Hi All!
As I referenced in a previous blog, I have Aspergers Sydrome, which is now formally known as autism spectrum disorder. I am going to describe how this, as well as two other conditions (one being newly diagnosed) are impacting my life, mostly in negative ways.
I seem odd or out of place to most people I encounter. This world is basically alien to people who are on the autistic spectrum. Its like to the NT population, there is something about us that they see that obviously we can’t see because we are different than them. My life has been nothing but torture since day 1, I started with having huge blowups and meltdowns, finding out I had a significantly severe food allergy also. Both of these teamed up when I was younger to make my life a nightmare you wouldn’t ever dream could be a reality in this world. Let me start off with my school years. I, for a long time, was homeschooled by all different teachers in which only the first one I had fit perfectly, the rest were either too bossy, too tough, or had some sort of fetish for bringing in unwashed stuff for our projects we used to do for my Science classes. In third grade, my mom had decided she had had enough and began homeschooling me herself. This began until I entered public school in Grade 4. While, apart from one incident, Grade 4 was decent, Grades 5 and 6 (which I started after that) were nothing but problematic. Every day there was always an issue with the school and the biggest reason was because they didn’t want to provide me adequate services for functioning like a school aged child. We ended up suing them for a lot of money.
This was also around the same time my mother and my father got a divorce because supposedly my AS was making everything in the house more difficult to handle than it should have been, and like a glove filled with water bursting open, the pressure just ended up being too much to bear after some time and my parents, my dad in particular, couldn’t take it anymore. So there ends the first chapter.
The second chapter involves middle school and high school. I was homeschooled again for 7th grade because the new middle school didn’t want to honor our commitments for services for me to utilize. So my mom had had enough. We decided to move to a new town in 2005. However, when I started at the new school for Grade 8, they wouldn’t even let me into the school! My mom was dismayed and fought as hard as she could to appeal their decision and finally they agreed. In November 2005, I entered 8th grade. However this is only the beginning of the hell I’d face up till now, which I will come to later on in this passage.
High school brought new challenges, especially since I was becoming attracted to the opposite sex. What I didn’t realize until much later was that most girls, don’t like our type. They for some odd reason think we are outcasts and want nothing to do with us. They don’t even want to look at us, as just staring at us disgusts them to no end. This problem really started becoming apparent in 9th Grade. I developed a crush on a girl in high school and things went well at first, until I asked her out. She told me she had a boyfriend and because I didn’t know any better about women back then, I kept pestering her and she brought her mom in to talk to us as it seemed like borderline stalking, when really I just didn’t know how to communicate in the proper frame of mind. When I entered my sophomore year of high school, the crush had ended and I had made two new friends. I eventually ended up being friends with them until much later but then we parted ways as they moved far ahead of me but I’m not spoiling that now! 10th Grade started off well but brought even further problems thereafter as I started rebelling against the students for not being accepted and deliberately did different things I shouldn’t have done just to tell them how mad I was at them for disregarding any type of presence I had. I had a terrible aide– one who defied all physics of being friendly, she was beyond mean, she didn’t care about how I felt or what my disabilities were all that seemed to be in for her was the pay. So we removed her but by this time it was already too late to turn back the clock and reverse the damage I had done. For the rest of the year I was on a half day schedule at school with an awesome aide which adapted well to my speculative needs, but by this time I had also made the biggest mistake of my life, one I will always regret: leaving the mainstream and entered a special needs class at another campus affiliated with the one I had gone through my sophomore year at. This begins my junior year. I felt terrible I was in a class with people who couldn’t even make a sentence to save their lives. What I had noticed however was the absence of hard work and frustration,. The teachers in this group actually worked with you to finish your work and get it up to standard, this exact reason is what led up to me getting straight As in senior year. I strived for my best in senior year, and earned it causing me to be exempt from final examinations for the rest of the school year.
