When I first discovered an asperger support group to attend, I was elated with joy. It’s been a wonderful experience for me to finally get to see what neurotypicals detect that’s different about me. I could do this because of being with other aspies.
I gained a lot by attending and I also contributed what I could. Now it appears I’m back to my same road blocks. Indecision stinks! Do I keep going or has the season arrived for me to quit? I have a month and a half to decide, but I’ve also already had almost three weeks pass since I last attended. It’s an unusual break (normally the group meets every other week) that is matching my transition period.
Every now and then, I sense a major change occurring within my being. That explains how someone (such as myself) evolves towards becoming a radically different person over time. Some people never change, but then there are some who make re-adjustments now and then. Even though one may never stop going through transition periods, it is possible for some aspects of his character to remain constant (e.g., honesty). I’d like to call it ‘growing up’, but that doesn’t quite describe what I mean. Maybe I can’t explain it? I can try though.
It is not hormones that cause this type of indecision. It is the combination of learning new information and realizing certain facts. In the case with my decision about continuing to attend the asperger group, no one is going to realize why I quit (if I do). It would be best if I didn’t try to explain such a decision to them. They would not be able to see my inner struggle with my conscience, nor could they understand it.
Talk about frustration! I describe my being an asperger person in an aspie group as being a misfit among misfits. The reason I’ve written the posts that I have lately is to bring awareness to how complicated human behavior is. I feel like I always want to be telling people, “Don’t try to figure me out. I’m too confusing for you.” Since it took my husband and daughter a couple of decades or more (my son needs more time) to merely begin to understand me, I then wonder why do I even bother to blog. I blog on with the hope that there are some tidbits of information others may find useful. To remain silent would be like throwing a life away. Everyone has something to offer others—even a child to his younger sibling.
Being the non-conformist aspie that I am (i.e., one who remains true to self), I find myself now having to hide vital aspects of my being (if I continue to go to the asperger support group). I have to refrain from truly voicing the way I live life as an asperger person, along with having to hide what I really think in order to avoid confrontations. Why is this? It’s because of my being different spiritually.
With my aspie nature, I have a predisposition towards obsessive/compulsive behavior. Living this long, I now know that this will never go away. All throughout my life, one compulsion after another has found its way to being a challenge for me. That’s the bad news. The good news is I also know that for each of these compulsive behaviors, every one of them eventually is overcome.
Here are a couple of examples of what I could safely talk about without stepping out of bounds:
1. As a teenager and young adult, I struggled with compulsive eating. For those who have never experienced this, you’re most likely not going to know how horrible this is. I was stuck in this vicious cycle for years. During this time, I was also spiritually lost. Around the age of 22, I finally sought help from a psychiatrist (he actually made my problem worse). This compulsion was like a roller coaster—sometimes it was intense and other times I thought it might be gone. I cannot pinpoint exactly how old I was when this compulsion finally came to an end, but I will guess that the turning point was when I was 27 or 28 years old.
This compulsion was the longest lasting one. The only thing that was keeping me from committing suicide over this nightmare was hanging onto one thought. The more I reminded myself of it, the less the compulsive eating had a hold on me. I knew that since I was able to eat in a normal way (eat when hungry; not eat when not hungry) before adolescence, there was no logical reason why I could not do so again. Guilt, followed by self-hatred, definitely compounded this problem.
2. This example is both a compulsion and an addiction that can happen to anyone who engages into this practice that leads to a habit→ cigarette smoking. It wasn’t until I had seen a color poster (on July 4th, 1976) of two lungs side-by-side (comparing a lung from a cigarette smoker with one of a non-smoker) before I began being sincerely concerned over what I was doing to myself. I knew most people complained about putting on weight after quitting smoking, but again I believed (without knowing what it was called) in the self-fulfilling prophecy (the Pygmalion Effect).¹ I knew I’d have to be creative again, especially since two failed attempts at quitting were not helping my confidence. Logical thinking told me that I’d have to attempt quitting whenever an opportunity would arise that would disassociate my reminders of cigarette smoking. In January of 1979, such an opportunity arrived (thanks to enrolling into Florida Atlantic University). During the early morning hour of moving out of New York State (after going through the thruway toll booth to pick up my ticket and before exiting the ongoing ramp to the thruway), I threw away my last pack of cigarettes. The excitement from my new adventure into the unknown kept me mentally occupied enough to forget about cigarettes.
Nothing about being in a new State existed to condition the response of me wanting to smoke a cigarette. I’d describe it as being like taking dirty keys away from a baby who puts them into his mouth and giving him something more interesting to pay attention to.
Here is a recent example of what would be futile to mention in an aspie group:
I was obsessed over upgrading and tweaking my son’s computer to maximize his potential success at playing World of Warcraft. That might sound like a simple project, but unless someone knows me, I have a knack for making a simple thing into a complex nightmare because of striving for perfection. It’s akin to major overhauls—sometimes you have to make a big mess before you can fix things properly.
This obsession was so bad that it led to becoming a physically painful compulsion. Even though my arm and neck were hurting insanely because of being in the same position for hours and days on end, I was determined to finish what I started. The trap of this obsession was believing the goal was near completion, but in reality it was not (thanks to unknown issues hiding in the next step→ like such things as Windows XP updates stubbornly refusing to install and not knowing that the most recent drivers for the new graphics card were programmed too complex for the operating system for starters!).
So, what made this obsession/compulsion cease? I’ll just say it was a non-technically related shock (wake-up call) that was more painful than what my body could do to me. God was trying to tell me that my behavior was not His will (i.e., I was being ignorantly sinful by not realizing how some of the particular ways that I ‘help’ my son affects him).
The amazing part was the contrast between the before and after part of this O/C. My anxiety level, before this compulsion’s end, was stuck at a high level. As soon as I realized that what I was doing was going against God’s will and repented, that anxiety disappeared as if it was never there! I was so tired that, on the day after this, I slept until 6 PM! I cannot describe how peaceful it feels to be severed from an O/C behavior, so I will not try. The last time I slept that late into the day was over a quarter of a century ago! Now when I look back at it, I see how insane sin is. In fact, that’s the definition of insanity→ practicing a lie. Lies are illusions/deceptions. I am beginning to think that obsessive/compulsive behaviors are another form of sin.
Hopefully now you can understand better how my faith creates road blocks in such situations as sharing solutions to problems in an asperger group. I cannot share these kinds of success stories offline, because I’ve never even met another Christian aspie who can relate to such experiences. I know I cannot be the only one. I do know though God has His reasons as to why He is preventing me from meeting others who I think would comprehend me the best.
¹I lost weight when I quit smoking and I wasn’t even on a diet! That’s not usual for me, considering that most things in my life are the reverse of normal.
