When Anger Is Justified – Part 76: I Was The Stigma: College Freshman Year – Section M

***The following post mentions suicide. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room. You can also call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

I was the stigma.

I really could not expect people to come to my aid, and I really did not expect it. I did have hopes though. However, I kept a lot of things bottled up inside of me. I dared not share myself. For the most part, I couldn’t even remember most of what to share. My brain had compartmentalized a lot of my pain and trauma. I was really numb if I felt anything at all.

Most times I did not know if I needed to cry until I cried. I did not know I was angry until I exploded. I did not know that something was wrong with me until someone else pointed out the inevitable. On top of struggling with overcoming stigma, I was coping with stress. A lot of stress.

Oddly, I was not even stressed about school. I was miserable and bored to tears. I was assigned to two classes and was not allowed to take more than that. My mind was no longer as stimulated as it had been in high school. My mind became a cesspool for my somber thoughts instead of the intellectual stuff I liked to keep it filled with instead.

I sought ways to cope that were not always healthy, and I coped in some ways that are often normal ways of coping for someone who has autism. Those coping mechanisms are called stimming. I stimmed all the time in a variety of ways. Sometimes I just sat or reclined in one spot and stared at the wall until I saw nothing … stared until I fell into a state of dissociation and wished my life away.

As an autistic, I masked a lot too. No one even knew I was autistic including me (for a long time until I was diagnosed), but I have a sibling with the autism diagnosis, and I presented very similar behaviors to them including a few of my own behaviors that are very representative of someone with autism. At the time, the word “autism” was not even a word anyone seemed to know.

Specifically, I was later diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. Mainly, I have a very painful time in social situations that presents as severe social anxiety. When it is time to be social, I experience an overwhelmingly great deal of anxiety. The anxiety is often soul-crushing to the point that I can become mute.

In most cases, I actually need to prepare myself to be social days or even weeks in advance. Hours before being social just will not be enough sufficient time for me to prepare. If there are legitimate reasons for me to be social like in cases of work, school, or going to an outing, I am sometimes able to control how much I will socialize.

Plus, work and school were always routines. So I already knew what to expect unless I had to give a speech or presentation. Then, I always practiced beforehand. Yet, even with routines, social anxiety is always a problem for me. As soon as anyone mentions doing something that involves a crowd of people, I can feel anxiety arising within me.

So, imagine me being a college student and attempting to fit into the crowd. I could not fit in. So I would not even try. I was always the odd person out no matter the situation, and I did not even try to be the odd person out. I just never seemed to fit in no matter where I was or who I was with at any time. My friends could not help but think I was weird. I often walked in on conversations with them saying just that and a whole lot more.

A Look Back

The one thing even my narcissistic father told me was never try fitting in if I am meant to stand out. At some point in my childhood, my parents recognized that I was different compared to most of my peers. Most times, outsiders pointed my differences out to my parents. As a result of seeing my differences, they would prepare me with a host of things I could do to feel more comfortable in a crowd like talking to people and focusing on their foreheads when I was unable to directly look them in their eyes.

A major issue most people have with me is that I avoid eye contact when I am talking to them. I always look a person in the eyes when I am listening to them, but I never look a person in the eyes when I am talking to them. My movements when talking are also very animated, but I never directly look a person in their eyes.

I always turn my body away when talking to people, and I look straight ahead. Most times, I am processing my thoughts. I am a visual talker. I see what I am saying as I say it. This is how my brain tends to process. If I cannot see “it”, then I usually have nothing to say. I know this probably only makes sense to someone who has experienced this.

Anyway, my lack of eye contact was first brought to my father’s attention by a relative who wanted me to speak at a camp program. For whatever reason, she thought I had eloquent speech for a seven year old and wanted me to be a part of a summer program ceremony she had put together.

However, my relative’s greatest pet peeve was that I would never look at anyone when I spoke. She said that this evoked a lack of confidence on my part even though she thought I spoke with confidence and boldness. My father agreed to allow our relative to take me under her wing for a week to practice the speech. I only agreed to go because I was very fond of the cousin, and it was the first time an adult had noticed a good quality about me and taken an interest in developing it.

