Experience growing up with Asperger's

I am writing my memoirs. I'm semi-fictionalizing a few parts for the purpose of making a coherent story out of it, but the focus is on growing up with Asperger's and the complex and dangerous, sometimes self-destructive emotional life that comes with the territory. The villains of the piece are the school system mishandling my education and my father and his embarrassment of me. It is very much my attempt to dispel my own demons, demons I am forced to confront in my job every day, as I coordinate and monitor services for kids on the spectrum, including services that I wish I had, and being the role model I wish I could have had then, when I was young and vulnerable and the world was telling that something was wrong with me.

I am interested in other peoples' stories of growing up with mental illness (it doesn't specifically have to be Asperger's), because I want to make my memoirs relate to as broad an audience as possible. How does your experience compare to mine? Specifically, people who were in elementary school before there was any real awareness of Asperger's- your stories would be appreciated.

Short answer: It's very frustrating. There all sorts of things you miss, and you (well, I) feel immature and weird.

The road goes ever on. -Tolkien

In my experience, the adults were merely perplexed and not very helpful. The real villains were my peers.

Almost certain I have Asperger's. I'm not very surprised; I've always known something was fundamentally wrong with me.

I am diagnosed with ADHD, depression, and anxiety. I'm not going through the reasons why I think so.

edited 18th Oct '12 5:48:28 PM by Shaggy

If anyone in the thread wants to kidnap me, I don't mind. We'd just be in their van drinking Mountain Dew and watching MLP for days on end

This. Half the time I was convinced that most of the people I tried to get help from didn't care at all.

"Yup. That tasted purple."

It was very annoying that people, parents included, thought of me as The Rainman. On one hand, they believed I was mostly incapable of functioning in life, and on the other hand they'd react disappointed if I couldn't solve a Rubix cube.

Since I'm neither a retard nor a genius, this stereotype really started to grate.

And there were the many, many ways that people that were supposed to help me didn't really seem to know what they were doing either.

Some people simply pounce when the think they detect a weakness. Others try to help, by setting you impossible tasks, yet when you cant do them they give up and walk away. The worst one of all was my mother. She set me impossible tasks, and then never gave up trying to get me to complete them. To this day, I both resent that and appreciate her for it in almost equal measure.

I remember back in the day when people thought I was retarded.

Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.

yeah... I was misdiagnosed several times as well. I think that's par for the course for people born in the 80's and early 90's. There weren't even Autistic Support classes then, much less any awareness of Asperger's. I think people only started to notice us Post-Columbine, when "normal" kids briefly felt guilty for picking on people like us, then just as quickly forgot about it once it was no longer headline news, but maybe that's just my inner cynic talking.

Well, it was demonstrared later that those two shooters wernt really the socially alienated personality types that they had initially been depicted as anyway.

What I find far more troublesome (apart from outright bullying) are people who want to deny that anyone has the illness, claiming its just a fashion trend, or an excuse to act like a jerk (ironically these are usually the jerkiest people I know).

I wasn't saying that the shooters had Asperger's. They definitely did not. What I was saying is that there was a two week period in 8th grade where people all of a sudden pretended to care about my feelings, and I saw through it like glass. As They didn't care about me. They just felt afraid and maybe a little guilty. As soon as the media frenzy died down, those same kids were picking on me again. And all the school did was send pamphlets home about bullying, instead of making examples of the bullies like they should have.

edited 20th Oct '12 4:23:37 AM by fulltimeD

To be fair, there are quite a lot of people who "self-diagnose" as Aspergers, meaning "I am going to willfully ignore the most elementary rules of social etiquette, but you cannot call me out for this because it's not really my fault".

Interestingly enough, that does not seem to happen very often with diagnosed Aspergers, at least in my (very limited, of course) experience: they may at times make social mistakes, but they genuinely try not to — because of that, they actually seem a little too formal at times.

Also, while Aspergers is a real thing, "being socially awkward" is not the same as having Aspergers.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

^Believe me, I'm well aware of that phenomenon. Those people tend to just be assholes. I grew up with AS (though I was not appropriately diagnosed into adulthood) and I have worked with literally HUNDREDS of children all over the Spectrum. Even if I hadn't grown up with it, I've probably met more people with Autism, PDD, and Asperger's than most people do in their entire lifetime. I was hired at my current job precisely because I am an expert on the subject. There's two people in my entire county who do what I do, and I'm half of that number.

