#Many autistic people are perfectly content to not build social skills or mask and that’s super cool /gen

[dilutedapplejuice]

Tw: none

I live in my head a lot!

In the early years of my life (before high school) I was pretty oblivious. I spent a lot of time alone with my special interests (reading fantasy books, then later watching anime), escaping into fictional worlds for most of the day. I spent some time with friends at school, but I frequently forgot to make plans outside of school with them- and I liked it that way. I didn’t have lots of extra time or energy for socializing and opted to spend it alone in my head.

Near high school I developed some intense social anxiety and chose to spend more of my time and energy on social things. I went to therapy without knowing about my autism and learned to mask in many ways, one of which being hiding and repressing my special interests.

I lost interest in anime by sophomore year. Still, I am not built for constant social stressors. Rather than becoming outgoing and spending all my time with friends, I had moved to spending all my time on tumblr and YouTube while dealing with near-constant exhaustion and guilt from both social and academic stressors.

Junior year, I decided to give myself a break. I took easier classes and spent less time with friends. I developed a special interest in Kingdom Hearts and happily pursued it (even though it meant slightly ghosting I my friends for a few weeks). I found a much better way to live, even if it wasn’t conventional.

Now I know I’m autistic. I realize how suppressing my special interests harm my self-image and general mental health. I know that I still suffer the repercussions, despite only masking that part of myself for around a year.

But I also learned that it’s not good to live inside my head all the time. High school did help me a lot. I made closer friends who accept me for who I am. I became more informed about social justice and deconstructing the own stigma I’ve internalized. I’ve thought more about what my future will be like. I had to get out of my shell to do those things.

Now these two sides of myself coexist; I live in my head, but I relate to the world around me in my own way. It’s all in moderation Most autistic people DO need help with skill-building; even level ones like me. I got support even before my diagnosis. It wasn’t entirely the right kind of support but it helped me discover myself a bit more.

[prince-of-places]

No One Ever Asked Me If I Wanted to Change (This is a little life story. You don’t have to read it. I just wanted to tell someone and I finally had the motivation to do it. Sorry if I clog up your dash at all, I don’t know how to do the “Keep Reading” thing)

No one ever asked me if I wanted to change. I always knew from a young age that I was different from everyone else around me, I knew that I didn’t fit in. I preferred to read on my own or sit in a corner of the playground by myself while everyone else decided to play sports (mostly football/soccer). Which was fine, since I had no interest in those things. I was quite content just being me, and not being like everyone else. I liked to learn new things about the world around me, and I had little to no value for friendships or human connection (it was there, but it was not a primary concern of mine. I liked being alone). I enjoyed learning more than anything else. My reading age was always further ahead of the rest of my class. I only learned when I turned 6 or 7 that I really enjoyed reading encyclopedias, and showing off to my fellow classmates and adult figures in my life. I enjoyed the praise and adulation I received. I also found a fondness for maths, as shown by the fact that my first two maths copies are full of correct answers (not a single mistake in my copies from my first 2 schools. Maybe a handful but most of my copies are unscathed). I used to do extra work outside of school just because I liked learning that much. I enjoyed writing reports on my favorite animals, as well as designing characters for comics and stories. I had creative outlets I enjoyed using, as well as intellectual pursuits.

My parents suspected something was “wrong” with me for a long time but could never pin their finger on it. I think my teachers suspected something was different about me but most were hesitant to tell me about it. According to my parents, I had unusual bedtimes (still do XP) and one day I stayed up late thinking about the universe and what created it. When I realized there was no definitive answer, I became incredibly anxious. I never really had any kind of faith in a “god” (at least not the Catholic one, which I’ve been surrounded by for my whole life) but when I realized it must have been a god which created the universe, I then became anxious about who created god, which has been ever-present anxiety of mine and never really gone away. The next day in school, I basically had an anxiety attack in class, which prompted my teacher to tell my parents to seek help for me (why they didn’t do so beforehand is beyond me). A temporary solution was to do yoga in school, which didn’t really help since my brain was too logical to accept that it would work. There were also various attempts to shove me into afterschool events, and while I appreciated people trying to help me, I didn’t appreciate not being asked if I wanted “help��. I was a perfectly fine being who I was, and yes, I probably did need help, but I didn’t want my whole personality to change.

