Thursday 4 September 2008

How can I help you when I can't help myself?

This subject isn't something I've been looking forward to posting about and if I'm honest I doubt I'll post about it again. However I want this blog to be as honest as possible; I want my Asperger Syndrome (AS) to be as fully vivisected as it can be.

Having AS is having a frustrating, scary, and at times hard to deal with life. We often get overloaded and just fail at being able to cope. When I find myself in those lowest of times I do self-harm. I cut myself and have in the past (but only as a never-repeated experiment) burned myself. I've done other things that I'll stop short of telling you about, but needless to say my body is a patchwork of history.

As I have aged and matured I've kept to parts of my body that I can hide with clothes, but my younger self has pretty much ensured that I have secrets I want to hide but can't. My hands and my forearms are scarred, but it's weird cos I have just accepted it and cos I don't "see" my scars I think that others can't either. What unsettles me the most is when someone makes it obvious they can see them. Thankfully this has been very rare, but when it does happen it makes me think that everyone can see them, they are just too polite to say anything. The irony. Here I am, character assassin extraordinaire relying on the kindness of strangers. Probably the most memorable aspect of my diagnosis was the fact that I didn't think anything of my scars (as normal)…but I instantly noticed when my psychologist looked at them. She was being obvious about it and all my walls and barriers and lies came tumbling down. It was a visual slap in the face, a jerk into the reality of the obvious self-abuse that I deny…quickly followed with questions that began "I see you cut yourself" and other grasps at my dignity.

If I could go back in time I'd tell myself to only injure parts that you can hide.

No comments: