#most patient complaints are about shitty communication anyway

[sally-mun]

I’ve wondered if I have Asperger’s for years, pretty much ever since I learned what it was. Even when I was little I knew there was some weird, intangible thing that divided me from my peers, and I could never figure out what that thing was. Even though on one hand I generally have a strong ability to see things from other points of view, at the same time I just simply do not understand SO many social things and I end up extremely confused and ultimately back away and keep to myself instead.

For the most part I sort of considered myself Asperger’s-like, but always ultimately telling myself I probably don’t because I didn’t seem to share enough of the characteristics, and now that it’s not even technically considered a separate diagnosis I figured I was even less likely to ever end up with that label. Yes, I’m very sensitive to certain stimulation, and yes, I tend to get REALLY zealously into the things I like, and yes, I do tend to get more excited over new objects than I do over new people, buuuut at the same time I also didn’t get hyper-fixated on numbers, and I rarely have difficulty understanding abstract ideas, and I’m reasonably good at detecting and using different mannerisms and tones of voice to communicate. I just figured maybe I’ve got a lot of things in common? But not enough to actually have the condition? Maybe? It’s always been kind of a weird question mark in the back of my head.

The reason I’m going into all this is that I keep getting blindsided at work lately with things that I’m apparently messing up without any idea that I AM messing up, and both my infractions and my instructions for rectifying them both seem incredibly vague to me. All I can seem to hear is, “You’re doing poorly at this. Do better from here on out.” And it’s not just task-oriented stuff, it also has to do with how I’m handling co-workers. I had absolutely no idea of any of this, and furthermore I felt like so many of the complaints weren’t fair because I thought I was doing things I was INSTRUCTED to do, but, apparently I didn’t understand it correctly?? And it turns out that I’ve offended lots of people at work and had utterly no idea of this because no one ever tells me or wants to talk it out and instead are just telling my bosses until I get written up??

Anyway, the point is that I’m floundering badly at work right now, and I feel so lost trying to get my footing and I feel like the harder I try to fix this the more I’m blowing it, to the point that I’m pretty sure I’m very close to getting demoted or fired. This has not only made me start thinking of the Asperger’s thing again, but it’s making me think about it much harder than I had before because my problems don’t seem so small in this situation, and I’ve been wondering if I should maybe see someone to see if maybe I WOULD have that diagnosis. But I kept circling back on the fact that I only seemed to have like a 50/50 frequency of behavioral similarities, so I told myself to at least research it a bit before actually looking up doctors. For the most part I was really disheartened and back to feeling like this isn’t the case and there just IS something wrong with me that I can never seem to figure out, but right as I was about to give up I saw a suggested link for diagnosing Asperger’s in adult women specifically, so I gave that go too. I read this page and this page and, honestly, I feel like I was reading about my entire life. I actually started crying while I was reading it because it started to make me feel, at least a little, like maybe there’s not something ‘wrong’ with me so much as something unrecognized. It made sense, since I know most medicine is based on male patients and women go undiagnosed for all sorts of things because symptoms emerge differently for them, and it would appear this is one of those situations. In that vein, I feel a huge, huge amount of relief.

But I also feel really, really scared, and I’m still just as wary about looking for a diagnosis because I’m afraid of people accusing me of looking for excuses. I’m not saying I want a diagnosis because I want people to just have to accept my shitty behavior; if it’s shitty, it’s shitty, and needs to be taken care of. I want it because I just want my fucking life to make sense. If I really am this way, it would answer so, so, SO many questions I’ve had my entire life. It would explain soooo many things I could just never quite seem to control in myself or figure out in my peer groups. It would bring so much clarity to this weird mist that’s been around me my whole life, and then I could also tap into resources that might make all that shit better. Maybe not totally fix it, but at least improve it.

But I’m also scared that, even if I get past worrying that people think I’m fishing for excuses, maybe I’ll go see a doctor and it still turn out that I’m wrong and this really isn’t a thing in me. Not only would I be right back where I started but I’d be even more lost and confused because the one suspicion I’d had all these years that might have explained it turned out to be a dud, and then I’d have no clue whatsoever other than “Something’s just really wrong with me.”

I don’t know what to do. I really do need to have this figured out, one way or the other, if just for the sake of my employability. I’m just... really worried and stressed and scared this is going to make the things already blowing up in my face get even worse.