Well here goes. This is a personal rant. I have never been expressly diagnosed with autism as i have never had a psychologist/psychiatrist long enough to be formally diagnosed due to finical issues or to life i.e. moving out of country.However it has been strongly suggested by therapists that I likely have autism spectrum disorder or Asperger’s syndrome. Including my stepmother who was an adult social worker with a masters in psychology (i even found her copy of DSMIV that had the page on AS bookmarked and heavily annotated with references to my activity where the rest of the book was fairly void of markings.). Early on in school (long before i ever saw a psychologist) i was put into learning disability programs at school partly due to an early speech impediment.
Any way school has always been a very strange mix of extremely difficult and painfully easy and the constant social interaction would leave me drained at the end of each day and in the morning with never enough time to my self especially in high school and middle school (granted during most of that time it was only my father and i). But it was a difficult for me to study because the last thing i wanted to do was think about school and all the social crap i had to put with there. This has had the detriment of me becoming weak in math because this was the only subject that I had any trouble with in school that i could prevent by actively studding (languages have also been my weak point but my mind dosn’t work well with spoken languages period) so that resulted in me just scraping by in each math class, where every other class i would be getting high marks to the point that i was purposefully putting wrong answers to keep my marks below honer roll level (i have been on the honer roll once at each school i have attend just to prove i can get there with little effort). I kept my marks back to avoid the expectation and the added pressure from my father and teachers.
any way back to the point of being autistic in school my problem is the huge over baring social aspect to it no mater where you go there are people and unless you live near to the school you cant go home between classes so you stay and try to find a quiet spot that has only few people. This is especially true in college every “quiet space” is filled with 80 some odd people making noise, moving around and in general making things more uncomfortable for those of us who truly need the quiet and isolation just to cope on long weeks this results in me missing days of school just because I need to recover my social energy. in my school i have encountered problems with trying to get some help. I was never good at talking t people and those i do try to just talk seem to automatically be suspicious of me this being the most true of the special needs counselor in my college i went to her initially just to try to talk and get some help with coping skills and information . she seemed to automatically think i wanted school accommodations at the time i didn’t even know they offered it and she kept pushing for me to get some kind of document from psychologists that i haven’t even spoken to in years and of course they wanted to talk to me to even get a hand written note and i didn’t have the money for a session ($250 at the time) and i was panicking and just wanted help i ended up nearly failing that semester with no help from the student services i felt helpless and depressed and stuck in a place where everyone seemed to think if you want help from the school you have a hidden agenda. so i just toughed it out i guess and got into a different program at school. so here i am the last semester of program courses of my new program (i still have 1 or 2 semesters of other classes left before i can graduate )turning 25 with not even a college diploma to my name 6 years out of high school. however i have heard amazing news yesterday that i can get in to a university and have a bachelors of engineering technology with only 1 additional year of school (the university is a fair distance away however) because of a deal setup between my school and that university as this would be my only real opportunity to get a bachelors degree because i have no desire to do another 5 years of school i need to get on with my life.
to anyone that managed to read this whole thing: I thank you for listening to my rant or whatever this can be called and putting up with my horrific punctuation and sentence structure this is just a raw outflow from my mind and the only way I could articulate my thoughts. I did try to clean it up and make it easier to read i just needed to clear my mind and this is the only effective way for me to do it when everything gets stuck in a mental buffer of sorts. and it makes me feel better.
