“If you own this story you
get to write the ending” – Brene Brown
I’m struggling to own my
story, I’m not sure what it is.
Now I’m looking back over my
life from the perspective of believing myself to be autistic, I’m left
wondering if anything I believed to be true was right. I deluded myself over a
lot of things and it’s hard to find the truth in a situation after so many
years have passed. And when I can see things for what they really were, well
sometimes I just feel sorry for myself, sometimes I thoroughly dislike myself,
sometimes I feel angry. It’s a lot of new perspectives and new feelings to take
on board at the same time and it’s all a bit much.
I keep finding myself revisiting
my past; like remembering the quite frankly awful way I broke up with a boy as
a teenager. He genuinely seemed to think I was special and wanted to spend time
with me, I couldn’t for the life in me fathom out why and was terrified that
once he actually knew me he’d find out how boring and unspecial I actually was.
The truth of that particular situation is fairly easy to see. Back then I was
this timid, heavily bullied girl living in my fantasy world, I had no
self-esteem whatsoever and well, the real world was too much for me in large
doses. But I was also excruciatingly lonely and so I said yes to becoming his
girlfriend, foolishly thinking I could grow to like him…
It got ugly as I tried to
wrangle my way out of that one.
But why 25 years later do I
find myself racked with guilt over that? I think I really hurt him. If anyone
treated my son the way I treated him I’d be spitting feathers. I always use to
pride myself on being a nice person, but the way I behaved to him wasn’t nice
at all. I guess I feel guilty now because I buried it back then, that’s why I’m
here 25 years later reliving it.
I suppose I’m looking back
over my life without the blinkers, without the softening effects of the fantasy
world sheltering me and it’s hard.
I know this is all part of
some process and I won’t always feel like this, it’s actually healthy in the
long run, better to wake up and deal. But right now it’s throwing me.
I thought I knew how to behave
socially and I thought I could read people and situations, but now I’m left
wondering if I actually do? Because I do always end up on the outside, I can
own up to that now, it’s true… and when I first meet people I’m all at sea in
terms of how much of myself to reveal, how much to hold back. Until recently I
never realised how one sided my conversations were, how I talked too much about
myself and didn’t know how to ask people about themselves without feeling like
I was interrogating or interviewing them… what else have I been getting wrong
all this time without even realising it?
Hence feeling like I don’t
know anything anymore. This has really left me doubting myself, not sure I know
right from wrong (in the world of social interaction) anymore, and doubting
myself even more.
In my darker moments I always
felt like there was just something not quite right about me, but by and large I
thought I’d learned how to fit in pretty well and I thought I was fitting in.
I don’t know that I was.
