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.