Hey everyone.
Welcome to My Aspergers Story - Part Three. To recap you on the events which have happened so far, I got diagnosed with autism at a very young age, I struggled to come to terms with it, I didn't fully understand it and my school life wasn't always the easiest ride for me.
Now in this part of the story, I am going to talk about the most difficult and probably the hardest thing that I have to deal with having Aspergers and that is friendships. Making friends and keeping them. This has been an on going problem for me all my life, I would make friends with other people and the friendships would be very short lived because something would happen to draw the friendship to unpleasant end.
I'm basically going to talk about some of the friends who have come and gone in my life, the difficulties of the social interaction domain for me and my life with friends at the moment and there are quite a few points in this part of my story that I want to make, which I feel are very important and serious and which people need to start understanding and getting their heads round.
Before I start this part of the story, I just want to point out that I have been struggling very hard with anxiety. I don't mean to say that I've just been having a few panic attacks, or feel really shy about going places or doing stuff, I mean to say that I have majorly been struggling with anxiety recently, over the past month, I think since the middle of February I have just gone down hill. 2017 has been a very difficult year for me so far, That doesn't mean to say that it's been horrendous non stop, I've not had a terrible start, but anxiety wise, it's been really difficult. Because I now have such a lack of structure and routine in my life, it means as a consequence I can't enjoy things as much as I would use to. And it's not great for me because I didn't ask for this. I didn't ask for this constant fluctuation of anxiety and always having the feeling that something isn't one hundred per cent.
I don't just have anxiety. I have autism. And because I've got autism, the anxiety that comes along with it is prolonged and it's life long, it's always going to be there and it is ten times worse than a neurotypical anxiety, it's because I am hypersensitive and I see the world differently, that's what autism is, it's basically giving you a different set of eyes to everyone else in the world. And a different layout of feelings, a different nervous system and different set of emotions. Because I am hypersensitive, if you upset me for example, I get really upset and it goes deep and gets me really down because I would hate to cause such upset to any of my family or friends because I love them so much. It's a hard one because it's just prolonged anxiety and I just wish it wasn't there or it doesn't bother me as much as it does.
So I have been struggling really hard with that, and I have been struggling to find any motivation to get up in the morning and do stuff. I just don't have any structure or routine and I'm just bored a lot of the time, thinking how else I can waste the day other than spending it sat in front of a screen all day. But I am working on it, I am concentrating on getting better, my family have been very understanding and supportive of me and I've got some of the best friends I could wish for who are there to hold my hand and help me find my way back so I am on the mend and hoping to get better soon.
So to start at the very beginning, in order to explain this properly I have to go back to as far back as nursery. The nursery class I was in, was a mixture of boys and girls, I was never a boy who got the chance to join in any fun games that small groups of other children were participating. I can remember we had this train set which I absolutely adored, one of the trains was a deep blue and it was just gorgeous it was one of the best toys I had ever seen in my life and it was at my nursery. I did get my chances to play with it, but not often, there would be many times other boys would snatch it off me when I was ever playing with it, wouldn't let me join in any games when they were playing with it and I found this very distressing and confusing as to what I had done to make them not want to play with me.
Putting all that aside, moving up to 'big school' I always found play times and stuff like that difficult because at my first primary school we had a big play ground, and there was lots of free space so that in itself scared me and made me anxious of going outside, I found it tricky to approach other kids, normally the teacher would have to suggest to other children if I could join in with any of their games, I was quite a shy child growing up in the early days of school, I never knew how to approach other children in the play ground.
As time went by when I was still at school, I was never 'liked' by anyone. Not really. When I was young, my mum would get complaints from the school from other parents because apparently, the other kids told their parents that I was bossy or too forceful on their child and that made them feel uncomfortable, when all I was trying to do was be nice and be their friend. I would often get kicked out of friendship groups and I never understood why, so I was often told I was bossy, my friends would fall out with me, I was often left out, just because my class mates just didn't want to be around me, or they'd chose to believe rumours about me that other kids had spread which made them want to avoid me. Teachers and adults in my educational journey have often said about me "He's very well spoken for his age", "Should he really be coming out with that kind of stuff?" I've heard it all, I honestly have.