Unfortunately, it was the most disastrous week for both of us because I simply could not do what my relative wanted me to do. I could not look her or anyone in the eyes as I spoke to them. She was a nurse and felt something was deeply wrong with me, but my father did not agree with her assessment of me and just said I needed practice. He blamed it on my being shy, but I was not shy. There is a difference between social anxiety and shyness. Get me talking about something I love and a person will beg me to be quiet.

Needless to say, my dad just settled with telling me to look above people’s heads to give the impression I’m talking to them since it was always difficult for me to look anyone in the eyes. I tried that, but it only works when giving presentations to audiences because I can move my head all around. Nonetheless, the excessive practicing exhausted me and my relative, and she ended up leaving me out of her program. I cannot say I was unhappy about it at all. I actually had great relief. Trying to be who others wanted me to be was exhausting.

On The Spectrum

Other ways I present with Asperger’s are by my obsessions with specific topics of interests. Whatever becomes an interest of mine will become my main focus. I research, research, and research.

I take in all the information that I can take in about a topic until I have exhausted the topic at every angle. I do not let go of a topic or interest until there is nothing else to extract from it. For anyone that listens to me, their frustration grows because they perceive me as running a topic in the ground or beating a dead horse.

If I am unsuccessful with an interest – like roller skating because of so many accidents – then I will take a break. I always go back to an interest even when it appears to others that I have lost interest. I use skating as an example because that was my last most recent interest.

I had always wanted to skate from the time I was a young child but never mastered it because I was too busy trying to survive life trauma and struggles. Roller skating fun was never part of the equation because I was never allowed to go anywhere, and there was no where to skate in my neighborhood.

I desperately want to be good at roller skating, but I have had massive amounts of accidents that have slowed me down. So, I put my interest in the physical act of roller skating on a go-back-to-it-late shelf, but I still watch videos of roller skaters to keep my passion. I will have to transition back into it slowly since hurting my shoulder blade.

Another aspect of autism I present with is also picking up a word or phrase and repeating that word or phrase over and over again. In fact, that word or phrase becomes the thing I say for a long time until I never say it again. I did not take note of this oddity until colleagues, friends, and family pointed this out. They found themselves saying my word or phrases too and wondering what happened that made me stop.

I have also been told I have a knack for style or an eye for putting clothing together even if my wardrobe choice is something no one else would ever consider wearing. I am not sure if this is a presentation of Asperger’s, but my style has often been one that flying monkeys of narcissists I have known would emulate. In fact, two flying monkeys made themselves over to look like me and drastically changed their style to copy my style.

Interestingly, colleagues and friends have called me a trendsetter because I wear things that most people would not dare to wear and I still come off appearing classy or at least hip (when I feel like I look like a bum). In particular with trends, when I first wore black fingernail polish, it was to match up my chosen style of dress at the time. It was also during a time that I was going through extreme anger and expressed my mourning by wearing all black.

At first, I was ridiculed for obvious “religious” reasons, but the following year on the job, wearing black fingernail polish soon took off as a trend, and this was long before the nail color became a popular trend. I soon saw female colleagues show off their black fingernails, and these were the same colleagues who had ridiculed me about the style before.

Asperger’s Syndrome

The host of other ways I present with Asperger’s includes, but is not limited to,

• not taking cues in conversations or not knowing when it might be my turn to talk,
• oversharing when I do talk,
• being constantly interrupted when I begin talking as if listeners think I have nothing valuable to say,
• repetitive behaviors,
• self-soothing behaviors that might not necessarily be considered as soothing to others,
• difficulty regulating my emotions – particularly when stressed which comes off as my need to vent but I can’t stop until I’m finished,
• shutting down and isolating,
• sensory hypersensitivity to light, sound, textures, etc.,
• missing A LOT of social cues only to scan what I missed after the fact and reflect, reflect, reflect,
• rigidity when it comes to routines,
• making mouth sounds,
• contorting my facial expressions,
• clearing my throat excessively,
• self-isolating for hours and days at a time when overstimulated – sometimes to the point that one of my neighbors will check on me when she hasn’t seen me,
• difficulty following directions with a need to have them repeated several times,
• clumsiness often to the extreme,
• streamlined, tunnel thinking,
• there are times when I will not empathize with a person’s situation, and it’s usually when I’m discerning something is off with a person’s story or they present with fake tears and cries,
• dancing moves when I eat especially when it’s something delicious,
• dancing moves like I have ants in my pants,
• lack of eye contact,
• sometimes a lack of expression at all that makes me hard to read (which people usually tell me all the time),
• lack of smiling (because I’m constantly told that I should smile more),
• walking on my tiptoes, and …

