Sunday, 28 February 2010

• Is it Aspergers or Simply Just Bad Habits?

  I am a 36-year-old female and I am on the cusp of being tested psychometrically for Aspergers Syndrome. My Therapist is fairly certain that this is what we are dealing with. There are many years of behavior to sort through. I do not know who I am most of the time and the parts I can remember of my past, does not feel like my own. My self-esteem has been systematically eroded. I always thought I was stupid, lazy, demotivated, unreliable, flaky, highly-strung, narcissistic and angry, when that is not necessarily true.

   But old habits are hard to break. One needs a system, a direction, some answers or some skills sometimes to break the habits of the past. The “origin of habit”, if you will. But what happens when you truly believe that old habits have been changed due to healthier behavior as a result?

  Am I just dealing with bad habits, or Aspergers? I cannot have done this much hard work over the years to come this far, to be told that nothing has changed. It isn’t logical and the thought is terrifying. Am I doomed to a life of inaction and confusion just because I am too much of an ignorant moron to change it?

  I have always secretly loved my mind; it is the years of ostracism/mental illness/drugs that has taken its toll. Despite my desperate need for a solitary and quiet existence, there are people that I love deeply, and they love me deeply back. And despite my misanthropy, I do concede that there are some wonderful people out there. Just because I have not met them in my travels as such, does not mean they do not exist.

  I cannot explain how I feel. I have never been able to. I know my emotions are bubbling away with the heady anticipation of them coming into the light and providing the listener with some clarity, but I am consistently disappointed, even if the listener claims to understand what I mean. They remain submerged, on the periphery of my understanding, a sunken ship. The energy it takes to explain myself in this manner in an hour therapy session, or providing an explanation when someone asks me how I am feeling, makes me want to have a panic attack, such is the level of frustration and fear at being misunderstood and trying to find the right words. The bottomless feeling of not having a clue of what I am actually made of or the understanding that I should be feeling more when the idea never crossed my mind until someone brings it up

  . I am frightened that if I cannot convey what is happening inside, then people cannot help me and I remain stuck like a prisoner in my own mind. I become angry with myself for my deficits and enraged at the person who put me in that position. Is this inability a learnt thing? Was I as repressed as a child as I have always believed? What is the truth?

  There are some things that feel right to me – my mothers’ inability to process/deliver her own emotion and the occasional distribution of violence and my fathers’ characteristic emphasis on honour, integrity and good manners. I was groomed constantly with the emphasis on science (being my obsession) and my bedroom walls covered, not with pictures of teen idols, but periodic tables, diagrams and super novas and my favorite Tonka truck sitting cleanly in the corner. But I also remember my musical saturation with my father being a musician and my mother introducing me to the likes of Public Enemy, NWA and Bob Dylan at the age of 13. I was allowed to dance around the house and sing Michael Jackson at top note and put on plays for my family or so my father told me. There is the convoluted mix of history and action versus the question of AS. What would the outcome be if it were a mixture of both?

  The alternative?……. is to do nothing.

  But my mind does not rest. I am not restful, content, or happy. I am my own science experiment with my life filled with controls and participants.I am intelligent enough and old enough to know that I am “different”, outside, missing. It is when I watch other people that I want to understand what it is that they feel and why they look so much more “relaxed” than I do. That their interactions are the graceful, but somewhat frightening, dance of human emotion, when I struggle to push out any cohesive sentence about feelings to my satisfaction. I have been lying to myself and to others my whole life. Not because I am a good liar, but because of survival. In saying this, I was pushed by forces beyond my understanding 2 years ago to face myself in an extremely confrontational and agonizing way.

  I spent a period of intense hibernation with self, to morph into a hesitant participant in Spring, to loving myself a bit, and I will continue to do so with little emphasis on diagnosis. However, in order to love myself, I must feel self-worth and for me the worth comes from using this amazing, complicated brain in an exhilarating, productive and rewarding way. I want to achieve something. I want to feel better about myself because I can FINISH, COMPLETE and FOCUS and forgive myself when I can’t. I want to be able to live with fear, but not let it hold me back.

  There is much I cannot say. There is much I want to say but don’t know how and I have little faith that I have even scratched the surface of what I am feeling. I can only get so far cognitively, a learnt skill, before powers much stronger than cognition create a black hole, an invisible field, and a velvety blackness in my mind that I cannot penetrate. It is intensely frustrating when I can explain the principles of photosynthesis with the zeal of a preacher, only to find my mind completely seizes at explaining my humanity.

   

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