I had this one friend in Year 5/6 who I loved. I absolutely adored him. He was like a brother to me, and we were inseparable. I felt like we were going to be best friends forever and it was all going to be wonderful and marvellous. Nope. That wasn't to be the case, because the fact of the situation now looking back on it, he was a real arsehole this boy. There are so many times, I spent waisting in the toilets crying over him because I felt I had done something to really upset him, when in actual fact he wasn't all that bothered by what I said, he just wanted to me to feel sad, we'd argue a lot over the most stupid and irrelevant things, he'd tell his mum on me and say I was bullying him and when we moved onto secondary school, we were moving on to different schools I wasn't going to the same school he was going to and I think of it now as a blessing, thank god I got away from him because he wasn't my friend, or he was at the start and then got bored and decided to play this game with me. I've not seen or spoken to this person since leaving primary school. I have no contact with this person, and I am quite happy for it to stay that way.
In secondary school, I do feel now that I fell in with the wrong crowd of people. At the time, I thought they were my friends and I feel in some respect one or two of them did act like my friend but the other people in the group just sort of 'put up with me' as it were and they were quite dismissive and rude to me a lot of the time. We used to bunk off school and buy skunk, and I would always be the person who had to pay for it because no else ever had any money. Not once did I ever receive a thank you or a gesture of gratitude from any one in the group for all the times I did that. It just made me feel like it was just a waste of time. I wish I should have just gone to school on those days. I drifted apart from that group, thank god, I feel lucky to have got a gap where I got an escape from those people, all of which I don't see anymore and don't speak to.
I mentioned in the second part of my blog, just before I got depressed, I befriended a group of girls and at the start it was a lovely group to be around. I made friends with this lovely group of girls from different backgrounds and different classes and it was a great laugh and fun at the beginning but I think where things started to go wrong with that was when I got depressed, I let the negative side of me take over more often than most and my mood reflected off me onto other people and I did blame a few people that I shouldn't have done for the way I was feeling and said that they weren't a true friend, I said some really nasty things which I wish I could take back which weren't true and were mean but I wasn't in a right state of mind mentally, I wasn't myself, I need to eject my anger out onto someone or something and sadly my friends got caught and mixed up in the firing line.
One girl, in particular, I grew a lot of affection for, she took me out to get drunk with some of her friends who I didn't know, we went to this boys house and some of us got very drunk and someone actually got really ill and started throwing up and getting hysterical. It wasn't a good day. I then went back to her house once everything had cooled off and sorted itself out to do what I wanted to do with her which was watch films and chill. At nine o clock, her parents kicked me out of her house. I was left out on the streets waiting for my dad to come and pick up. The next day I was supposed to hang out with her the next day but I got an email from this person going completely off the wall at me saying "thanks for saying you didn't enjoy yesterday, it wasn't all about you. I won't come to your house now you have said that" she was really angry with me, she ignored me, she was just a complete and utter bitch to me. I tried so hard to fix things with her, but she was so stubborn and just would stand her ground and not listen to reason or my version of events at all. It got so bad that I had to get the school involved and make her speak to me because she just would not talk to me.
It got worse as it went along, I did things to make matters worse as well as all the stuff she did in response to my actions. I tried apologising, I tried everything I could think of, I wrote a letter to her family explaining what I have done was wrong and that I wish we could get back to being friends slowly but even that didn't work. Her family were just arseholes. To put it frank. You can't reason with people who don't want to listen. They were just point blank, down the line, stubborn arseholes. It made things all the more harder and frustrating for me. I'd see her out of class sometimes after that where we would speak about the odd thing or two for a few minutes, but I've not seen or spoken to this girl in a very long time and I don't wish to ever see her again. I'm very sorry for what I did, and I wish I could take it all back and maybe if I was different things may have turned out differently, I never asked for any of this to happen or to end so catastrophically. I'm no saint in this situation, I wasn't the victim all the time, I did do some really stupid things out of just not responding well to the social aspect of the situation or the emotional aspect of the situation. I only hoped to move on from those mistakes in life and never fall out with a friend this badly ever again.
After all the shit that happened with me with friends and friendship groups through school, I just put up my defences and decided that I can't make any more mistakes with people if I'm not friends with them. When I first started university, my attitude was to not get too attached to anyone there for the results may be severe.
At the start of my second year, I befriended this group of people whom I had a mutual fondness for. They were a very welcoming and positive bunch at the start, all of my friendships get off to a good start, that's a positive about it, I can delve into groups quite well it's just staying there for longer than three or four months which is the problem.
