest ones I have ever come up with, but it counts…in a way…I guess.

I am feeling much better now. I am learning to trust people, to be able to socialize, to be able to express my feelings more clearly, my wants and needs. If I didn’t know I had Asperger’s, my self-esteem would have still been road-kill and I would still hate myself for being a weirdo.

I have begun searching for communities online that mainly work to get people with Asperger’s – many of them adults who had previously been diagnosed with A.D.D. and other ailments. I am waiting to read the book “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night” about a teenager with either Asperger’s or autism trying to find out who killed his neighbor’s dog. “Mozart and the Whale” is one of the movies on my to-watch list. The syndrome has interested me, probably because I have it and I want to find more about why I am who I am.

My social life has been getting better. I have a small group of friends – three other people – in art class and a friend in my English class. Only four people, but it is better than nothing.

Remember: we are people, too. I might make snide, sarcastic, or tongue-in-cheek remarks. I might go on into one-sided conversations about my favorite topic and not notice you want to stab yourself with a pencil because of how much I am talking. I might draw anime and have daydreams about being a writer or forensic pathologist/anthropologist or being an activist for gay rights or something, but I’m still me.

We look just like you, we brush our teeth just like you, we puked up an inhuman glob of Tootsie Rolls and Hershey’s Kisses when we were kids still dressed up in our Halloween costumes at 2A.M on November 1st just like you. We might not be what you consider “normal,” but we deserve the same respect and dignity you would treat a person without Asperger’s. We aren’t stupid, we don’t need you slowly enunciating every word and explaining how to do the simplest commands to us, we don’t want to make people cry and feel pity for us when we tell them our stories. We – or at least I do – want to be treated with the same regard and given the support and understanding we need.

Hopefully, no other kids need to go through the road-kill self-esteem, the misdiagnoses, or the feeling of being weird or painfully different that I did. Maybe we can even find a cure for it – and I hope I live long enough for that. Goodbye, and thank you for listening to my story.