Another Newbie

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Tsela
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker

Joined: 3 Jan 2011
Age: 50
Gender: Male
Posts: 70

05 Jan 2011, 8:25 am

Hi everyone! I joined this community yesterday (after lurking for a while) to answer a specific thread very dear to my heart, and then realised that I should do the polite thing and present myself officially to the community.

So hello there! My handle is Tsela, but you can call me Christophe if you like . I am a French man in my thirties, and I live in the Netherlands with my Dutch husband.

I've always known that I was "socially (very) awkward", but after attending a lecture about autism last year I discovered that I fitted the Asperger's syndrome's mould nearly perfectly. I haven't been officially diagnosed yet (damn waiting lists!), but I hope I will be soon. While waiting I've done some self-diagnosing through a variety of tools on the Net and their unanimous results are that I probably have Asperger's indeed, or at least some form of high functioning autism.

Discovering this has been a liberation for me. For years I've been accused of laziness, asocial behaviour, unwillingness to pay attention to others, and even willingness to hurt others on purpose, while I myself felt like I was trying my best to please, and strained myself to exhaustion just to try and behave as others expected from me in a social environment (mostly failing, as I continue to misunderstand many of the social rules others seems to have no problem with). Needless to say, all those comments blaming me for all this (while I mostly didn't understand what I was doing wrong) made me feel very miserable, and it was liberating for me to discover that what I felt was real, already known, and had a name.

That's it for now. I don't know how active I will be, but at least now you know I'm here :lol: .