I worked together with these people on a documentary project, which was really fun, I really liked working with them and to be fair, I think we worked really well as a team. During that project we got close and they were inviting me round to their student home and it was really nice and then fate had it that we got brought together with them again for the studio piece we had to do. It was around November time thing started to go wrong. I had grown affectionate towards a girl who I liked, knowing where I stood because she had a boyfriend, I knew not to over step the mark, but the thing which makes me different from some other autistic people or people with Asperger's is, Aspergers people sometimes don't like to be touched or don't like being shown affection, they like their space. I'm not like that at all. Because of my up bringing and the way I was brought up, I grew up in a very affectionate family where things like hugs and kisses are very common. Having this mind set in my head because family do it to me, I therefore assume it's alright to do it to everyone. I have no understanding of people's personal space or I have no awareness to other people's boundaries that you can go before you cross a line as it were.
Anyway, I got very attached to this girl, we became quite close, I was left on my own with her one time, we had a long talk, but the thing is, whilst we were having that talk I was getting a bit too comfortable with her. It was fine for me, it felt perfectly natural, to the girl I was with it wasn't. She was really off with me the next day in class and then that evening she messaged me saying "I know what you meant was this, but in reality, it was this, I didn't like it, please stop." I agreed and said I would not do hug her as much. We then didn't see each other for a week, we came back after study leave, she was fine with me then on the first day back. She said that what we needed to do was back things up and take things slow, she didn't know me that well, etc.
I then made a foolish mistake of wanting to play a prank on a different friend, that joke just completely backfired and the consequences threw right back hard in my face because the three of them just went mental at me, and completely over reacted to the whole thing. They wouldn't even listen to reason or let me tell them my side of the story. It was all a bit ridiculous to be fair. The next thing I know I am being shouted at and told to fuck off. I then get taken aside by the guy who I was playing the joke on, he didn't seem to mind or care about what I did. He took me back to the house and we took a picture of the sticker on his car as evidence and had a chat about things that had gone on and then that time was cut short because they others came back early and that of course, meant I had to leave. I spoke to this person later that evening and he basically confirmed the worst for me, just that they the three of them didn't want to be my friends anymore and that it's best to just stay away from them. Since then these three have been very vile and horrible to me.
I have always found it hard to settle into a social interaction domain, even when I was with family is some places. We would have family meet ups and a remember endless sessions of just sitting in the car with Mum or Dad because I was too anxious to get out and say hello to anyone. I'm much better now, with family situations but there was something about going out of the house which always made me feel really uncomfortable and my anxiety flared up because of that.
Whenever I talk to people, I have low eye contact or minimal eye contact, this is something which I have tried to improve upon but it always leads back to me looking at the floor or something else in the room, but the person I'm talking to has always known I'm talking to them so I've always assumed it's not been a major problem. I should try to connect with people better, it's not an excuse and I think that eye contact is the key to connecting with a person, I should look at the person I'm talking to more and then that in turn will allow me to get more confident with talking to people.
I'm scared because of what has gone on in the past that my autism is like a curse. I am forever doomed to be making the same or new mistakes with people and never ever feeling like I belong in a group of friends.
It's the battle I am facing with myself at the moment with the group of friends I'm in at the moment. Putting my heart on the line again, wearing my heart on my sleeve and just feeling vulnerable basically. My chest hurts, I can feel a tightness on my back, my heart rate has become heavier, my stomach is in a knot. I feel really stressed out and on edge because all these nice, lovely things have happened so fast and I'm just not used to being in a friendship group, everything still feels new and weird to me.
I have a lot of social anxiety and self-doubt and if there is anyone with Asperger's reading this, you'll know what it's like to have the negativity of your world just on top on you and get under your skin. And I am not trying to imply that people who don't have asperges's syndrome don't let the negativity get under their skin, because of course, they do, everyone does, everyone has feelings and their own pain and problems to deal with, and I'm not saying all this to get pity or sympathy because I'm not that kind of person, if I was looking for sympathy I'd approach this blog in a different way. I just want to point out the struggle I have been going through and every time going into a friendship confidently and happily and feeling really happy being with a group of nice people who I feel get me and then doing something to fuck it all up and making me feel like a useless failure. Those who know me well will understand, and I think other people with Asperger's will understand what that struggle feels like.
I struggle with simple things like small talk, especially with girls, girls are the worst people for me to talk to, apart from my mum, my sisters and the females in my family, I can not talk to girls. My small talk with girls is hopeless. And if I am trying to chat them up because I fancy them, fuck me, that's even worse.
An example of this was I was out in a pub with my friends one night and friends of a friend were also there, and one of my new friends, a girl, not just a girl but a pretty girl, was talking to me, now because there's a pressure there for me to get it right and make a good go of it and have a nice, mature, fluent conversation with this girl because I like her, nerves kick in and I do something to interrupt the flow of the conversation which makes things really awkward. Awkward silences are just the worst for me, I never know what to say because I don't want to say or do the wrong thing and everyone's on their phones. I hate that so much.
