Sunday, February 28, 2010

Grades School and Asperger Suspicions

A bit of my past and what growing up was like for me circa 1995 - 2002. Includes a few of the reasons I now believe I may have Asperger's as my mother now tells me she had begun to suspect years and years ago. I got a lot of this out of a few of my old notebooks from high school where I had tried to document my history and my development. Other parts come from discussion with my mother. My analysis is now much more complete.

Looking back a little on the history of my once poor visual memory, I often was too distracted by my imagination to really focus much on what things really looked like. It took some training for me to really be able to start paying attention to things like this when I was directed to. In contrast, when thinking alone to myself I would often stare deeply at an object paying careful attention to every detail and day dreaming about it. I would do this for hours if no one came to interrupt me. I could recall these things perfectly, but the psychologists never got to see this side of me. I've always loved to do this and I think it has greatly contributed to my overall intelligence. I got a lot of practice thinking, as it is what I did with most of my time; I did not have many friends and those I did have I saw rarely outside of school. During recess I usually sat alone and imagined things because I did not enjoy doing what most of the other children did. They wanted to play sports or to imagine by playing archetypal roles. I preferred to imagine things morphing and changing, flying around and becoming other things. I liked to imagine colorful, curving and swirling beams of light that had different effects on the things they passed through. I really liked the television show "My Little Pony" with the unicorns and pegasuses because of all of the light and color themes they had. I think this may be why I called this imaginary world "magic." I spoke of "magic" incessantly to my mother and anyone else who would listen. As a younger child I did not realize that these things were not real and that other people did not see them. When I reached 3rd grade it started to become more apparent to me because my classmates would tease me when I spoke about it, but I still did not understand that it was because their world was very different from mine. I think they thought I was crazy. Interestingly, the teasing did not bother me unless they were outright mean to me. Other situations in which they laughed at me were actually enjoyable for me because I liked the laughter. So, I learned what made them laugh and engaged them in it often. It took me a year or two to understand that they were trying to be cruel - that the laughter and the mean behavior stemmed from the same thing. When I realized this, I realized that the "magic" of my imagination was not real, though I still found it enjoyable and so engaged in it often.

As soon as I found out that it wasn't real I began to pray every night that it could be real. I did not enjoy the nightmarish world I was beginning to see that everyone else was trapped in. I knew that I needed to understand it in order to have friends and be accepted but it was difficult. Now I knew that I was different but still didn't know that it was unusual to have such an active imagination. I did not connect this to my poor grades in subjects which I could not focus or that it was what made me different. I knew that I had ADD and attributed everything to this, but didn't really know what it meant. They told me I couldn't pay attention and they gave me medicine to fix it. I didn't like the medicine, it made me feel weird and it took away much of my comforting world. However I liked getting better grades because it made everyone around me happy. I loved to see people smile so much and to know that I made them happy, especially people I looked up to like my parents and my teachers, so I dealt with it for a few years.

I learned how to play pretend with my friends at this age. It wasn't as much fun as my imagination but I liked interacting with other people and this was one of the only ways I could do it. I thought sports were pretty boring until I got older.

7th grade I started consciously realizing that if I wanted to do well in class I would have to ignore my imagination and pay attention to the teacher if I wanted to score well on tests. This was after I stopped taking ADD medicine which had just taken the imagination away from me. When I learned how to control my imagination and subdue it I started doing much better in school and my ability to read other people's emotions improved because I could focus more on subtleties I had not previously taken note of. This helped me to understand more about other people and other to act like one of them. I built a shell through which I could interface with the "normal" people. At the time I thought I had fixed myself, I thought "Now I am normal, now they will like me, now I will understand them." I was excited when I started out at high school because I felt like I had a fresh start where everyone didn't know of my bizarre actions at a younger age. I thought I had a real chance of just being like everyone else, of having lots of friends to do stuff with. More than anything I wanted a group of friends like I always saw in the movies and TV shows. I continued with this mindset until summer 2003 when I was introduced to the band A Fire Inside (AFI). They explained everything to me. But I'll tell that story later.

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