I'm quite new to this, and a little unsure on how to proceed.
Anyway. A friend of mine pointed me here. She has Aspergers and thinks that I may have it as well. Due to financial and moving situations, I can't really get into a psychiatrist's or therapist's office for a couple of months, but until then, I'd like to at least use my time constructively to perhaps do some learning on the subject.
I have a brother who had an autistic spectrum disorder (I don't know the specifics of it) so I've had some personal experience with it. It never came to the attention of my parents because they figured if my brother had it and was so radically different, that I couldn't possibly have aspergers or anything like it. In addition, since he took up most of their time, no one ever was able to watch me for long enough to make a decent enough judgement. But since I was a very high functioning child as far as intelligence was concerned, no one really bothered to try and think that something might be wrong.
I never had friends as a child, mostly because I'd prefer to spend my time alone. I had the typical forced playdates, but I don't really count two children practically being held hostage together in an attempt to get them to form some semblance of friendship as 'friends'. I preferred to spend my childhood alone, off reading somewhere. It wasn't until I hit the age of about 12 or 13 that I started becoming upset that I couldn't make friends with people. A big part of it was I had a tendancy to blurt out incredibly insensitive comments and not understand why the person on the other end was upset. Another part involved the fact that I just didn't like people. I had friends that I made on the internet that I clung to for dear life. I found it much easier to communicate with people online so that's really where my only friends were. I also sometimes hung out with people IRL, but after a couple of hours I'd find an excuse to sneak home because interacting with people was just exhausting and I didn't want to do it for too long. I ended up being treated for depression which I now believe was a wrong diagnosis. I had a job, but my life consisted of doing the job and coming home because I didn't want to be around other people.
Most of my teen years were a blur. I was in an abusive relationship and was mostly forced to socialize by him so no one noticed anything else. During that time I learned how to mimic other people's facial expressions and feelings by observation, so it was helpful at appearing more normal, I guess.
Skip forward to now. I broke up with my ex a couple years ago and am living abroad with my current boyfriend and planning to get married. Things with him are good, but some of the stuff I experience now makes our relationship difficult sometimes, and it makes my time at my job difficult because i don't interact well with others. I generally suck at empathy, and am extremely unemotional. I don't speak to people and when someone speaks to me directly, I feel violated and uncomfortable. I know to some measure that they think they're being friendly, but it feels like they're interrupting my life and makes me uncomfortable and I generally just want them to go away. My boyfriend is the only person I get along with because he understands that you can't go chasing after me, so to speak, you have to let me come to you. We sometimes have big fights because I do something really insensitive and he doesn't understand that I don't know what I've done wrong. We also fight because sometimes I can't explain to him what is making me upset, so instead I just get angry and start yelling. I'm not sure why but the inability to communicate is infuriating and it happens in all my relationships which is more or less limited to him and my family.
I'm just tired of everyone thinking I'm a b***h or 'extremely arrogant' because I'm not. I just come off that way because I can't communicate or in most cases, don't want to. Also, I try to tolerate people, but I'm at my wits end, so I suppose I'm here to learn more and maybe learn some coping mechanisms for dealing with other people.
Sorry for the text wall, by the way. If anyone read this, I'm quite appreciative.
Also, I'm female and 21. Not sure if I mentioned that. Hehe.
27 Jun 2011, 8:33 pm
