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This past year, I’ve been trying to read some books on Asperger’s, but wasn’t really able to do a good job of it.
I just can’t seem to handle it. I’d like to hope, ‘yet’.
I read articles and impersonal descriptions online just fine. And I have Tony Attwood’s book too, and perhaps I should have tried to read that one first…
But the full “Guide to Aperger’s” is big and serious, and I thought I’d ease myself into it by reading much thinner personal accounts… like “Pretending to be Normal” Liane Holliday Willey or even “Aspergirls” by Rudy Simone… and that’s where I thought wrong. I don’t know if I’m just too bitter right now, or am constantly in an unstable place.

Reading about mildly confusing but generally supported childhoods gets me angsty and snuffling after every paragraph, even when I later read that usually the difference is only that what I went through in elementary/middle school, others still went through, but perhaps somewhere closer to college age. But then the chapter when she begun talking about friends had me in tears 2 seconds in and I almost flung the book against a wall as hard as could… which was rather unfortunate because I also for some reason thought that reading it in small portions during lunch at work would be a good idea.
Whatever it is, I can hardly read these personal accounts without getting frustrated or tearing up, and there’s nothing good about these tears. They are no tears of relief, sympathy, or empathy. They are bitter, and resentful (even if not towards the words and those who wrote them), and exhausted. And I really don’t like myself like this. I don’t want to be this person tearing up 20 times a day from some kind of self-pity or what is this even. I think Simone wrote in the Introduction how it made her exited to read these accounts by other women, because they finally allowed her to recognize herself in others, or identify with someone, and I get that. And I wish I could feel like that too. I wish I would just read these to learn more about others and myself, to maybe even get some hints that could help working through it, to understand things a little better. The problem is, is while I can identify with most of related issues, and am perfectly aware of the fact that each person is different and even if share some one ‘thing,’ there is no way for any other experiences to have any overlap, I still… just can’t handle it, apparently. And it is not really about perceiving my experiences ‘worse’ than the way someone else had it. Though, to be honest, I don’t even know what is this about, really.
And there are plenty of people who are not diagnosed until well into adulthood, and say things like ‘I wasn’t diagnosed until my child was,’ but I’m still in that bitter corner where I just want to narrow my eyes and say “yeaaah, the point is you still managed to get married(likely) and have those children though, didn’t you?” And the marriage and children is not the point, it’s the fact of being on the ‘inside’ of the human society, and having enough social abilities, where you’re even able to do things like that.