Experience One: Anxious Fear
Yes, it’s true. I was diagnosed with anxiety and panic disorders, depression, and ADHD at an early age, about six, so I’ve shouldered being weird, over-reactive, and outcast for a while now. I was even tested for Asperger’s Syndrome twice. Now, I realized what they were testing for immediately, so I did everything I could to seem non-Aspie, and I fooled them twice. But, I know I have Asperger’s… It’s classified a disability which would discount me from military service, and people would look down at me for it… So, I did all I could to fool their exams and seem somewhat normal… I wouldn't let something like this deny my dreams and career. No one else knows this about me, I’ve never felt safe telling anyone but my fellow Aspies, like you.
Tell me, friends, have you ever experienced fear? Er, not just being scared, but true, incapacitating fear that clouded your mind to the point that you couldn’t think, or adapt to a situation? Experienced such fear that your body kicks into sheer fight or flight, and the moments can barely be remembered through the red, hazy tunnel vision and crushing sense of metaphysical “pressure”? And not just that, but being kicked into these episodes by the littlest reasons, or for no reason at all? That’s what I’ve experienced growing up with my negatively stacked conditions. Something would occur, maybe anger at the kids who would bully me, or massive confusion with a question on my classwork… And the terror would begin. An hour later I’d be lucid enough to speak calmly, and I’d realize, that what was to me a crushing bout of fear, was to the rest of the world a kid having a temper tantrum.
And even worse than living with that fear was living with the shame, the infamous reputation that’s followed me from kindergarten all the way to my senior year of high school. Just today, someone embarrassed me publicly by recalling a time in fourth grade, when I had a panic attack and virtually destroyed the class’s steel trash bin beyond repair before running out of the school and into the woods behind it, where I curled up and cried behind a fallen tree. To them, it was funny, just Al freaking out as usual, but to me… To me, friends, I was locked in a personal, sudden hell that I couldn’t contain, couldn’t predict, and so I would isolate myself from the world around me… Collecting rocks in a corner during recess and studying the stars above me at night, on my porch away from my family, hoping that it would minimize these hellish instances, and take away the fear.
It's been a number of years since grade school, but even today, recaling this has sent my heart rate up.
Thank you for listening.
