Welcome back to My Aspergers story, this is number four. I've covered a vast majority of things from being first diagnosed, my problems fitting in at school and my ever defining struggle to make friends and keep them.
Now, I am going to talk about what life is like for me now having autism as a young adult.
I am twenty one years old, I feel I have come a long way since childhood, I've had my ups and downs and I most certainly have had my misunderstandings, struggles and dramas in life with people who have come and gone over the years, but most of the time I feel every time something bad or unfortunate happens to me, something good will always be waiting round the corner.
In all honesty I feel very blessed to be in a very loving, kind, affectionate family that have such a wicked sense of humour and we all get each other and we are all so close to one another. I have great support at hand in my friends, people you genuinely like me for who I am and don't judge me for the way that I am, they just accept it as being me and we can get on and have a laugh and just enjoy life to the full.
Obviously I feel a change has occurred in me as a person throughout the length of my life up until this point. I think I have certainly become more able in doing day to day things independently as I have gotten older, but then at the same time there are still some things which I feel anxious about or just will not do. For instance, we have a gas hob in my house, and I never liked to use the gas because I would always have this fear of the house blowing up but the way that I have learnt to overcome that fear was to just practice using it with someone with me and that helped to show me that there is no danger with it and that it is a very safe, applicable thing to use. I can do my own washing and laundry, I couldn't do that when I was younger, now I can. I feel more grown up and I have matured more. However, there are still a few things which hold me back which I just won't do because I just feel uncomfortable doing them. I won't get a bus or get in a taxi on my own, ever. The simple reason is I don't trust Taxi or Bus drivers, and the bus drivers who I have encountered have been very rude to me.
So, I have noticed a change but yet still find it hard to cope with social interaction. It's always been a recurring thing. No matter hold old I am. I just feel like I am just crap in that area, and me chatting up girls on dates is even worse, my chat up lines are just awful and my conversation with girls is just non existent. There are two types of social interaction domain that I commonly respond to.
One is family gatherings and family outings, spending time with family. It depends on which family I am with, if I'm with my mum's side of the family, that's so much better and more comfortable for me because I get on well with both my aunts (mum's sisters) I've got two older cousins, (one whose nearly thirty and one who is twenty six) three younger cousins (one who's a few months younger than me, one who is nineteen, and one who is seventeen but will be eighteen in nine days of me posting this blog. I get on with them all well enough and I always enjoy seeing them because I don't get to see them often, it's very rare for me, which makes are meet ups are so great, I can get talking to them and have big long catch ups which is always so lovely for me. My Uncle (Mum's brother) who I don't always see because he's an air steward is just a diamond. He is so unique and wonderful and just a joy to be around, he always cracks me up with jokes or just by telling stories of something which has happened to piss him off on with his job and he's taught me to live life to the absolute full. If I'm with my mum's side of the family and spending time with aunts and cousins on that side of the family, that's fine. I know that I'm going to have a good time and really enjoy myself and I can feel myself around them.
If I'm with my dad's side of the family, it's a bit different, my dad's side is more of a sophisticated type where there are not so much a party on down type of people as my mum's side of the family is. But they still are really lovely people. All of my dad's brothers are really nice and accommodating, I can remember having lots of grown up conversations with my uncles, my dad's brothers when I was in my teens about the values of money and saving money and just life skills in general. As much as I love them, they can be a bit bland sometimes if I'm quite honest. I'm not saying that as a bad thing, but sometimes the meet ups we have, even though they're fun and interesting, can be a bit dull and bland in regards to the atmosphere. But you can't chose your family, I like my family for what it is and I always would respond well to social interaction situations with family, no matter what side of the family it is.
So that's one side of social interaction domain that I feel I can respond to successfully and as such as taught me lots of valuable lessons in how to respond and behave around people. I can take what I learn in a family situation and apply to a mode of thinking where when I'm with friends, I can just act like I would do if I was out with family. I think I often struggle to understand reading people's gestures or just understanding the premise of a joke. I have a friend called Joel who is very banter-ish. I have a hard time working out half the stuff he says because I'm not sure what he means, and that in a way can be discomforting for me because it's lost in translation and a lot of stuff is miscommunicated. It goes back to what I said about not understanding banter. The banter you have with friends is different to the banter you have with family. I can often misinterpret banter as a personal dig at me or misinterpret it as something completely different to what the other person meant. It's not always good the way I respond to social situations with my friends, I end up feeling very disappointed in myself. I become paranoid and start thinking was I too much?, was I annoying? did some of the things I do look like I was putting on an act? silly questions like that I ask myself and I think too much about it and the more I dwell on it, the worse I feel.
I'm terrified of falling out with my friends. I've been so unlucky in friendship groups, I've sort of accepted that I am doomed to be alone due to my condition. When I'm with friends now, because of the experience which have happened in my past, I now feel like "Ok, I'm just waiting for something bad to happen" because I am so scared of fucking up or the group just breaking up because I'm having such a wonderful time just being in the moment and enjoying nights out or fun days with them. It's a tricky one, I'm feeling sad over something positive. Surely I should be happy because something really positive has sprung itself upon me.