This pervading feeling of being changed, sculpted by people who had no business doing so made me really upset looking back, but because I have trouble expressing myself and standing up for myself, I just let it happen. 

I start going to therapy when I was 9 years old, and this was where my personality really began to change. I never understood my other classmates, especially not the male ones (I thought for a long time that I was just a girl and no one told me. It was that or a robot. Either way, I don’t think I was ever big on gender but little me just accepted that it was too hard to bother getting worried about). My therapist told me to focus on building up my relationship with male classmates since I was more likely to have more in common with them (even though I always got on better with the girls) and so I felt like I was being forced to change my interests to adapt myself to be more sociable with my classmates. Again, no one asked me if that’s what I wanted. 

Around this time, I also started attending a local youth center, which was small and segregated by gender (essentially). It made social interaction easier, but it meant I spent a lot of time with people I didn’t really like, and it was mostly boys. My work in the center led to me being accepted on a scholarship to my current school, which is a private all-boys Catholic school. It’s a very small school (less than 200 pupils), which meant it was easier to socialize and also get specialized attention from teachers. Except that most teachers don’t acknowledge that I have certain problems (I don’t even think I could describe half of them). I then began volunteering in the youth center after school, leading group activities for children and helping raise money for the center. It was a good experience for the most part, but I soon came to realize that the stress and time I was dedicating to the center were not worth the benefits (this was when I was around 16 if anyone cares about the chronology). 

Just to back up a little bit, I finished my therapy when I was 13, which meant I had to set my own social goals. My isolation from females meant I decided to make my aim to get a girlfriend (I realized I was at an age where I could do that, and I thought the experience would be helpful for when I was older). I’m fairly certain this meant I got a crush on pretty much any girl who showed any kind of interest in me (yeah, I feel bad about that). I also got a phone around this time, as well as my first crush. I got bullied in school over the crush by everyone in my class, and older students I didn’t even know. My use of the phone also isolated me. Both of these factors made it so I was pretty depressed for most of my first year in school, and pretty much all the years after that. 

My school has a conservative, individualist approach to personal development, which made me feel like I had to sort these issues out by myself and that it was my own fault for not wanting to change enough. I was frustrated and in internal turmoil with myself over how I was feeling, which wasn’t helping the recent discovery I had made that I regretted my therapy and found it wasn’t helping me. 

I got a diagnosis of Autism when I was 9 (Asperger’s Syndrome then). I was told I have a very logical mind, an IQ of 120, and had trouble empathizing with others around me. It came along with lots of other connotations and informed my identity. It was one of the only identities I felt comfortable using. Then, when I was 14/15, I went to my school psychologist and told him about the diagnosis. A year later, he told me that someone “bullshitted me” and that he thought it was more likely that I had a vestibular disorder (a problem with my inner ear, which badly affects my balance and social skills), which meant I had near-constant anxiety over my sense of identity. 

This leads me to a place where I’m at right now. Last year or the year before I found out what a nihilist is. I found that being apathetic made it easier to live, and combined with my tendency to mask my autistic traits means that I don’t really know who I am. It feels like there are multiple “mes” in my head. 

I guess to kinda summarise,I’ve always felt different from everyone around me. People have always felt like I need to be “fixed”,without ever asking how I felt about it.or what I wanted to change. A combination of social circumstances means that I now no longer really have any sense of connection to myself or who I am. I feel like a walking contradiction. I don’t know who I am or who I want to be. I never feel fully satisfied with things,I feel like I’m always looking for more. But I never know what more is. I feel like I always push people away,and I’ve never really had other people want to stick around with me for a long time. So many people have tried to craft me into what they view as the perfect version of me, and they’ve all failed. No one really knows me,I think. So many get close,and then I usually push them away. I don’t know why I’m like this. I finder it harder and harder to learn things. I don’t know who I am,who I was or who I’m going to be. But I do no one ever asked me if I wanted to change.