Welcome to the desert of the real

This is a piece I wrote 18 months ago when I was first diagnosed as having Asperger’s. I thought I’d repost it here and mull it over, then perhaps I might write a follow up on what it’s been like since.

“Tempting to put ‘dessert’ and go off on a banoffee tangent, but this is not the time or place… I feel like I am standing at the top of a really large water slide. I’ve just had my suspicions confirmed (that I have AS), and I want to completely plunge myself into this new world of understanding, but I am afraid that it will be too much, that I will be completely disorientated and that no-one will help me when I reach the bottom. I am confused by the range of responses of those around me, from, “Oh right. Have you been watching the football?” through, “As if! Don’t be silly…” to “I can’t bear to think that you’ve been unhappy all this time”. Perhaps now I can learn to not be so hard on myself. I’ve been judging myself by someone else’s rules and that’s not right. I swing between feeling like a fraud who’s tricked a diagnosis out of some poor unsuspecting assessor (presumably because I’m soooo bright) and reading stuff that could have been written about me and thinking, “But doesn’t everyone think like that/find that difficult??” The up-river swim stops here.”

© Catastraspie, 2012.

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