Introversion and Friendship Difficulties

Introversion and Friendship Difficulties

Chapter 10, "Introversion and Friendship Difficulties."

I'm Clark. I'm 29 years old, and I was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome at age seven. My mother could tell something was different about me. But no one could seem to figure out what it was.

Eventually, she was painting the kitchen ceiling at 2 o'clock in the morning one night. And she heard an interview on the radio where a guy was talking about his son who had Asperger's syndrome. The more the guy on the radio talked, the more she thought that it sounded like me.

So next thing you know, she went to the library and checked out every book that was available and encouraged the psychologist who was investigating me to read them all. And the rest is history. My mom really, really pushed for me to get as much help as possible. One of my therapists even called her overbearing.

I ended up graduating high school, despite the fact that the people who evaluated me didn't think that I would make it past middle school. I have a bachelor of science in applied mathematics. School was still hard for me. Academically, I did really well. But I struggled in the social aspects.

Struggles making friends.

I had a lot of mannerisms where people would take advantage of me. For example, if I got overwhelmed and had a meltdown, the kids soon learned that they could put me in meltdown mode to get a few minutes off in the middle of class. Some of them would actually intentionally rile me up just so the teacher would go out of the room for a few minutes to calm me down.

Other kids would pick on me for repeating phrases. It took quite a while for me to actually get rid of that reputation. Honestly, I think college is where I got my real fresh start. I did have some friends, especially when I was really young. There were three girls I got along with in kindergarten. And then in first grade, I started hanging out with my best friend. And he also has Asperger's. His mother was one of the people who helped out my mother with getting the school to actually give us the education and accommodations we needed rather than just sticking us in a special-education class.

In middle school, I made another friend with someone with Asperger's who moved into town. Now that I'm an adult, I've noticed that it's a lot harder to make friends. But I've heard that that's pretty much people in general. Having that difficulty was especially frustrating for me just two or three years ago because I've put so much effort into getting myself to the point where I can have meaningful interactions with people over the last decade.

Then all of a sudden, half of the people I used to hang out with are too busy maintaining a job or having a family. As a result, they didn't have time to interact with me. So I felt a little penalized for becoming socially competent so late.

I recently joined a singles club called Events and Adventures. I have actually been pretty successful there just interacting with people and going to events. But I still haven't made any new solid friendships through that. The positive is that I'm gradually getting more ideas about what I can do with people, where I can go to meet people, et cetera.

Advice for others. I think that having Asperger's and functioning in a world of neurotypicals, you need to be able to have a lot of introspection to see where your struggles lie and where you can improve because the more you look at them and actually figure out what they are, the more you grow to understand them. And the more you grow to understand them, the more knowledge you have in overcoming them.

A lot of us on the spectrum tend to be pretty introverted. I read this article a couple of years ago that was saying that introverted people tend to have really deep thoughts. So use that to your advantage. Think about what's going on with you and what areas you need to improve.

As far as I'm concerned, the real challenge is figuring out which issues to address first. The last several years, I have spent a lot of time self-searching. It took me a while to figure out what path I wanted to take. For a while, I was trying between data entry, statistics, and technical writing-- so a bunch of different things.

But in this day and age, a lot of people seem to be that way. Once I started learning about defense mode and how to get out of it, I actually started finding it easier to focus on the long-term picture, which is probably what has made a lot of this easier. When people are stuck in a less than satisfactory way of life, they lose sight of just how unsatisfactory it is and find it difficult to imagine that they could have something better.

My brother-in-law, who recently married my sister, said to me, treat life as an experiment. Try something. And if it helps, good. If not, try something else.

One caveat I'd give is definitely don't try to do too many things at once. I tried that, and it definitely overwhelmed me. I find it easy to focus on one or two goals at once. There's something called the snowball effect, where when I accomplish one win, I tend to be able to use that momentum to tackle a bigger problem and keep going more and more. But as you do that, you build emotional capacity. And suddenly, you can handle more things without even thinking about it. So definitely take advantage of momentum.