Hi everyone,
I'm having a bad week, so please be gentle.
I'm new here, but at the same time I'm not new.
I discovered I had Asperger's around 6 years ago quite by accident, but it explained everything.
Everything.
I then spent the next three years or so with AS as my special interest, learned a huge amount about myself and along the way created a blog that was moderately successful for a little while.
Special Interests come and go, and eventually, the blog died through lack of upkeep on my part, and my thoughts went in other directions.
I'm male, live in the UK, am in my early 40's and have a wife, two kids, two cats, a house, a couple of cars, a university education, and I've always been employed - I'm good at what I do. Life is great, and I've made it, right? Right?
Well no. It doesn't feel like that.
At all.
And I guess that why I'm here introducing myself.
I feel so incredibly alone and isolated.
I have always had that "single friend" issue that so many of us have. I'm not interested in having a sphere of friends - I find talking to people is such hard work, and I've also become incredibly sensitised to how I come across to other people.
So I've spend my life being a serial one-friend person.
I had one friend through much of school, then I had a string of long term girlfriends one after the other, culminating with my wife.
A have trouble labelling emotions, and so therefore putting a finger on what love is has been difficult for me. Attraction I can understand and label accordingly, but love - that's much harder to pin down.
Relationships have their ups and downs, and for a neurotypical wife, life with an aspergic husband can be difficult. This is clearly true.
So we're in a bit of a down period in the relationship at the moment. I don't feel that connection with her.
My work isn't stable - things are moving under my feet and work politics, which I usually try and steer clear of are becoming unavoidable.
Someone I respect a lot at work is leaving too. I feel oddly abandoned.
All of this has left me feeling completely ungrounded.
I spend time analysing my interactions with people, and I see myself as someone that is gradually becoming less reliable and more crazy. In my head I beat myself up over the bad interactions I have with people. I say the wrong things. I miss the obvious. I look stupid.
It is difficult not to reach the conclusion that I am fundamentally stupid.
I may look like a stressed 40-something man, but I feel like a 12 year old boy who has no friends, and is utterly isolated and alone.
It's horrible.
I may have Aspergers, and crave solitude but I'm still a human - and that means that feeling alone and unconnected to anyone at all feels awful.
This morning I realised I had to tell someone this. I had to externalise it all or I would just feel worse.
A few years ago I would have blogged, but I don't have that community in place any longer.
I thought about opening up on twitter - but my connections on there do not want to hear about this.
And then I remembered this website.
Maybe some others would understand how I am feeling. Maybe I'll get a few responses that will provide some comfort.
I hope so - you seem a decent bunch of folks.
Oh, and finally, James isn't my real name. It is however the name I went by with my old blog.
It seemed appropriate.
10 Oct 2014, 8:30 am
