This content is over a year old now. Please, read this page keeping its age in your mind and realise that not all the links will work. I'm happy to hear from you if you find anything that is broken or dysfunctional, but I may or may not be able to do anything about it!
New place, new environment, new job, new colleagues, new house, new school, new friends, new opportunities, all provide a chance to discover more about myself. Post discovery of my Aspergers, it freed me to allow myself to be different. No longer do I wonder why I think and react differently, but instead the mission is to curb the over reactions, increase the tolerance and generally better cope with the hard situations. There are certain things I have discovered that are not ‘normal’ (if normal is defined by how other people expect an adult to react and behave) but linked to how my brain is wired as an aspie (person with aspergers). I appear to have an over developed sense of possession – what is mine is mine – hands off. It turns out I am not very good at sharing. I like the familiar, I like having my computer, my phone, my place to sit at the table, my chair in the lounge, my bit of shelf in the bedroom, my blanket or even my jumper! I don’t like sharing food on my plate and I don’t like people reading over my shoulder.
What is odd, is that internally (and sometimes externally), I can react at unexpected things and sometimes I don’t even know why a situation or a request is causing me a ‘struggle’. Most of the time I can resolve the struggle in my head and get on with whatever is happening, occasionally I can’t or don’t and vocalise the struggle – not always bad, but not always good either! The funny things is that I can have a reputation for those vocalisations, yet if people only realised how many times I don’t vocalise the struggle, I think I do really well – but when I vocalise it can be so unusual and out of the norm for people who don’t experience the same struggles that they can be perceived as outbursts; I guess they are -sorry to ALL those who have experienced such an outburst! I’m not very good at sharing jobs either. I like to know what is mine and what isn’t mine. When we got married we identified very early on that cooking was a job better done by one of us at a time, not really good for both of us at the same time. If I have agreed and I am expecting to do a job, to find someone else has done the job – even if they are trying to help me. I experience that struggle as if something has been stolen from me, a sense of injustice related to my constant struggle for self-preservation – also known as selfishness.
More later on other things I’ve picked up over the past 18 months.
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