My Colourful Language- Please Don’t Ask me to Change Who I Am

My first spoken word was fuck, I shit you not, my parents pretended it was truck but they knew and I’m sure everyone else did too what I was really saying. I LOVE swearing. If I want to refer to the ingredients in Tip Top bread as a clusterfuck of non-food crap then I will. I often make up words or join swear words together. I won’t share too many here as they are all pretty embarrassing and ridiculous. It was one of my hobbies in high school. It is how I express myself, when I am free to write as I want to write or talk the way I have always spoken, I feel full of joy, the words flow and funnily enough I get MUCH more interaction on those posts then when I’m trying to be something I’m not and make sure that everyone is happy and no one is offended.

This lead to me feeling utterly miserable, wanting to stop running my page and stop writing. Not a great outcome for me really. Newsflash to Jessie. Haters gonna hate, no matter WHAT you say or do or how you behave someone will feel the need to send you a message telling you how you should write, who you should be, how you should share your info and legit ask you to sugar coat things or do this or be that or whatever other bullshit they want to put on you and oppress you with. It gets very tiresome and boring and honestly I don’t understand it. Humans shit me to tears. More often than not I find people highly irritating and wish they would shut up and get out of my face. Do I say this to them and list everything I dislike about them and ask them to change their personalities for my convenience? Of course not, that is shitty behaviour and not particularly seen as socially acceptable. Yet somehow if it’s on facebook and you’re in the public eye suddenly it is. Well not to me it isn’t. If I don’t like a page or I don’t agree with a particular way of eating or certain ideologies, guess what I do folks. I UNLIKE THE PAGE and move on with all the other pages that I enjoy following. This shit is pretty darn simple guys.

Recently I discovered that I am or I have Asperger’s or however it is appropriate to refer to it. This has helped explain A LOT of my life to me. I have always been an outsider freak, I’m too intense, I am too brutally honest, I intimidate people with my socially awkward behaviour, I am highly irritated by people that don’t seem to get me or what I’m about. I am not very good at saying things without offending.

Some of my other traits are my ability to read things exceptionally fast and memorise things. I am also obsessed with particular non-fiction subjects of interest to me, my personal favourites are gut health, saturated fat and cholesterol and obesity and heart disease and all the lies we have been fed about these areas of nutrition. I love picking things to pieces and writing and sharing about them. When I was a legal secretary I knew all 600 file numbers for my office. Before the iPhone came out I would deconstruct everything people said to me into text format (because you had to press each number multiple times to get a word), for example Jessie would be j, de, pqrs, pqrs, ghi, de.

I have copied and pasted pieces of a very interesting article about traits of women with Asperger’s that resonated with me the most and may help you to understand who I am and why I’m quite different a little better. Obviously we are all very unique people and I don’t feel that I need any help with my Asperger’s. It has just helped me understood who I am, why I am often alone and why I feel the way I feel in a large amount of situations. A link to the original post can be found here.

“We are deep philosophical thinkers and writers; gifted in the sense of our level of thinking. Perhaps poets, professors, authors, or avid readers of nonfictional genre. I don’t believe you can have Aspergers without being highly-intelligent by mainstream standards. Perhaps that is part of the issue at hand, the extreme intelligence leading to an over-active mind and high anxiety. We see things at multiple levels, including our own place in the world and our own thinking processes. We analyze our existence, the meaning of life, the meaning of everything continually. We are serious and matter-of-fact. Nothing is taken for granted, simplified, or easy. Everything is complex…

Confusion, feeling misplaced, isolated, overwhelmed, and simply plopped down on the wrong universe, are all parts of the Aspie experience. Can we learn to adapt? Yes. Is it always hard to fit in at some level? Yes. Can we out grow our character traits? No..

We are escape artists. We know how to escape. It’s the way we survive this place. We escape through our fixations, obsessions, over-interest in a subject, our imaginings, and even made up reality. We escape and make sense of our world through mental processing, in spoken or written form. We escape in the rhythm of words. We escape in our philosophizing.

Numbers brought ease. Counting, categorizing, organizing, rearranging. At parties, if we went, we might have escaped into a closet, the outskirts, outdoors, or at the side of our best friend. We may have escaped through substance abuse, including food, or through hiding in our homes. What did it mean to relax? To rest? To play without structure or goal? Nothing was for fun, everything had to have purpose. When we resurfaced, we became confused. What had we missed? What had we left behind? What would we cling to next?

generalized anxiety and/or a sense we are always unsafe or in pending danger, particularly in crowded public places. We may have been labeled with seemingly polar extremes: depressed/over-joyed, lazy/over-active, inconsiderate/over-sensitive, lacking awareness/attention to detail, low-focus/high-focus. We may have poor muscle tone, be double-jointed, and lack in our motor-skills.

