When I realised I had Aspergers

I was an 80’s child. I was missed. We’re all stepping out the woodwork and being counted.

My Auntie had suggested that I was Aspergers years before but I wasn’t ready to hear or accept it. It’s a difficult thing to hear, after coming out a long and unhealthy shitty experience with the Mental Health services. It was my wife that brought it to my attention recently, as we were reading up coping strategies on how to deal with our Autistic son, I remember thinking, “woah, this is my childhood revisited” and Alex, I see a lot of his actions in me. The needing to be forewarned, the obsessions, not coping very well when things don’t go as planned. There’s a plethora of things I do that I didn’t realise was not the normal. To be honest I’ve always thought everyone did them, not being privvy to everyone’s thoughts.

For me, my weirdness has always been under lock and key. I was bullied a lot in the beginning of school for my social weirdness and the strange things that I would do, so I learned some coping strategies, I kept it all under lock and key. My weirdness was only coming out at home, where I was comfortable. I learned from a really young age to keep that stuff super private, and adapt to the situation that I was currently in. I always remember being taunted by the kids that didn’t really know me, or have any influence in my life. Making it sound as if I had a learning disability, when it was quite the contrary.

I was well behaved at School, I was always in the top groups and always adhered to the teachers rules. I wasn’t a lot of trouble as a kid. Albeit I was VERY easily led, and could often find myself in the wrong crowd, as you’ll know if you read any other parts of my life stories. There’s a strange relaxedness to me that doesn’t go down very well with the wife, my teachers said I was too laid back, and since I’ve shed my social Anxiety I’m more relaxed than ever. To the point that my wife could strangle me at times.

It was her at first that I was bouncing ideas off,

“So feeling like you absolutely MUST do something isn’t a normal reaction?”

I thought everyone experienced this, but I’m wrong. There are times in my life where I absolutely need to do something, to the point that it’s all that I can think of. Everything else, like important stuff ebbs away into the background. Take last night for example, I was SO excited about doing another video and relaunching my YouTube campaign that I wasn’t going to bed until I had made a video, and I couldn’t think of anything else.

Yeah, I’m slowly but surely accepting that this is my life. I think it’s easier to spot in kids today because people know what to look for, and, I think there’s more acceptance in society for weirdness than when I was a kid. Anything remotely weird and someone was there, taking the piss, making us feel shitty, and make no assumptions I was there too, taking the piss. We were all at it, super cruel. So we all learned elite coping skills, we all learned to hide it as best we could. Some of us submerged the weirdness below the surface in a attempt to fit in with society, no doubt ending up in high feelings of shame and unworthiness, and others just accepting who they are, but still not feeling ‘normal’ or granting others access to the internalised craziness.

For me, awareness has been the key. It’s helped me understand myself a bit more in depth. It’s helped me understand why I do the things that I do and how it’s affected me in the past. I wonder, perhaps my Psychiatric ward stays were entirely unjustified, and that I could have been managed at a distance. If I look back at my life the grandest steps I’ve made was when I worked in the charity sector, I’ve learned a ton of shit about myself, whereas in Psychiatric hospital I feel all I was there was to be analysed and abused.

Anyways, here’s for a better 2017. And, if you’re going through the realisation too, that you may be Autistic / Aspergers, and that you’ve been missed, don’t think of it as a bad thing, because you’ve more than likely learned some super elite covert coping skills that pass you off as a general stock breed person. Embrace your personality, use those skills in other areas. I know I have!

Peace!

When I realised I had Aspergers