My life has this golden thread.
One part of the day I have no issue being my best self, but the other half I am a stubborn recluse.
You will see me obeying rules and conventions, but challenging just as many.
My love for the big noises in movies is as present as my tendency for jumpiness in select situations.
I can let my room succumb to messiness, but enjoy tidying up ever so much.
You will see me talk one’s ear off, but there are times I don’t like to utter one word.
Travelling I love just as much as spending an entire day by myself inside my room.
My passion is hugging, yet sometimes touch can be just unbearable.
You will see me find the most creative solution to a task, but an hour later I will ask for petty specifics.
One of my faces is well presentable, the other one not many get to see.
As to why, I couldn’t find an answer to. Until recently.
What is the Shape of a Person?
A person has an outline. Like in a colouring book, where lines define the shape and you just need to fill it with colour.
You decide for yourself, what shape and what size you would like to fill in your own life, to aspire to and to appear as.
Most likely, us humans’ shapes will all be roughly human shaped. And that is just how we live in the places we find ourselves in.
But it is always the outer boundaries of our shapes, where things get interesting and where we have work to reshape.
When not in active self embetterment, we visit these boundaries unintentionally: Outside the designated comfort zone, in a crisis, when travelling in general, when we change our surroundings or when we are confronted with stirring experiences.
We then decide on keeping, expanding or reshaping, with the newly found knowledge about ourselves.
And all that is okay and a crucial process in life.
Though when you find more foggy question marks than tangible impressions on one of those visits, it leaves you confused, frustrated and puzzled.
In my life I encountered many of those question marks, whenever I came near my outline. But this outline always has been carefully drawn and was up to any standard I hold dearly.
Questions as to Why
Naturally, when you confront a question, an answer is due. Only I couldn’t find answers to those arising questions:
Why exactly can’t I attend parties like everyone else does?
Why do I get so extremely uneasy when I can’t escape listening to the local radio station, but can rave at a festival?
Why do I love rules so much, but am also known as one thinking outside the box?
Why do I have classical music and glitch hop in the same playlist?
Why do I freeze when offered a drink suddenly?
Why can I express my love all day, but later have no more energy for a smile?
Those questions may seem silly out of specific context, but they can hurt really bad when you don’t have the answer to them.
For me it meant that on the majority of days, aka the good days, I didn’t have to worry about those questions.
But when I did reach those foggy areas, I had trouble making out who or what I myself was, as my outline was very much in question then. Those were the rare, but ever so intense bad days.
Early on I decided that I didn’t want to give the bad days too much room in my life. As best as I could I optimized my life to increase the good days.
But that didn’t really solve those questions I kept facing time and time again.
The explanatory Thing
Once I found out about a thing that could explain my ambivalent peculiarities and funny distribution of weaknesses and strengths: The autism spectrum.
It made perfect sense and held answers to almost all of the question marks in my life, but would require two major things:
First, the open acceptance of my hidden emotions and second, the reframing of the past, present and future.
Also it would be a hard to swallow pill for those who didn’t know my other face and pose even more questions than it could answer. Furthermore, I didn’t want to latch on to an explanation of things I just started figuring out ways to avoid in my life.
And so that thing became a backup explanation for the bad moments and only worked as a soothing agent for myself, whenever I needed it.
Turning Point
Life wasn’t bad by any means, as the blog is my witness, but this greyish area and all the question marks with the heavy explanation theory were always there and couldn’t manifest outside of the back of my own head.
Many years of improving my own human shape, but never solving many of those weirdly connected question marks went by and I decided to set out to find out: Is the long cradled answer valid or not? What parts of my life will change, with either outcome?
And so I set out. After long waiting periods (somehow the demand of psychological aid has increased the past years) I got
The Answer
Aspergers.
A form of autism, a developmental anomaly involving a passion for routines and rules, well developed verbal language skills, difficulty to intuitively understand social situations, an eye for details, and also an extremely heightened sensitivity towards sounds, smells, vibrations and inconsistency.
The symptoms in every human with autism vary, as they grew up in different houses, found different ways to deal with them using the own set of skills and share challenges differently.
Some are well aware that they are on the spectrum since their childhood, some find out later in life.
My journey led me to the answer just a few months back.
There are many things I can see clearly now, many situations I have reevaluated, substantially improved and found reasons to many of my paradoxes.
The Journey
Of quite some journeys I have told you on this blog and there are more in the queue. One of them, now, is the one I didn’t know I was on my whole life.
The journey of awareness of understanding myself and how I work and how I manage to make people happy.
And this journey I would like to share as well.
