All I knew then was that I was different from other kids and something about me made them uncomfortable or outright hate me.

Adults didn't know what to do with me either except to keep punishing me in the hopes that they could metaphorically beat the aberrant behaviour out of me.

I remember being 12 sitting in my mother's kitchen, trying to explain to her that the other kids hated me, listening to her assure me they didn't 'hate' me, and being frustrated at the words I was using.

That's when the illusion broke. I couldn't make them understand because I didn't have the right kind of words.

I was on my own.

So I flunked out of high school, failed to hold a job for a few years, got training in a trade, tried to get a job in that field, failed, and fell into a lube tech job instead.

And this year, I bought a workbook.

My name is Rewhan, and at 30 years old I am trying to teach myself Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

I'm still trying to learn how to be human.

I know people say we shouldn't let our past define us, but... weh. I feel like I was robbed of my potential because people either didn't care enough to help me, or else didn't know how.

So sometimes I lay awake at night thinking about what could have been - if I'd known the right words to use, if I could have made them understand.

But instead all of these things I've learned about myself I only discovered in the last year or so.

As harsh as it is to hear sometimes, there's something... incredibly freeing about being told "No, there IS something wrong with you; you're not imagining it." The blame shifts from yourself to this illness - this malfunction that interferes with your ability to interact with the world around you.

So now I wake up in the morning and the face in the mirror tells me "It's Not Your Fault."

Some days I believe him.

Most days I don't.

This, like all my other copings skill and human functions, I taught myself through years of trial and error... mostly error.

Even now, I still feel like I'm button-mashing my way through life, furiously trying to commit to memory what works before my ADD categorizes as irrelevant and casts it aside.

Right this very second I'm fighting to maintain this train of thought before it evaporates and my stimulation-starved brain tries to move on to something else more 'engaging'.

The one skill I still haven't even come close to figuring out is How To Make Friends; that's the Asperger's talking though, I'm almost sure. (I can't read people worth a fuck, but I've learned to guess with better than 50/50 odds.)

There's people I've interacted with for years, and to this day I still can't say with any degree of certainty that we were ever 'friends'. That, combined with some experiences in high school, still cause me to mistrust acts of kindness.

Anyway this whole thing was predicated by a co-worker asking me why I didn't ask for help with a difficult job, and coming to the realization that after twenty years, I still don't know HOW to ask for help.

I mean yeah I get the mechanics of it, I know the words to use. But... there was a long period of time there where I felt like I wasn't ALLOWED to ask for help, because my siblings needed me to be 'the capable one'. Plus the people I could ask for help didn't know what to do with me.

Because I was a 'difficult child' (i.e. developmentally challenged) growing up, asking for help came with strings attached - provisos that hinged on me doing something I wasn't, or else not doing something I already was.

And again, because I didn't know what was wrong with me at the time, I didn't know how to get help with fulfilling the conditions asked of me.

I needed help just to ask for help.

So eventually I just stopped trying. Either I succeeded on the first try, or not at all.

But yeah that's all a bit much to explain to a high-school-aged co-worker who looks more like he wants to know why I'm holding him up to go home.

It helps to be able to look at what’s wrong from the outside, as a distinct thing separate from the rest of you rather than a pervasive “being in it”. Still have to work through it but it’s easier when you have that perspective on it.