Once I left senior year, everything changed again, and this begins chapter three. I entered a program for kids ages 18-21, however I felt the right route to take was going to my local community college to pursue a major in special education, and this caused my delay which I’ll also regret forever. This place taught you job and life skills to people with special needs who needed extra assistance in the real world. I began working during this time. The first year I had a job at the borough halls in the town I lived in and the town where the old high school where I graduated from resided. Both of these jobs loved my work ethic but sadly due to the ending of school they ended abruptly and my efforts to return to these jobs have as of now failed to materialize. My second year at this program however I finally began to become more independent. I attended a community college and worked volunteering with special needs kids, a job I love to this day. People at my college always used to shun me during this time due to my disabilities while I got along reasonably well with the kids in the special needs program. My guess as to why the kids at my college never wanted me to be accepted was because even they too sensed something was off about me. I had crushes on multiple girls and all had given me the same excuses: “I have a boyfriend.”, “I’m not interested in you.”, or “Sorry I’m busy, maybe another time.” It really left me furious as I wondered how all the other non-Aspie men in my school had picked these girls up so easily. Despite my shortcomings socially, it didn’t stop me from focusing on my schoolwork, in fact it made me better at doing schoolwork because I focused intently on my work, which girls hated, .but they were all immature people and weren’t worth being friends with, let alone trying to get a date out of them. Some of the guys were, OTOH, nice but a lot of them had turned on me later in the semester after finding out how weird I was. In my third year of the special needs program I continued going to my community college but my favorite part of the day was working with nonverbal kids at my first high school. I never thought for once in my life i could serve as the role playing teacher. I had done a good job aside from a few mistakes but due to my graduation from high school I couldn’t keep the volunteer jobs and they fell by the wayside.
Chapter four begins with me continuing community college. The problem of being shunned by others was getting MUCH worse to the point where almost every person in my school ignored me and thought I was weird. I used to cry on my car rides home from school and had wondered why this was happening. I had also developed a prominent hunch in my back at this time which prompted a doctor visit several years later. I had started doing my college courses online after the last semester after high school because of three reasons: one my mom could no longer drive me to the college, two nobody there accepted me and three the work was easier to do online rather than in person. It ended up however being more isolating than I thought.
Today is June 18, 2015. At this point in my life I am 23 years old. I now have a part time paid position at a grocery store, as my old part time job at a department store didn’t work out they way I had initially made it out to be. The working world is the same way, nobody at my job wants to even face me or even talk to me with the exception of a couple of introverted people. In fact all the extroverted people wanted to do is use me or ask me for favors i.e. just wanting me to cover their shifts which makes them ruder than roots and I had to block some people including a girl who blocked me for no apparent reason other than maybe because I had a huge crush on her and she had a bf who she wasn’t getting along with at the time made me want to ask her out at the APPROPRIATE time no less. She, like all the girls at my college who I had previously asked out said no. I have had a few girls in my life but all of them seem to vanish quickly once they find out what type of a person I am. So this ruined the dynamic of my job. Then all the other kids followed suit and that combined with bad customers and a crappy job which makes you exhausted makes me feel like complete and total crap and like a failure every single day. All I do now is game, collect hot wheels, listen to music, and wonder why I’m not accepted as a whole by the general population, because of a condition I never asked for. This illness is a curse and one day I hope someone can develop a cure for it as I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. It caused so many arguments including one recently today that I now have to keep my mouth shut and not say a word. I have lost pretty much all of my friendships for various reasons i.e. we no longer connected, they relocated, or moved too far ahead of me. I only have one true friend left and while this one hasn’t gone away yet, I’m having a bad feeling about the eventual status. I am so alone and nobody realizes it because they don’t understand this “condition.”
On a side note, remember I mentioned earlier my back was hunched and that I went to the doctor to check on it? Well I did a couple of weeks ago. I turns out it is a permanent curvature of the back called Schueremanns Kyphosis which I have in addition to a food allergy and the AS curse. This now leaves me a target for bullying and teasing by my coworkers and other NT people I come into contact with. Right now the only people I am getting along with are people in the disabled community, for the most part. I have started seeing a physical therapy place for my back which is now one of the highlights of my week and a therapist who is helping me with CBT. I hope one day I do get a girlfriend, friends, drive (which is taking its time), and have my dream job. Aspergers may stand in my way but I’m not gonna give up on these dreams even if its a long and bumpy road to get there.
I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post, and I hope to make many more in the future.