Day 6: Favorite Superhero and Why

Ummmm. I don't really have a favorite superhero, but I guess if I had to choose one it would be the Green Lantern.

I never really watched the tv show when I was a kid, but I honestly think its cool that there's a superhero named Green Lantern. 

Day 5: Favorite Place and Why.

Well, to be honest, I don't have a favorite place. Because what's my favorite depends on how I feel at the moment. I have a list of places I want to go, and I guess that could be considered favorite places.

I want to go to London. I want to go to Taiwan. I want to go to Paris.

The point is, how can I have a favorite place when there are so many other places I've never been to?

Day 4, Unwanted Habits.

I'm just going to say straight up, that this post will probably end up being very personal. The problem with being Aspie is that sometimes we have habits that make other people uncomfortable. . . but I don't think it's fair that others can talk about their terrible nail biting habit, or the bad habit of never cleaning their rooms and we can't.

My bad habit: self-destruction. Ever since I was young, being  hurt always appealed to me. I don't know why, I can't explain it. But it happened. Blood was fascinating; having an owie bad enough to actually require a bandaid was awesome, and broken bones and stitches were even better.

I guess I'm just a glutton for punishment, sometimes pain feels enjoyable to me. Even as a little girl, I'd put myself in situations where I could potentially get hurt, just because I wanted to feel it. I guess it's because often I feel almost like I don't really exist. I feel like I'm this shell, not really alive and pain kills that disassociation.

Eventually my appetite for pain led to other, more destructive methods. Especially in high school, I found myself cutting or burning myself because that's what made the most pain. But the more I did so, the less of an impact it made. The scars on my body are reminders of what I do to myself. And I hate it, but at the same time, I have to do it.

It's a terrible habit. One that I wish I hadn't started and I'm glad I don't now. But at the same time I don't. That would require taking back time, and I don't know if I would be the same person. So I'll live with it. Because I prefer the person I am to the person I used to be.

Day 3: A letter to someone who hurt you.

Um. . . . Hey. How's life? I'm doing well, I guess. Life is life I guess. You know, college is a pain, so is getting out of bed in the morning. . .  It is life and it's treating me well. I hope it’s good for you too.

Wait. No I don't. I hope you're miserable. Really truly honestly, I do. . . Okay, not really. I'm just mad. Not mad mad, hurt mad. The kind of mad where you cry because you're mad because you feel sad. Does that even make sense? No. No it doesn't. I'll tell you why, because I'm CRAZY!! I get it. I mean really, who would want to care about someone who is so clearly broken inside?

I always wanted you to see the Me that is so put together, the one that can smile and laugh and have a fun time and not worry about everything. But I can't. I've got too much crap to carry around. Who wants that? I don't want it, and I'm stuck with myself, so why would you? 

You're such a goof; you're always having fun, laughing and messing around. And I'm the dark cloud to rain on your parade. And I don't mean to either! It just happens. There were so many days that I forced myself to smile and laugh because I knew that's what you wanted, what you needed; when inside I was drowning. 

Yeah, I get it. It's hard to be with someone like me, someone who is never sure how to act or say or feel. That's why I never wanted to tell you about Aspergers... Because I was afraid you'd never understand and think I was weird. Okay, yes I am weird and I say strange things. But the emotions I feel inside are just as valid and just as real regardless of whether I know what they mean or not.

The point is, when I was with you, I was happy. Inside, I was happy, I felt like I belonged in this world for once, instead of always feeling the outsider. I broke so many of my own personal rules for you: I managed to eat gummy bears without organizing them by color, I had a water fight with you and they're not my favorite things in the world, We took my dogs on a walk together - something I never let anyone do, I tried to be less sarcastic than I've ever been in my life, and most of all, I actually began to think that I was human.

Yes, I'm the girl who does everything backwards. That's who I am. I'm not someone who can pretend they're something they're not. I am who I am, despite all of my flaws. I take chances because they're the only way I can know for sure what will happen, and even then it’s only a 50% chance I do. I do everything backwards because that's the way things make sense in my brain.

It was supposed to be so different. With you, I wasn't scared of everything anymore. With you, I could sleep without the fear of waking up from nightmares I could only half-remember and the memories of an only half-forgotten face that still scares me. I wasn't afraid of walking down the street at dusk without the paralyzing fear that someone's going to jump out at me. I wasn’t afraid of hiding the scars that so many others don’t understand. . . I wasn’t afraid of being vulnerable.

.....

But what happened? I can't even explain it to myself. One day, you're a part of the world I understand, and the next, you're gone. Gone. With only the tiny glimmer of a chance you might come back. Gone with vague promises and two sided words. Saying it wasn't me, but you. Honestly? I know how it happened, I just don't know WHY.