We may have eating disorders, food obsessions, and struggles with diet. We may have irritable bowel, Fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and other immune-challenges. We may have sought out answers to why we seemed to see the world differently than others we knew, only to be told we were attention seekers, paranoid, hypochondriacs, or too focused on diagnoses and labels. Our personhood was challenged on the sole basis that we “knew” we were different but couldn’t prove it to the world and/or our personhood was oppressed as we attempted to be and act like someone we were not. We still question our place in the world, who we are, who we are expected to be, searching for the “rights” and “wrongs;” and then, as we grow and realize there are no true answers, that everything is theory-based and limited, we wonder where to search. (my results from the naturopath showed beginnings of chronic fatigue and obviously I have had severe immune-challenges and obsessions with food)

Through trial and error we lost friends. We over-shared, spilling out intimate details to strangers; we raised our hand too much in class, or didn’t raise our hand at all; we had little impulse control with our speaking, monopolizing conversations and bringing the subject back to ourselves. We aren’t narcissistic and controlling–we know we are not, but we come across that way. We bring the subject back to ourselves because that is how we make sense of our world, that is how we believe we connect. We use our grasp of the world as our foundation, our way of making sense of another. We share our feelings and understandings in order to reach out. We don’t mean to sound ego-centered or over zealous. It’s all we know. We can’t change how we see the world. But we do change what we say. We hold a lot inside. A lot of what we see going on about us, a lot of what our bodies feel, what our minds conjecture. We hold so much inside, as we attempt to communicate correctly. We push back the conversational difficulties we experience, e.g., the concepts of acceptable and accurate eye contact, tone of voice, proximity of body, stance, posture–push it all back, and try to focus on what someone is saying with all the do’s and don’ts hammering in our mind. We come out of a conversation exhausted, questioning if we “acted” the socially acceptable way, wondering if we have offended, contradicted, hurt, or embarrassed others or ourselves. We learn that people aren’t as open or trusting as we are. That others hold back and filter their thoughts. We learn that our brains are different. We learn to survive means we must pretend.

We seek refuge at home or at a safe place. The days we know we don’t have to be anywhere, talk to anyone, answer any calls, or leave the house, are the days we take a deep breath and relax. If one person will be visiting, we perceive the visit as a threat; knowing logically the threat isn’t real, doesn’t relieve a drop of the anxiety. We have feelings of dread about even one event on the calendar. Even something as simple as a self-imposed obligation, such as leaving the house to walk the dog, can cause extreme anxiety. It’s more than going out into society; it’s all the steps that are involved in leaving–all the rules, routines, and norms. Choices can be overwhelming: what to wear, to shower or not, what to eat, what time to be back, how to organize time, how to act outside the house….all these thoughts can pop up.

We are sensitive. We are sensitive when we sleep, maybe needing a certain mattress, pillow, and earplugs, and particularly comfortable clothing. Some need long-sleaves, some short. Temperature needs to be just so. No air blowing from the heater vent, no traffic noise, no noise period.

We seek out information in written or verbally spoken form, sometimes over-thinking something someone said and reliving the ways we ought to have responded. We take criticism to heart, not necessarily longing for perfection, but for the opportunity to be understood and accepted. It seems we have inferiority complexes, but with careful analysis, we don’t feel inferior, but rather unseen, unheard, and misunderstood. Definitely misunderstood. At one point or another, we question if in fact we are genetic hybrids, mutations, aliens, or displaced spirits–as we simply feel like we’ve landed on the wrong planet.

When others question our works, we may become hurt, as our work we perceive as an extension of ourselves. Isn’t everything an extension of ourselves–at least our perception and illusion of reality? Sometimes we stop sharing our work in hopes of avoiding opinions, criticism, and judgment. We dislike words and events that hurt others and hurt animals.

We have a huge compassion for suffering, as we have experienced deep levels of suffering. We are very sensitive to substances, such as foods, caffeine, alcohol, medications, environmental toxins, and perfumes; a little amount of one substance can have extreme effects on our emotional and/or physical state.

We are confused when others make fun of us, ostracize us, decide they don’t want to be our friend, shun us, belittle us, trick us, and especially betray us. We may have trouble identifying feelings unless they are extremes. We might have trouble with the emotion of hate and dislike. We may hold grudges and feel pain from a situation years later, but at the same time find it easier to forgive than hold a grudge. We might feel sorry for someone who has persecuted or hurt us. Personal feelings of anger, outrage, deep love, fear, giddiness, and anticipation seem to be easier to identify than emotions of joy, satisfaction, calmness, and serenity. Sometimes situations, conversations, or events are perceived as black or white, one way or another, and the middle spectrum is overlooked or misunderstood. A small fight might signal the end of a relationship and collapse of one’s world, where a small compliment might boost us into a state of bliss.

Doing the bills, cleaning the house, sorting through school papers, scheduling appointments, keeping track of times on the calendar, and preparing for a party can cause anxiety. Tasks may be avoided. Cleaning may seem insurmountable. Where to begin? How long should I do something? Is this the right way? Are all questions that might come to mind.”

Moral of the story. Please don’t ask me to change who I am, how I speak, or what I share. I am who I am. I understand some people don’t appreciate the swearing or the way I talk or the things I share. That’s fine. No one has to like me or follow my page. There are LOADS and loads of other pages out there sharing awesome information in a more professional manner as it were. Please leave me alone to be who I am, that is all I ask.