My ex girlfriend was a very disturbed person. I believe she had an Antisocial Personality Disorder. She would try to convince me that she had AS. Most of her friends self-diagnosed, as well. She was one of the rare attractive female hackers out there, and most of her friends were young white or Asian male computer geeks who valued their computers and using their hacking skills to harass and terrorize and bully others over any concept of human dignity or privacy. Most of them claimed to have AS, and probably a few of them did, but the rest were just looking for an excuse to justify their own antisocial behavior, particularly using their computer skills to intimidate and bully other people who didn't have those same skills.

That is so weird. They dont even get the symptoms right. It's like someone pretending to be black because they think it will make them look more badass.

Oh man, this gets me angry like few other things. I once ranted to a friend about people who mock people with AS, and her response? "Well, a lot of people who claim to have AS are jerks." Grr.

As for my own experiences? I was born in the early 80s, but wasn't diagnosed with Aspergers until I was 16-17. (I'd been in talk therapy for many years as a kid, mostly spending 40 minutes a week talking about which NES game I'd played. Then my dad took me to see a psychiatrist from a different school, who pretty much diagnosed me in thirty minutes.)

My primary school years were... bad. I was a loner and was bullied on and off. I didn't get any close friends until around age 16, and most of those were on the internet. I was very academically proficient and may have been a little bit of a prodigy, though I don't know whether that's related to my AS or not. Finding out that there was a real reason for my inability to fit in was actually a great relief.

Not sure if my experience is representative (chances are no-one's is, I guess), but I hope this is helpful to you.

edited 20th Oct '12 11:29:54 AM by DoktorvonEurotrash

Oh, god, the bullying. There was always the bullying, from primary school all the way up to final exams. Let me tell you, if there was only one way to nip a young mind in the bud, it would be the constant harassing and humiliating without ever letting the person in question know what they were doing wrong.

You know, I was a dumb kid. I admit that, in hindsight, I did many stupid, embarrassing and sometimes even kind of mean things*

in my desperate struggle for some positive attention. But did anyone ever bother to tap me on the shoulder and say "Dude, you're kind of being an ass"?

Nope, they all went straight to the 'punishment', because really, who doesn't like to be a total jerk in the name of justice? On a slow day, there'd be about 5 guys standing around me hurling abuse while I was trying to eat lunch. Every day, again and again. It wasn't even the same group, it was like they were on a rotary schedule or something.

Eventually they seemed to completely forget about the 'why' and thought of it as the routine playground entertainment. They even brought their kid brothers, as if it were a fucking bonding experience.

I was literally their verbal punching bag. For absolutely no reason but the fact that I was an easy target.

Eventually I just gave up on moving on the social ladder, and tried to at least get something of a moral victory out of this by using my 'bully lightning rod' powers to make sure that at least no one else gets bullied. All I had to do was walk past a bullying in action, and they'd magically switch targets.

And now I'm living like a total Hikikomori, unable to do pretty much anything wity my life because apparently, doing anything requires the subconscious assumption that doing so won't result in all your peers ganging up on you.

Thank you, mom and dad, for always telling me that I just had to ignore it, and they were just being jealous of my mighty brain. Thank you teachers for doing f*ck all whenever I ignored that advice, and punishing me by putting me in an assertiveness training group with other social rejects, where I learned how to humiliate myself instead of letting the bullies do the work for me. And thank you bullies for still featuring in my dreams, in which I brutally get to murder you. I hate you all so much.

Why yes, I didn't really get over it well, how did you guess?

edited 20th Oct '12 2:30:42 PM by Kayeka

*hug*

As much as I like to think I had it bad, I never had it that bad.

"Yup. That tasted purple."

@De Marqis

Yeah. It's weird. But speaking as a mental health professional, I think there is a very complex relationship between mental illness and subcultural affiliation; I include "imitators" in this framework, such as my ex's various male sex-buddies who, I think, sought to emulate a distorted ideal of something they didn't really understand.

edited 20th Oct '12 3:35:54 PM by fulltimeD

It depends, really. One of the families I grew up knowing had a child who suffered from classical autism. I'm not going to go into that because it's really not my business, let alone that of the internet, but it provides me with some of my perspective, in retrospect.

I'm going to be honest here: I'm someone who pretended to have Aspergers Disorder. I was tested and diagnosed, but without a doubt I took advantage of my, "condition," for my own benefit.