And the saddest part? I miss you. Probably more than you could ever imagine. A song will come on the radio and it'll remind me of the nights we spend sitting on my driveway just talking till 3 in the morning. I'll be on Facebook, and a picture will pop up from when we were inseparable and my heart will twist into painful little knots I can't untie easily.

I promised I’d never cry in front of you, and to give myself credit, I only did once. But how many times did I fall asleep, telling myself not to cry because crying gets you nowhere. I can’t tell you how many times I went over to my best friend’s house on Sunday morning, just to talk over a mug of hot chocolate because once again, you were ignoring me.

The truth is, the pure unadulterated truth is, that I loved you. And I don’t know if you truly loved me, or if you just wanted to be with someone, but I still loved you. I’m a cynic, I always will be, but you showed me that maybe there is love in the world. For a few short moments, I actually believed in love again. But how would you know? There were so many things I wanted to tell you, but just couldn’t. I could only tell you of the wounds that had already healed into scars. And even with that, it ripped a great deal more wide open.

Could you pass me the lemon juice and salt please? I think it’ll feel much better if I just rub those in the gaping wound. Or better yet, hairspray, that would work wonders. Oh and while you’re at it, let’s just rip off a bunch of scabs too. It’ll be a jolly good time.

But above all, I miss you, and I don’t know how to deal with it. When I get a text, I hope it’s you, even though I already know in my heart it’s not. You were the one person I talked openly about everything with, and now I have no one to sit on my driveway at 2 am with. Sometimes it’s all I can do to get out of bed in the morning. I’m not saying that because I’m pathetic, I’m saying that because the emotions I feel are amplified many times over. You feel sad, I feel depressed. If you’re irritated, I’m furious. And if you’re hurt, I’m devastated. I know that sounds pathetic but it’s the truth. I can’t help it.

When you text me casually, like nothing ever happened between us, I die inside. I’m stuck between the options of crying or telling you to never talk to me again. After a while, you might be able to forget, but I can’t. I don’t have that option. Now I’m haunted by memories of you too. Just as I start to think my life is becoming normal again, you open that knife wound and dig a little deeper.

I said I’d always be your friend. Yes, I can do that even though I don’t think it’ll work.

So let’s just be friends. Sure.

~E

Day 2

Any nicknames I might have and the reasons behind them.....

Lou

I guess this nickname came out of necessity, my given name is quite long and difficult for children to say. It was just easier to shorten a part of it. Also my best friends happen to have similar nicknames. We eventually became the 3 weirdo's: Lou, Lou, and Boo.

Emily

This quite honestly is my favorite nickname....A friend mentioned one day, that I will die and when people go through my room, they will find tons of poetry that was never published and I'll become the 21st century version of Emily Dickinson, an Emily 2.0 if you will.

The crazy octopus lady

I'm not sure how I got this one, I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the fact that I love octopi and think they're ridiculously cute...

Yoda

My friends constantly have to endure me quoting extensively the Star Wars Movies. I love them, I grew up on them, and should I ever have children, I will make them watch the movies as well. I often quote Yoda the most, ergo the nickname...

Ducky

I'll admit, this one is a little embarrassing. My dad started calling me Ducky after he realized I say "Yup yup yup" just like Ducky from Land Before Time. . . . Okay, in my defense, I was little and just liked the way it sounded....

Getting to know each other. ....

I'm still writing under the assumption that this blog will go unnoticed by most people in the blogging world, but should someone come across it, I figure we might want to get to know each other a little bit. As much as I dislike cliches and everything to do with them, I've decided to do one of those "30 day topic challenges" just as a way to introduce myself to the world. Yay me.
 Day one:  A recent picture of you and 15 interesting facts about yourself:

So much for the easy part. . . Sharing any part of myself is difficult in so many ways. I'm such a private person, and this blog is just the opposite of private.

 I always mismatch my socks. I have no idea why, but there's just something icky about wearing matching socks.

I'm a walking contradiction, everything I do or say is contradicted in the next minute by the next thing I say.... usually anyway.

Everyone has a vice, but I have many. My biggest one at the moment: Yarn. I crochet like a little old lady crocheting for her life. It's addictive and I pretty much only make baby hats, which is ridiculous because I don't have a baby, my youngest sibling is 13, all of my cousins are over the age of 4 or they're boys, and quite frankly, I don't make boy hats, and I know absolutely no one who has a baby girl.

Standing up in public is nervewracking, were I a smoker, I'd probably need an entire pack after doing anything in front of a crowd. This however is pretty much the whole reason I read at a poetry open mic every other thursday...... The power of peer pressure is strong to say the least....

Bandaids fix everything. Got a headache? Put a bandaid on it. If that doesn't work, take two advil and call me in the morning.