There are others, but the biggest issue that everyone points out to me is my lack of maintaining my presence in social situations. It is pretty much the “now you see me, now you don’t” vibe. I show up places and quickly disappear. I am the first one to leave most social gatherings and the last one to show up. I avoid social gatherings like the plague. Social gatherings are the bane to my existence because I become severely anxious having to indulge with a crowd.

The moment I walk into a crowd, I can feel and even sometimes see the mixture of different energies mingling together and it immediately feels like a stirring weight coming my way. I instantly feel a rush of physical symptoms – mainly nausea and an oncoming headache. So I will leave the scene quickly.

Most people who know me do not even realize how overly anxious I become, but those who were closest to me did know, and this really bothered some of them – particularly narcissists. So this was difficult for me on campus my freshmen year … constantly being around crowds all the time. My desire to constantly have down time was a problem for a lot of campus-mates and this desire for downtime opened me up for their ridicule and bullying behavior.

My Parents Thoughts On My Asperger’s

Frankly, my parents never addressed my Asperger’s despite the fact that I have a sibling who is autistic as well and presents with similar traits but also different because they also have ADHD (Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder) where as I was also diagnosed with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder).

Unlike me, that sibling has no trouble talking to others in groups. They are much more outgoing compared to me even though they have no trouble with alone time. I see them as more of an ambivert, whereas, I am an introvert. In fact, that sibling is always the life of every party. They bring joy and conversation wherever they go. However, my sibling also faces similar rejections that I have experienced, and they are often the life of the party because people use them, and of course, that has caused them a lot of untold hurt and pain.

Nevertheless, my parents only attended to that sibling because their ASD and ADHD presented in a way that caused them challenges in how they could accommodate that sibling. Yet, instead of addressing those neurological issues as health related, they just summed it up to my sibling being an overzealous and problem-causing child. Yet, I presented on the spectrum quite differently than that sibling because of my reserved and quiet demeanor. I did not say much at all. Verbalizing myself was a huge issue. I even spent some time mute as a result of trauma.

I was the stigma even though my other sibling displayed their autistic symptoms more prominently and dominantly. I was the stigma because of a host of other things as well. I was the stigma, because on some level, I was also relegated to being the black sheep of the family. I was the stigma because I bore a lot of my family’s shame because of the trauma that happened to me.

I am the stigma, but despite this, I never openly share any of my neurological or mental issues with anyone. A lot of people who have been close to me do not even know I have Asperger’s … that I am autistic, that I battle bouts of depression and severe social anxiety or anxiety in general. They already have formed a certain view of what autism looks like to them even though most of their views are wrong.

Only a few people people who know me have figured out that I am on the spectrum by saying things like, “I think you’re on the spectrum because so-and-so does the same things and they are autistic.” Otherwise, I mainly hear that I am some form of “strange”, “weird” or “different”. Usually, the oddest thing about me to an outsider is the fact that I do not socialize. I will always attribute this to me being an introvert of extremes until another introvert gives me a look like something is not adding up. “Has the cat got your tongue?” to which I always reply, “Yes, but do you know which cat?” to which I get a lot of eyerolls and stares as if to wonder whether I am serious because my face does not emote humor. I can be so very dry.

But yes … as far as being on campus those early months of my freshman year (and practically the entire school year), I was the stigma. I was that girl who had foiled the plans to ending her life. It is interesting that most campus-mates stood around waiting to see if I would attempt suicide again.