An excerpt

"My years in college would have presented the same kind of havoc and distress had I gone straight to a vocation. The fact that I chose to further my education was not the problem. The things I could have avoided are generic and can be applied to any other AS person making their way through life. I know in my heart and in my head, that if I had owned more AS knowledge, if I had been able to objectively understand that terms like rigid thinking, bilateral coordination problems, sensory integration dysfunction, and auditory discrimination, were very real words that defined who I was, I would have made small changes to my course. I would have gone to a smaller and perhaps more empathetic school. I would have realized I had a different set of needs and wants that set me apart from many of my classmates, but that never meant I was undeserving or incapable. And most important, I would have asked for the support I really needed.

I had convinced myself that my high IQ and high academic achievement record meant that I was strong enough to handle whatever came my way. In realty, they only worked to help me fake my way to a false sense of security, a security that vanished and left me cold with fear the moment it was overwhelmed by the reality of my AS challenges.

I was hit hard when I had realized smarts were not enough to make it in this world. I was turned upside down when I had to admit I could not find anyone who saw things like I did. I was crippled when I found out it took more than I had to give to make new friends. Looking back, it is really no wonder I was never able to build any friendships in college. I was not very good at figuring people out. And so it seems, no one was very good at figuring me out either. Without friendships, my version of friendships that is, I had very little support. Without peers to show me how to fit in and how to make the most of what I had, I could not stay connected. I foundered."

-- "Pretending to be Normal" by Liane Holliday Willey

I forgot today was no complaining day until now. Oops.

My petition was rejected and I am probably not graduating.

With all the of the wall bridal websites there are, I can't believe there isn't a site dedicated to aspie brides.

Experiment

So, I am going to try a personal experiment. I am going to go a whole day, maybe Monday, without verbalizing a single complaint. Once I can manage that, I will try to go two days, and so on. I pick Monday simply because I have a crazy busy weekend ahead of me, and have just pulled an all nighter, and though I will have no shortage of complaints I will have no one to complain to anyway and it will be no challenge to keep it to myself. That defeats the purpose of the exercise.

I have a bit of a problem with complaining. Not usually in professional or academic situations so much as in personal conversations. Part of it is that I have no idea how to keep a conversation going. I could talk about things that make me happy-- but those are much less complex, there is no issue to be analyzed or solved, so unless the other person jumps in-- which almost never happens, I cannot maintain a conversation. Problems can be analyzed, discussed, and solved. I am a problem oriented person, not because of a general negative outlook on life-- if anything I am dangerously optimistic, but because I can and enjoy working with problems so that I can fix them. I am constantly working with problems. On the outside it seems I am overly focused on the negative aspects of my life, but that is only because I am spending most of my time FIXING them. If I had friends to go out for a drink with to feel better about failing a course maybe I wouldn't care about fixing my problems, but fending off failure is about all I have going for me at the moment! There's nothing to talk about in happy things. They make me happy. I wouldn't want to change that. End of story. Things that are annoying or troublesome are a puzzle to be solved. Happy things are just there. How do I stretch that into an entire conversation?

I have been slowly discovering over the past few years that these are not puzzles anyone wants to share with me, they find them draining. My second problem is that I have little else to talk about. My life is very complicated and very hard. It is a mixture of brief very complicated very hard periods separated by long periods of general isolation and boredom. What is there to talk about?

My only strategy at the moment to fix these problems is to try and get the other person to talk about themselves, but they wont. Even close friends I've known for years that I know aren't just trying to get rid of me. I'll ask them how their day was, an invitation to tell any story they want from the day, and they say, "fine." I ask if anything interesting happened, and get "no" or a one sentence story. Then what? Talking to NTs is like pulling teeth! I don't get it! I DESPERATELY want to talk about something other than myself, I am endlessly curious about the people around me and will listen to literally ANYTHING anyone could spew at me, but I can't get them to do it!

So, a negative consequence of my attempt to quit any and all complaining (except in the form of scathing anonymous emails to businesses and the ruling bodies of my university, who deserve it) is that I may very well have nothing else to say to anyone. But I suppose I'd rather lose touch with the few friends I have than continue to be thought of as a pathological pessimist who is work to talk to instead of fun.

Boo.

So I just turned in my academic standards board petition. Hopefully within five days I'll have an answer, and hopefully it will be a good answer.

I am exhausted.

It's amazing, as "disabled" as I may be, how often I encounter people with far worse social skills than mine.

My grandma said she'd help me make the blanket, but my grandpa is in the hospital right now with pneumonia, so I don't know what's going to happen. I am scared. :( I want so much for Grandpa to be at my wedding, I need at least five more years out of that man.

So I have decided to make myself a weighted blanket. Unfortunately, I do not know how. This is troubling.