My headphones are practically glued to my ears, they're my way of blocking out the world without being overly rude.... and I like music too.

Octopuses are the cutest animals on the planet. No it's not octopi, its octopuses, don't ask me why, but it is.

I hate country music, but every wednesday, my friend and I go to a country swing dance in town. I go, not because I like the music, but rather because she's my friend....

I'm well past the age where Dora the Explorer shoes are cool, but it's hard to find shoes that look mature when you still wear children's shoes.

I love the rain, hate getting my socks wet, and my feet always have to be warm, but there's nothing like a good thunderstorm for some afternoon thinking.

Dark streets at night scare me. It freaks me out, I swear some creepy dude is going to jump out of the bushes and attack me or something.

I have a giant stuffed bunny that's pink and the size of a small child. It's name is Bunny and it goes with me everywhere. No I did not get it when I was little, I bought it just a couple weeks ago.

I have a pair of shoes that could kill someone if you hit them in the head... thats why they're sitting on a shelf right above my pillow right?

I only eat green M&M's if I have the choice

Lastly, I believe that scars are the body's way of marking where it has struggled and what it has overcome.

The Beginning

As I sit here listening to the rain against my bedroom window and my current Pandora.com station of the week, I realize that this adventure in blogging could end up turning into a typical pathetic whine about how "life is so unfair" and that "people just don't understand". This is not my intention. In fact, I never even considered starting a blog until it was pointed out to me that there are a lot of people in the world who do not know or understand, and that I have the opportunity to share. I want to show the world that people can be so different in so many ways, but we're all people with the same emotions and the same fears and anxieties. And I want to give people hope too. Hope that someday we won't be compared to others and that we'll all have our own value to others, not just ourselves.

I'm an adult with Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism where individuals like myself have little or no social intelligence. Basically, we're "people stupid". We can go our entire lives without ever fully understanding why or how social interactions happen the way they do. But here's the catch, most people with Asperger's are of the male persuasion. For a long time Asperger's and autism in general were considered male disorders simply because it was easier to tell whether boys had it. . . I know that sounds terribly. . . dare I say, "sexist", but it's the truth.  Let me explain.

I have a younger brother who also has Aspergers, he was diagnosed when he was about 9 years old if my memory serves me correctly. That would make me about 11 at that time. When he was born, we (meaning our family) knew he was different. By the time he was in preschool, my mother knew he had autism, but no one believed her. The earliest memory I have of my little brother is him screaming his lungs out about everything. He was so particular about everything, he had a specific pair of pants he wore everyday and only one pair of pajamas he could stand without screaming. And if there was a food he didn't like to eat, my mother would cook it for weeks on end until he would eat it. But he was easy to diagnose by the time he was in fourth grade. Boys with Asperger's syndrome deal with their social inability by reacting outwards. If they're angry, they can get violent, or at least my brother did. They're easy to diagnose. Girls, not so much.

I'm a female, first and foremost, you know, XX chromosomes, barbie dolls, frilly dresses, and all the angst and torment that comes along with growing up and looking like an actual woman. For the entirity of my childhood, I looked like any other. At least on the outside. But I can always remember being and more importantly feeling different than the other kids my age. For one thing, I was intellectually more advanced than they were. This is not to say that I'm smarter than everyone on the planet, but I was merely at a stage where I understood things some children didn't quite yet. I ended up being the really smart weird kid that no one wanted to be friends with, but everyone wanted to cheat off of.

When I was younger, I just pretended like I knew what all the social hullabalou was about. Just the classic, nod and smile technique. It worked everytime. No one could ever tell, they just thought I was weird. And by all means, I was weird. Tell me a proven fact and I could tell it back to you word for word a month or two later. I remember almost everything I read and I can quote entire conversations to the T. When I say it here, it looks impressive, but it's not exactly the kinds of abilities kids look for in a friend.

I was diagnosed With Aspergers when I was about 16 years old, has it really been that long? At that point in my life, all I knew was that I was different, and that no matter what I tried, nothing worked. In it's own right, high school is tough, but add in the fact that I was a social screw up and knew it. It was a recipe for disaster. And it was.

The rain is still pouring outside my window and the music coming from my computer fills my room with a feeling that's hard for me to describe. I guess it could be described as contentedness, but I'm not sure. Really I guess it should be described as hope. Hope that this will show the world that those with Aspergers, or Aspies, feel and function just like everyone else. We may be socially backward and often act like Dr. Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory, but we love and hate and cry just like every other person on this planet. I know I run the risk that the blog will never be read amongst all the others on the internet, but I write in the hope that maybe someone will read this and finally understand at least a little bit who we really are inside.

~E.