Im not sure where to begin, so I will just start. I will try not to ramble.
Things will get pretty dark. My life has not been a kind one and much of what I can report is necessarily stark. I don't mean to bum anybody out or start things out by sucking all the air out of the room, but to gloss over the ugly context of my state would be a pointless exercise.
If you are young or especially sensitive, perhaps you shouldn't read this.
Hi, my name is Rory. I am 38 and have struggled with many psych diagnoses, Asperger's included. Over the years I have made strides in dealing with the symptoms but I find with the confluence of many social and material stressors that I am regressing. I have begun hitting myself (usually in the head) when I cant handle frustration and withdrawing socially to a very unhealthy degree.
These were things that I thought I had gotten past, as my discontrol symptoms were more pronounced in childhood and began to decline as I grew, though never totally going away.
Right, so context.
I was born into an addictive household, my mother was into heroin and my dad was an alcoholic that beat us both pretty severely. My first memory is being thrown by my father down some stairs. I had some step siblings in my life for a few years but they went away.
My mother passed when I was seven and things got worse for me at home and the only things I had were books and my NES.
Though my life was awful I could escape my circumstances in another world on the page or the screen. I could forget myself and my life for a time and live in a state other than fear or pain. The other kids were, well other kids. Which is to say horrid, beady eyed goblins that sensed my otherness and relentlessly ostracized and mocked me. I had to fight often or simply be a victim. I refused to then as I do now, but I would warn anyone wanting to emulate this that though you may get the better of someone temporarily, man is a social animal and the pitchforks and torches are never far off.
I was social passed through most of school, though I tested well I refused to do much in the way of classwork or participation, finding it boring and repetitive and much too easy. I hated school, feeling trapped in a remedial daycare against my will, forced to do pointless tasks to satisfy an arbitrary criterion of fact regurgitation ironically referred to as education. I was in both GT and Emotionally Impaired programs and fit into neither those or the general population.
By middle school I was experimenting with drugs and developing an alcohol habit that haunts me to this day (4 months sober and clinging desperately to my sanity).
By my sophomore year I had had enough. I dropped out, got my GED and got to work. It was here that I learned about the Treadmill, a variation of The Red Queen Hypothesis in chaos theory that posits that you must run as fast as you can just to stay still.
So run I did, doing 2 full time minimum wage jobs (sometimes taking on some part time work to make ends) just to keep a ramshackle roof over my head in ramen in my gut. And booze of course. As one could almost certainly guess, this was unsustainable.
I lost it, in a big way. My home, my car and what little personal possessions I had for a start, and my dignity and self-respect for another.
I spent my days begging for and drinking booze on the street, deep in privation and despair, and couldn't even get on well with my fellow derelicts. My life became a blur and I would wake up from a blackout several states away from where I started. With brief moments of lucidity this has gone on for the past twenty some-odd years. Though my drinking is much more in control, (and frankly the amount of poison I have to ingest to even get drunk any longer is entirely too painful to contemplate) and I have managed to secure a small amount of stability for myself in the form of a van, in which I live, my outlook is far from rosy.
The mental health care available to me is a JOKE, basically just writing prescriptions and asking about my state on a monthly basis. I have changed counselors three times in as many months (not sure why, some sort of administrative mismanagement I guess), and frankly their qualifications are often a bit dubious. I am not generalizing about the entire profession, but those available to those on medicaid are an EXTREMELY mixed bag of harried, overworked professionals and people simply stealing a paycheck, to people who couldn't counsel a dead squirrel to anyone's satisfaction .
Just a month ago, ostensibly because of covid, they failed to fill my antidepressants for two weeks, and I went through awful withdrawals. Now that they are available again, I hesitate to go back on them, just to be put through that again. I wish I could say this was this was an isolated incident, but I have had several episodes in my life in which I would gain some semblance of stability only to have the rug pulled out from under me.
So now we come to present day, and I am trying to cope without alcohol, friends, family or a visible means of support in a van surviving on $194/mo. food stamps. I can no longer work as I have extensive stress fracturing in 2 lumbar and 1 sacral vertebrae that never healed properly. I am left to the tender mercies of a bureaucracy that couldn't find its posterior with a map and a flashlight and manifests itself in my life with indifference, incompetence and neglect.
I feel myself growing increasingly dead inside and know that I am likely going to die penniless and unmourned. But other than that, things are great.
So, for those of you who gutted through this, congratulations, I guess. Sorry to unload but I needed somewhere I could express myself truly as opposed to maintain a cover identity for the comfort of those who would simply ignore me otherwise. Though my report is necessarily grim, I look forward to meeting you guys and learning better ways of coping with being atypical.
I hope all is well with you in your worlds and that you can receive this as it was intended, a frank discussion of my circumstances as I feel as if I cant possibly discuss my Spectrum issues without first discussing the many others that comprise the Gordian knot of my existence. Im hoping to find better qualified strategies for dealing with the problems we have in common in the hopes it may help alleviate those we do not.