Anyway, this girl, who I have a lot of respect for and think is amazing, I tended to fall into a pattern of everything reverting back to me and not focussing on her interests or asking about her and what she was doing or if we did it wasn't for very long. It's just a sign or a red light which was telling me that I wasn't responding well to the social situation I was in. I don't know how to start a conversation or what questions to ask in a conversation, that's another thing that makes social interaction a big challenge for me.
I find things like banter difficult to understand, true there is banter and then there's plain being a dick. More often than most, people would make a harsh comment about me and then just say "Oh, it's just banter Dan. It's just banter, lighten up" as a means of covering up the true meaning of what they said. Banter is just an excuse to be an arsehole. But sometimes banter can just be banter and friendly and just how friends speak. I confuse the two and just misinterpret banter as being a personal dig at me, I don't know, maybe I just need to be more laid back and show people that what they say doesn't affect me. You should never show when you're down as it's a sign of weakness.
I'm just a little flustered because I didn't expect anything from anything. I didn't expect this to happen. I didn't expect these people to take such a liking to me and to take me under their wing after not knowing for very long, we had just been working together on a play and true, you do form a bond and become like a family, it's part of the job but when you go out of the boundaries of the job and into the real world, that's when things become different and start to change.
Someone can make a joke in the group which everyone will get straight away but I won't get and then a few minutes later, I'll get it and start laughing and the others will look at me really confused thinking 'why is he laughing?".
I always strive to try my best in life and to get on with other people. And often feel that when I put myself out there, my best is never good enough for people.
Going back to these five people again, they are such great, actors and people, and being around them we do have a great laugh and all get on well within the group, it's just there's a fear there holding me back that I am going to do something to eventually fuck it all up. My feelings have always been a burden on me because, I've been too open and honest with some people about my feelings and that's scared people off. I've learnt over the last few weeks not to validate my feelings or make my feelings so well known to people, I don't know whether this is just me pushing down my feelings, and not letting how I truly feel come out. I do often let my true feelings be known, I have a good cry but for the most part, because I'm so worried of something bad happening, I fear for myself that I am going to do or say something really stupid which will change things. I've learnt to push back my feelings and not let them take over and to stay in control. It's become something where the more I try to ignore it the harder it becomes to ignore and it's eating me up and killing me.
And things like social media don't help either, I remember I was looking on my friend's Instagram because she posted a picture of herself with another girl and the caption below said "with my best friend since day 1" I shouldn't let stuff like that get to me but it did. It made me feel "oh, I'm not your best friend". I waste a lot of time scrolling through endless social media, it doesn't help me in the way that I am feeling, but I somehow feel compelled to look at it.
I hate feeling this vulnerable, I hate feeling like I can't be myself around people, I have to feel I need to be somebody else because they like that person and not me or hiding my true feelings from people by just not saying anything. Either of those things don't help me.
And with this new group in particular, I don't want to lose them, or fall out with them like the others. I'm finding it really hard to keep it together and I am so sick and tired of feeling this way. Feeling like I can't be my true self around people because they don't like who I am or don't understand me. I've made mistakes in my life with people, that much can be said, I am no saint, I have made strong relationships but those relationships have all been broken and with it, my self-confidence that things can get any better. I feel like I'm at the bottom of this well and that I'm trying to climb out and every time something bad happens, I fall out with someone or I make a mistake, I just go back to square one. It's disconcerting for me as it just makes me think "why bother?'. You put yourself out there only to get rejected. What's the point?
But the positive side of this whole thing is I've landed myself in with a group of five other people, they all really like me and I like them. A lot of our interests aline, we meet up often enough and when we don't see each other we are on the Facebook group chat, discussing our next meet up or just talking about silly/ stupid things as friends do. I'm just taking it as it comes and trying to enjoy it. I don't know three out of the five people that well, so you just have to take each day as it comes, try to make the best of it and be a good friend, and just have a really good time. I'm surrounded by really good people at the moment. Those of you who know me will know that I am a very positive, loving, optimistic person. I look forwards to the future, there's no point getting upset or dwelling on moments in the past which you can't change. So I'll sign off by just saying how grateful I am to have found these people and how lucky I am to be a part of a new diverse friendship group.
In the next part, I'll be talking about Me and Aspergers now that I am a young man in my early 20's.
So thank you very much for your time.
Have a great day!