In my case, it wasn't so much looking for an excuse to be rude and get away with mischief as it was an attempt at counseling myself, justifying my problems on some external issue. Blaming social ineptitude on inability to communicate rather than just being an introvert who didn't want to try fixing my problems out of fear. Laziness on ADD. Failings on being a unique person who just thought differently. Having the delusion that I'm some Sherlockian savant with a quirky point of view and a snowflake like individuality.

It was true that I might have had traces of Aspergers Syndrome. A bit more difficulty at some things than others, a few deficiencies in various areas that were more from just how my brain worked than any personal faults or vices. I don't know if everyone is a little Autistic to some degree (It being a manmade concept about those who are slightly different from the norm in a specific way, and our personalities varying from person to person), but even if we are, there is still an Aspergers Disorder. I might have had difficulties, but I think the distinction is that I never had a disorder—just challenges that paled in comparison to my gifts.

Fire, air, water, earth...legend has it that when these four elements are gathered, they will form the fifth element...boron.

@Rem: I really appreciate your honesty. It shows character and fortitude to say what you just said.

I have worked very hard to emulate the kind of executive functioning that comes naturally to neurotypicals to the point where very few people actually pick up on it; particularly as most of the people I interact with on a daily basis, I interact with on a professional level, whether they are clients or coworkers (a select very few of whom actually know this about me... about 3 people in my department, and I'm keeping it at that). They also know I was going through a rough time recently but it was definitely Seasonal Affective Disorder. I have that and PTSD as well as traits of OCD and Generalized Anxiety Disorder.

And I've overcome a lot of the social stuff, but I'm still paralyzed by the opposite sex, even at times when I'm able to flirt. I've only asked someone else out two or three times in my life, really, that I can remember, and I've made more than a few passive aggressive missteps with women that ended badly. I also suffer from PTSD from that messed up relationship with my ex, the psycho hacker goddess/

edited 20th Oct '12 7:52:59 PM by fulltimeD

I was diagnosed as Asperger's only in my late thirties, but the concept didn't even exist in 70s England. I was just weird, daydreamy, socially inappropriate at times. Compared to some of you, I got off lightly.

A brighter future for a darker age.

@Kayeka: fuck, man. I know nothing I say can make a difference, but I wish you (nor anyone) didn't have to go through that.

My own youth wasn't as bad as yours, but I had similar experiences of my parents telling me to "just ignore them" (which isn't easy when three guys are actually beating you up), and teachers laughing when I tried to report the bullies. I could go on about this for ages, but I won't, since this isn't a general bullying thread.

@Rem: I admire your courage in telling us this. It's very interesting to hear that side of the story, too.

edited 15th Jan '13 5:26:22 AM by DoktorvonEurotrash

I grew up with various chemical imbalances that have never been properly explained to me, though they probably manifested as bipolar disorder and some degree of Aspergers, as has been indicated to me by people who should probably know what they're talking about. Additionally, I suffered from parental abuse at home — it's not clear to me where the cause and effect of this lies.

I suffered regular abuse both at home and at school, often daily, and was heavily pressured to be a successful student at all costs, in a highly competitive environment. Little interest was expressed in my inner life, though being an out queer student meant no one would. I snapped come university and my mother's accompanying illness, resulting in my homelessness.

I am recovering slowly, yet still experience difficult patches where I can't leave the house, and no long term relationships — barring the one very loyal friend whom I met just over two years ago.

This post has been powered by avenging fury and a balanced diet.

@Kayeka: Dude, I had the exact same experience, and many others just as bad. Abusing me actually became part of the school's culture. I once caught two people using my last name as a synonym for "stupid", neither of whom knew me.

And yet, here I am, gainfully employed, married, two kids. I lead a reasonably happy life now. I don't have any idea how I clawed my way out of that, but I did. And if I did it, without therapy, without emotional support of any kind, then anyone can. It isnt easy, and it isnt quick, but it is possible. So my advice is keep trying.

My boyfriend has HFA and Aspergers and is gay and has a learning disability to boot. His school life was so bad he had to be pulled out and homeschooled from Junior High on. He was bullied mercilessly. Funny thing is, he does not look at the way he is as a disability. He takes them as a strength, although he knows he is quirky and at t he beginning of our relationship was in constant fear I would grow to dislike him for some of his habits related to those things as he has only been able to keep 1 other rl friend, but a year and a half on I love him more than ever.

He is in College now. Just going for an Associates to start off with, and he is carrying an A average as of the completion of last weeks midterms.

Devypu's~ Big Pony :3