Did Real Misery Start At Puberty?

Post Reply New Topic

When I turned 13 anxiety became so relentless that I knew that the only way to escape was to kill myself. I messed that up, couldn't keep the pills down. Then I got so emotionally attached to a dog and vice versa that I felt it would be wrong to kill myself and leave her.

So, years and years later, I'm alive. My ovaries are gone now and I think that some of my anxiety went with them.

Okay... Nice to see you hangin' in there. I noticed I was most miserable during my early teenage years as well.

It definitely got worse in my teen years, when I started to realize I was different. I'm finding college to be the hardest time though, right now.

My aspy son just started college. He likes it better than high school because he works off his nervous energy by walking around the parklike paths all around the campass.

What's bothering you about college?

yeah, I fixated on suicide from early on, too. I have a couple of scars down my right cheek from leaping from my bike on the Amazon bike path in Eugene. I broke my back in a few places and still didn't bleed to death in the bottom of the creek. I had hoped to not have eventually deal with the choices I had made because my hormones drove me into places and situations that made my life far rougher and my resilience stronger than if I had not had them. Since menopause I have gotten out of my own way enough to actually address myself intellectually and make great inroads of self discovery and self analysis. besides, I haven't had an inappropriate relationship since menopause, either and that is a genuine blessing, a genuine blessing.

oh, and I have a deal with my local cat shelter that they take back the cat (microchip) should I shuffle off this mortal coil, just so I can always have the choice unhindered should I need to check out early, again!

Glad Becky is living and that Rose is living. It makes it so much easier to relate to each other!

Merle

Last edited by sinsboldly on 27 Oct 2007, 8:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Middle school was quite traumatic for me, relentless bulleying and being picked on...didn't help that I was physically smaller than everyone else too (still am!) Of course, middle school is right at the puberty years. I still have PTSD over middle school! I became nervous simply walking out on a fall morning and noticing that the air felt the same way it did when I would wait for the bus to take me to school, and here I am 33 years old! High school was a bit better primarily becaue I found my niche and a few people to hang out with. The bullying also stopped by about my junior year as people just left me alone. College though was my favorite time in school. I met several people there that had similar interests as mine and are perhaps undiagnosed AS or ASD themselves. I still keep up with them to this day

I feel a lot of pressure to love it like everyone else. Also, I turned down a better school to go to the one I'm at (still a good school), because I thought I'd fit in better. But now I kind of regret it, and i feel stupid for making the choice. I don't party, and everyone does. I guess, in high school, I could hide my social awkwardness more. In high school, we talked abotu school during the day, and I went shopping with a few friends a few nights a week. When they partied, I simply didn't go, and we hung out other times. At college, everyone sees me all the time, so they know that I don't party, and it's just much more obvious that I don't go out as much as everyone else, because i can't hide it by going home - so I just feel a lot of pressure and embarrassment. Everyone talks about alcohol and hot guys - not my favorite topics, but because we're all in a group now we can't just talk about topics i like better, as I could with my friends in high school, because we typically interacted one - on - one. We all take different classes, so we don't have that conversation in common any more, and I'm best at intellectual conversation, not so much girly talk lol. Idk...if I wasn't worried about what people think, I'd like it more. I'd just go shopping, go for a walk, go to the library, chill out, and hang with friends occasionally. But I feel so much pressure to have a group of friends and do what they do, as all my high school friends have done. I wish I liked to party and drink, btu I just don't.

Okay, I completely understand. You are grown and ready to live real life and you can't be like the NTs. My son isn't feeling that pressure yet. We really like to be around him and keep him busy when he's at home. While his brain is way ahead of a bunch of people in math and science, he's still an innocent kid.

I am truly amazed that I survived to adulthood, to be honest. I was perfectly fine up to about age 11, but then things fell apart in a big way. My first trip to the ER with what would have been a fatal drug overdose was when I was 13. Before I was 15 I had been made a ward of the court for selling psychedelics, which was my 3rd felony arrest in a year or so. I remember walking into my 9th grade classes one January, having resolved to start the new year off right... by attending. My admit slip listed my period of absence as "Oct-Dec." And the next couple of years weren't much more pleasant.

Aspies should go into suspended animation when they hit 11 or 12, and be woken up when they're 18 or 19.

My time really started in 3rd grade, the loneliness. And then it got really really really bad in the 6th grade. But college was MY time and it rocked. Grad school does too, come to think of it.

When I was 11 I started crying for no reason, crying because I loved my parents but was too shy and embarrassed to tell them because all that stuff was sort of icky and out of character for me. When I realized the embarrassment was winning over the love, I got even more depressed, like when I was 13. When I was 15 it was the same. I still never told them I loved them! Though I showed them, so they know it. So it's not an issue any more.


Still, I think that a small dose of an antidepressant, starting at puberty, might have made or broken my life. I wonder which.

I would have really preferred that.

My worst was at 4th grade, actually.

yes definitely, teens to early 20 i was a raw nerve ending...i am still learning to deal with the trauma that i repressed during those times...for instance i only started to remember about the abuse i recieved at home, although i think my mother is bi polar
...and i just recently have come to remember a time when this supposed guy friend of mine tried to sexually assult me...just to set the record straight i am a hetrosexual man...oh and the thoughts of suicide would usually end with me in the bathroom of my parents house with my fathers 38 caliber pistol in my hand looking for the reason not to pull the trigger...i dont know how these things seem to follow you throughout the years wel after the supposed emotional damage should have passed...and even as a psychology student whom is in search of all the things which makes me the person i am i still faulter when i am presented with these things from adolesence to a point of regression into my past defensive nature when i feel threatened...

i have always seemed to fight pain wth logic over the years and most times i have been able to deal with things witha cut dry explanation of why i feel what i feel and do what i do...now its seems though as i have aged the need for understanding emotions tend to rule and conflict with the urge and need to be accepted by those i care about and love...if you take any interest in psychology then it may be possible that i am living Erickson's developmental stage of intimacy vs. isolation where my aspie nature cherishes solitude and my need to share my life with another forces me into a tails spin of confrontational scenarios from which a part of me must adhere to the stronger urge of the moment...
they say psychologists are the most disturbed people of them all and if all of this continues i admit this in a couple of years...
But as i have digressed i must return to point which i magically deviated from a few momoents back and say yes adolescence sucked arse and a majority of my adulthood seems to center around fixing my shortcummings so that my adulthood can remain as plesant as possible...

This months had its ups and downs but ive learned young or old you just have to go with the flow sometimes when things always seem to go terribly crappy or unlike they have been planned...

I don't think I could consider myself miserable at puberty. At least compared to other people. Actually, I don't even think I knew it was happening. Which is probably why people had problems I couldn't relate to. Despite being female, I don't think I had any sort of tantrums or emo moments. It could have been that I was more interested in playing video games or doing schoolwork to really care about the surge of hormones everyone else was experiencing--either I kept mine under control, or I didn't have much of them to begin with.

Yeah, post-puberty sucked; before and after was two different lives to me. It didn't suck due to me changing (I just kinda grew bigger and talked deeper), it was how everyone else changed around me; people behaved differently--cruelly to one another.

(I've got a new one now, but that's beside the point.)