Living with Asperger's Syndrome

Hello:

This is the first time making my ‘past’ a public commentary of any kind, though I can simply think - “maybe, just maybe someone is feeling the same thing” and, like me, is or was totally clueless about the overwhelming senstivities of being HFA.

I am a child of 2 mentally ill parents: I was “silent” until I was approximately 10 years old.
Even though I was so intensely observant - not a minute detail ever ‘got by me’ in terms of people’s behaviors, comment’s, interactions and even subtle non-verbal gestures - to everyone else I was a ‘cute, retarded, mute kid’, even though I didn’t understand why.

Because of my early years and the difficult circumstances, it was my belief that everyone must be like me, except that they “talked’ and it never resonated with me that they couldn’t “hear” what I was thinking.
It seemed I could “feel” what people were thinking, feeling and even planning long before they might actually act on their thoughts. . . . . . . . I could remember anything and everything: places, people, comments, colors, environments and even the most subtle expressions people made: their faces, bodily expressions, movements, and pre-occupied with every tort, wince, wink, or turn of any physical part of themselves: it all ‘told me’ what they were saying. I could immerse myself into things for many days at a time, without getting distracted. I could handle doing multiple ‘tasks’ of very diverse subjects at any time: detailed model building, art competition drawings, sculpture, protrait drawings [of animals only], music practice, reading of anything related to science/medical subjects - any of which I’d picked up on my own.
I could go without talking for many months [and still can!]

So, I lived in an internal world that I imagined as being my “real world” - a place that was intricately diverse and colorful, both in images of myriad shapes & forms, as well as in multi-dimensional “places” that were very much like different physical places to actually “be”.

Internally it was . . . . . .. “beautiful”.

The problem was, that I didn’t know that my “isolation” was called something . . . . . I only knew I was alone almost always, and that ‘connecting’ outside of me was a problem . . . .. . the intensity of responding in virtually any situation [socially] caused such a severe internal breakdown, the all of my senses were fully & completely overwhelmed, it would leave me in a state of trauma & confusion for days at a time, and it was constant . . . . and, in fact, painful emotionally and even physically without me being ‘aware’.

By curiosity, reading helped me solve my confusion, my “trauma” . . . . . . . . and that was a very long & difficult path, that I work with on a daily basis.

Perhaps someone “knows” that path, that feeling. Perhaps commenting might help someone either in that ‘place’, or from such a ‘place’ in their own life?

Best wishes, R.