It always made sense to me that I had all these fallouts and misunderstandings with friends because of my Aspergers. I've lost a lot of friends because of it, and then I'd make new friends and then I'd lose them as well. It just became like a continual thing. 2016 was the time where I spent most of the time just enjoying being on my own and just not having the burden of fucking anything up or feeling under any pressure. To be fair, I made two of the best of acquaintances with two of the most lovely, diverse people in 2016 and I'm still best friends with them now. At Christmas time, the three of us went to go and see Cinderella at the London Palladium and that was like "The best" It was such a great show and what was good about it is the three of us had a really fun night. But yes, 2016 was the time where I just had a full year of just enjoying life without friends as it were, after what happened with my friends at Uni and I fell out very badly with them, I became very down and deflated and I was a total arsehole to my family because I just wanted to shut myself off from the rest of the world and isolate myself because that way it would mean that I couldn't hurt anymore people and my mum could understand why I felt that way when I eventually plucked up the courage and told her how I was feeling. Things got very morose and self reflective after that, and I began to question myself and my Asperger's and made want to try and understand it better. I typed in Asperger's Syndrome into YouTube and there was a video of this doctor, talking through the characteristics of someone with Asperger's Syndrome. It made me identify the symptoms better and made me more aware of how I am, because I was just going the whole time "yep. That's me" "That's what I am" "I am so like that" and that really depressed me because it made me feel like a freak who is just so different to the rest of the world. There was all the other people in the world and then there was just me. On my own.
It can be discomforting feeling isolated. I'm on my own a lot of the time. I don't get much of a chance to get out and meet new people. Which is a shame for me, because people often misunderstand me for hating people. I don't. I actually love people. I love meeting new people. Especially older people, people who are like in their 50's, 60's or even 70's. People who have experience life have far greater stories to tell than the rest of us. Old people are kind of ignored in the way that Autistic people are, they are just shoved aside from the rest of society and have become invisible.
And a lot of people were just nasty to me about my Asperger's in secondary school. Whenever I explained this to other kids and laid it out for them, they just couldn't get the concept. And I wasn't doing it to try and get the sympathy vote, I was just trying my best to get them to understand me and my autism and just for them to get to know me a bit better so that they didn't think I was weird anymore. What I got the most in reply was "You just use it as an excuse" that was not what I was trying to do at all. I just wanted to make friends. People don't understand how difficult it was for me, when you're trying to make friends, and it gets to a point where I have to make up stories with people or just alter facts about me and pretend to be somebody else because it was just easier and as it turned out people started liking me for doing that, some of the more popular boys in the school were actually starting to like me, but then they would find out what I was doing and then pick on me because of it, saying "Don't trust Daniel, he's a lier." "He makes up stories about himself to get people to like him" and that was very part and parcel, It was something which I partially brought upon myself as well as them shit stirring the whole thing and exaggerating the whole thing out of all proportion. It made people want to stay away from me, rather than be my friend.
I would always tell someone who I was becoming friends with that I have Asperger's because it is such an important and essential fact about me which I just need to mention. It's what makes me who I am, it defines the person that I am. It's never going to go away. It's incurable, It's a condition, NOT A DISEASE for those of you reading this thinking that I have something contagious. It's just a chronic condition which makes me what I am. And if people can't accept that and can't be my friend because of that well, that's not my problem.
As far as my brain is concerned, I'm a bit slow with understanding things, on both a non emotional and emotional aspect of a situation. I get very perplexed and curious about things or misunderstanding something can mislead me into doing the wrong thing. I feel thick sometimes, on the bases of I try so hard but things just don't seem to go in. It's just difficult, tiring and frustrating above everything else.
However, my brain is amazing at retaining information. It's why I am so good at quoting things, I like to reenact things from films or plays or TV shows that I like, and I run with them and know quite a lot of the things that are said, just off the top of my head. Or if I'm quizzing and revising for a big quiz coming up, I'll stock up on all areas, get sudden tremendous obsessions, I'll get fascinated by something, I then have to learn all about it, and this genuinely grips me for about a month, during that time I've learnt a huge amount about this one subject. I watch a lot of documentaries. Have a photographic memory, if I'm seeing a tube map or a poster for something, I'll remember it. So my brain is really quite a master machine in many ways, and even I am amazed at how well I remember things and take stuff in. I feel like Benedict Cumberbatch in "The Imitation Game" one of my favourite films, and performances I have seen by any actor in a film. A genius at work. My brain never shuts off. It's round the clock ticking away.
I don't like it when people insult my autism. Because they're not just insulting me, they are insulting a whole load of other people who have autism more severe than me. There are people who can't talk or have difficulty walking and some people have weird obsessions with themselves, some people don't know what to do with their hands for example, they flap their hands around. The worst insult you can give to me or anyone who has autism is calling them "retarded" or "a retard" that deeply offends me and I got very angry whenever I was called that. I just found it so offencive and disrespectful so I couldn't help but retaliate when someone came out with that. They just fuck off as far as I'm concerned. They're a waste of space.
So yeah, school was shit! It's a strange place to develop, but the majority of young people go through it, it's only when you go to college or uni things take a dramatic change. I feel like I have become more academic and I have developed serious entrepreneurial skills, and I am ready to go out into the world and do whatever the fuck I like! Because I am so ready. I can't wait to start working a full time job in the media I want to go into. I am so excited.
I'm even that different, I am exactly like you, I just think differently. I see the world with a different perspective. Apart from that I am as normal-ish as you an get. In fact, a lot of people are actually surprised when I tell them I have Aspergers they say to me "Oh you have Aspergers?, you don't look like the sort of person who would have it" and that sort of makes me think I hide it up. I don't. It's always there, people just don't pick it up I guess.
On the whole, wrapping this part of the story up, I feel like I have come a long way in my time, and I have become a more able person, and that my condition has shaped me into the person I am today and will continue to shape me into the person my future self will become and I'm excited to meet him.
In the concluding part, I'll just give you a nice round off of everything in where I have come now up to this point.
Enjoy the rest of the day!
