A Mid-Forties Butch Aspie
Makes Her Way
by MindWithoutWalls
(blog originally kept at WrongPlanet.net)
The Road from Here to There - Part 7
Assessment in Progress -
A Pause in the Road
Composed on November 17, 2011
I've taken up consoling myself by eating way too much chocolate, hiding out (even though I'm alone in the house for much of the day) in a tent I've made over the couch with a blanket and a couple of chairs, and entertaining my girlfriend by leaving faces made of bottle caps and whatnot on the lid of her laptop, which she then discovers when she arrives home from work.
Yesterday, I made her a golden airplane out of the foil wrapper from my chocolate bar. It doesn't fly very well. She found it late last night, after returning home from a weekly evening class. There was really no reason to save it, so I wasn't surprised to discover it in the trash when I got up this morning. What else was she going to do with it? What matters is the chuckle she got out of it when she first saw it.
A lot of my day is now taken up with watching episodes from the early seasons of "Big Bang Theory" while eating said chocolate. I didn't watch them when they were new, so this is my first time around with them. I think I like the show better now, in my current situation, than I ever could've allowed myself to before. I don't know how I'll feel after my last appointment. My girlfriend doesn't want to watch at all, though. She doesn't like the laugh track, and she hates comedy that's based on anyone's embarrassment. I do see her point, and I admit some episodes are tough for me to watch. I limit my viewing to daytime hours, so as not to disturb her or chase her away to the upstairs. I like having her downstairs with me, even if we're doing separate things. It's different if we want to do things that are on separate floors (or if one of us wants to be inside and the other outdoors). But I don't want to make her too uncomfortable to hang around, especially since it's her house!
I still work out and walk the dog and stuff, and my weight is steady, at least for now. But I feel glum.
I find myself rethinking a lot of things. Who am I to say what's going on? If the psychologist says I don't have Asperger's, then maybe I don't. Pretty simple. Not too radical to think a professional might actually know what he's doing and a lay person might not. I do tend to get overexcited about things. But I can't hope to use a diagnosis to excuse bad behavior. If I don't have Asperger's, then I'd better just get my act together. The fact that I've handled so much in life is really evidence that I have no excuse for not handling things. That alone seems like it would count against the diagnosis.
As has been pointed out to me many times, everybody's life is hard. Everyone finds certain things challenging to deal with. I've witnessed this in the lives of my own friends. But, as I've seen for myself, people do what they have to anyway. I'm not special. Why should I get special consideration that no one else does? Why would I even want to be thought of as "special"? It's really just an insult. Maybe I just need to grow up. The fact that some of my life is difficult is no reason for me to be difficult. In truth, most of my life is very good. Why whine and complain about it?
In the end, I suppose the right thing to do, when the assessment is over, is to keep my commitment to blog about it all the way through to the end with a final post about how it turned out, change my status to "Neurotypical", and leave Wrong Planet for good. It'll be just one more place where I don't belong.
I don't want people who have a legitimate reason to believe they're on the autism spectrum to feel disheartened by my posts. Their outcome should be better than mine, so I hope they'll be brave and pursue truth, with all the dignity it carries. They should still get assessed, if it's possible for them to arrange it. It's better to know.
Back to waiting...
The MindWithoutWalls Asperger's Syndrome Assessment Blog:
A Mid-Forties Butch Aspie Makes Her Way
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