Things will get pretty dark. My life has not been a kind one and much of what I can report is necessarily stark. I don't mean to bum anybody out or start things out by sucking all the air out of the room, but to gloss over the ugly context of my state would be a pointless exercise.
If you are young or especially sensitive, perhaps you shouldn't read this.
Hi, my name is Rory. I am 38 and have struggled with many psych diagnoses, Asperger's included. Over the years I have made strides in dealing with the symptoms but I find with the confluence of many social and material stressors that I am regressing. I have begun hitting myself (usually in the head) when I cant handle frustration and withdrawing socially to a very unhealthy degree.
These were things that I thought I had gotten past, as my discontrol symptoms were more pronounced in childhood and began to decline as I grew, though never totally going away.
Right, so context.
I was born into an addictive household, my mother was into heroin and my dad was an alcoholic that beat us both pretty severely. My first memory is being thrown by my father down some stairs. I had some step siblings in my life for a few years but they went away.
My mother passed when I was seven and things got worse for me at home and the only things I had were books and my NES.
Though my life was awful I could escape my circumstances in another world on the page or the screen. I could forget myself and my life for a time and live in a state other than fear or pain. The other kids were, well other kids. Which is to say horrid, beady eyed goblins that sensed my otherness and relentlessly ostracized and mocked me. I had to fight often or simply be a victim. I refused to then as I do now, but I would warn anyone wanting to emulate this that though you may get the better of someone temporarily, man is a social animal and the pitchforks and torches are never far off.
I was social passed through most of school, though I tested well I refused to do much in the way of classwork or participation, finding it boring and repetitive and much too easy. I hated school, feeling trapped in a remedial daycare against my will, forced to do pointless tasks to satisfy an arbitrary criterion of fact regurgitation ironically referred to as education. I was in both GT and Emotionally Impaired programs and fit into neither those or the general population.
By middle school I was experimenting with drugs and developing an alcohol habit that haunts me to this day (4 months sober and clinging desperately to my sanity).
By my sophomore year I had had enough. I dropped out, got my GED and got to work. It was here that I learned about the Treadmill, a variation of The Red Queen Hypothesis in chaos theory that posits that you must run as fast as you can just to stay still.
So run I did, doing 2 full time minimum wage jobs (sometimes taking on some part time work to make ends) just to keep a ramshackle roof over my head in ramen in my gut. And booze of course. As one could almost certainly guess, this was unsustainable.
I lost it, in a big way. My home, my car and what little personal possessions I had for a start, and my dignity and self-respect for another.
I spent my days begging for and drinking booze on the street, deep in privation and despair, and couldn't even get on well with my fellow derelicts. My life became a blur and I would wake up from a blackout several states away from where I started. With brief moments of lucidity this has gone on for the past twenty some-odd years. Though my drinking is much more in control, (and frankly the amount of poison I have to ingest to even get drunk any longer is entirely too painful to contemplate) and I have managed to secure a small amount of stability for myself in the form of a van, in which I live, my outlook is far from rosy.
The mental health care available to me is a JOKE, basically just writing prescriptions and asking about my state on a monthly basis. I have changed counselors three times in as many months (not sure why, some sort of administrative mismanagement I guess), and frankly their qualifications are often a bit dubious. I am not generalizing about the entire profession, but those available to those on medicaid are an EXTREMELY mixed bag of harried, overworked professionals and people simply stealing a paycheck, to people who couldn't counsel a dead squirrel to anyone's satisfaction .
Just a month ago, ostensibly because of covid, they failed to fill my antidepressants for two weeks, and I went through awful withdrawals. Now that they are available again, I hesitate to go back on them, just to be put through that again. I wish I could say this was this was an isolated incident, but I have had several episodes in my life in which I would gain some semblance of stability only to have the rug pulled out from under me.
So now we come to present day, and I am trying to cope without alcohol, friends, family or a visible means of support in a van surviving on $194/mo. food stamps. I can no longer work as I have extensive stress fracturing in 2 lumbar and 1 sacral vertebrae that never healed properly. I am left to the tender mercies of a bureaucracy that couldn't find its posterior with a map and a flashlight and manifests itself in my life with indifference, incompetence and neglect.
I feel myself growing increasingly dead inside and know that I am likely going to die penniless and unmourned. But other than that, things are great.
So, for those of you who gutted through this, congratulations, I guess. Sorry to unload but I needed somewhere I could express myself truly as opposed to maintain a cover identity for the comfort of those who would simply ignore me otherwise. Though my report is necessarily grim, I look forward to meeting you guys and learning better ways of coping with being atypical.
I hope all is well with you in your worlds and that you can receive this as it was intended, a frank discussion of my circumstances as I feel as if I cant possibly discuss my Spectrum issues without first discussing the many others that comprise the Gordian knot of my existence. Im hoping to find better qualified strategies for dealing with the problems we have in common in the hopes it may help alleviate those we do not.
and im deeply sadend to read about youre struggles 
