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Hi Everyone. I'm a 30 year old guy from Europe.
I hope you may find motivation and inspiration from my struggles.
To sum in up, I have Asperger, have gone through several bouts of depression, suffer from Ankylosing Spondylitis, a degenerative disease similar to rheumatoid arthritis, and lost my mother to breast cancer on April 15th this year.
First of all, I think the anonymity of the internet is great because it allows me to speak openly about these matters. So let me share with you a little bit about each one of these areas and how they have been, in many ways, a blessing in disguise. A blessing that may end up giving you strength as you deal with your own difficulties.
Asperger
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Asperger is a soft form of autism. Being autistic means that my brain is wired differently. For example:
I think in pictures and videos. What does this means?
When we are young our brain thinks only in this way. However, as we age, it develops the capacity to think in a pure abstract form. Someone with Asperger doesn't develop this capacity in the same manner.
For example, if you say to me “I love life” that doesn't mean anything to me. Nothing. Zilch. It's noise. My brain has to go trough several steps of processing in order to extract the meaning:
I imagine someone walking and smiling. He thinks about his life, and many different memories pop over in his mind. His smile widens. Then I understand what you meant, but it's an understanding limited to the pictures I have generated in my mind.
Concrete vs Abstract thought processing is a really fascinating topic and I'll delve into it in future posts.
The Challenge:
It takes me a lot of time to understand other people when they speak. Social interactions are a big pain. Being with others drains my mental energy. I require frequent resting periods away from people.
I need to allow myself to spend time lost in my thoughts. There's no other way around it. If I'm forced to be with people I'll get anxious and with an increasingly erratic behavior due to the mental overload.
And now you understand why it took me 30 years to get a girlfriend.
How Asperger turned out to be a stepping stone for me
I found out about Asperger a few 3 to 4 years ago . However, I've been researching and studying human behavior ever since I can remember. It fascinates me.
Now, it turns out that when you have Asperger, you have a super power: your obsessive nature towards learning.
Some people with Asperger get obsessed with Pokemon. I have a friend that memorized Pokemon names, attack and categories and the stats – and trust me, there's a gazillion stats. That's the power of Asperger's.
People with Asperger are more common then you might realize. You probably know someone who memorized all the planets, characters and spaceship's models from Star Wars. However, this same intelligent person is unable to hold a regular conversation about the weather or the news. Well, that's what Asperger is like.
In a similar fashion, my fascination/obsession with human behavior led me to dig really deep into human psychology.
However, psychology is mostly abstract. So, how could my concrete brain process all those abstractions?
By converting them into concrete language.
I filled, and keep filling dozens of notebooks with mind-maps, diagrams, and drawings that expose, in a concrete manner, these abstract terms and their relationship to concrete, palpable, concepts. I even got a whiteboard and dream about having a wall sized board to doodle in.
How can this benefit you?
I really take a long time to understand something. However, when I do understand it, I can explain it in simple terms. In fact, for me, to understand means to break a concept apart and to simplify each one of its parts and their internal relationships.
Having Asperger is like having a 5 year old inside of you. A 5 year old with an insatiable hunger for knowledge. When I can explain something to this 5 year old I know I can explain it to anyone.
Depression
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Depression is a struggle I go trough frequently. Being depressed means losing the will to live, entertain suicidal thoughts and feeling trapped. It's horrible.
How Depression turned out to be a stepping stone for me
1 in 4 people will suffer from a mental illness sometime during their lifetime. Depression is the most common of these.
Now, because I have Asperger and an obsession with human psychology and behavior, I have delved deep into mental health research.
This means I researched depression with the intensity and interest only an autistic person can. And, because I also have depression, I could make changes, test out theories and see the results in real time on myself.
Testing on myself allowed me to develop a framework for helping others. Now, because of Asperger, the actual interaction with others is a pain for me, but it really makes me joyful seeing the good results and it feeds into my fascination with humans, therefore it is worth it. Best of all, it allowed me to deconstruct depression in a very useful way. Today I posted the first post on the topic of depression, here. As I'll keep publishing my conclusions it is my hope more people will come to a deep understanding of the inner workings of depression and how to take control over it.
Ankylosing Spondylitis
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Having Ankylosing Spondylitis means my immune system considers my body as the enemy. My white blood cells spend their days attacking my joints. They have a special affinity for my spine.
Even though I'm only in my 30s I already feel pain through out the day. Right now I'm feeling pain in my wrists, fingers, elbows and spine because of being writing on my keyboard for a long time. Then, throughout the day I deal with flair ups. These are sudden bouts of intense pain that force me to stop what I'm doing. Thankfully they only last a few seconds. However, it will get worse as I age.
How Ankylosing Spondylitis turned out to be a stepping stone for me
My girlfriend is amazing and also has Ankylosing Spondylitis (and Asperger). Yes, what were the odds? If I didn't had Ankylosing Spondylitis I wouldn't be able to connect with her at such a deeper level, so it is a blessing.
Then, there's something of unique about being always in pain. It really puts the other things in perspective.
For example, even though I'm autistic and empathy is pretty hard to me, I'm considerate for other people needs.
Because I deal with suffering daily, I end up trying to keep others out of suffering as much as I can.
Now, if you follow me around throughout the day you'd witness a very strange guy.
I'm always changing position: I walk, than I feel pain and I have to sit, but remaining seated is also painful after a bit so I have to stand up again. Then, I can't remain standing up without moving because it's painful, therefore I walk. As it turns out, pain makes me a very active person, who would say?
Cancer
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My mother fought metastatic breast cancer from 2008, if my memory serves me right, until April of 2017.
Her untimely death has been terrible. Specially since she was such a great emotional support to me.
However, I did my best to help her. We put all our savings towards giving her the best chance of getting better.
This situation also move me into obsessive research into alternative medicine which maybe it's the reason she survived for so long even though she have her bones, and later her liver, filled with cancer.
In the end she was taken by morphine. They gave her a great amount of morphine, even though her kidneys weren't functioning properly. Turns out morphine is excreted in your urine and shouldn't be administered to someone with impaired renal function. It really saddens me because I keep mentally reviewing everything we could have done differently.
Dealing closely with doctors and hospital staff has allow me to see just how much the medical community as strayed away from actually helping people. Being there with her, in the hospital, allowed me to observe how sick people are treated when their family members are not around. It's really terrible. However it also demonstrates how special a kind gesture can be to someone. Think about it, when you smile of extend an helping hand you are giving a gift so precious, yet so rare.
This whole situation also helped me realize who my girlfriend is. My work kept me away from home from 6 AM to 5 PM and she would come and clean my mother, give her food and take care of her needs. Also, it allowed me to see how strong of a person my mother was.
The Lessons
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So, these are two of the lessons I've learned from my challenges:
1. The better you understand how something works, the greater your ability to help others going trough the same
Therefore, be the person that takes interest into your loved ones challenges. Maybe you can't spend an whole night obsessively researching a topic, but do what you can.
Make sure you allocate some of your time to learning how to help those around you. Then apply what you have learned. You will be giving them a gift they seldom, if ever, have received.
2. Use suffering to everyone's advantage
One of the greatest problems of our society is the lack of empathy.
I get that a lot, having been frown upon, or been called weird and weak, by people who don't understand my challenges.
However, that has allowed me to be well aware of the impact my actions and words can have on others, and that has helped me to be more conscious of other people's needs.
Suffering is a door into empathy and into being more human, make sure you enter trough it.
This is ironic since Asperger means I was born with a brain wired to be terrible at empathizing. Guess suffering filled that gap and I'm thankful for it.
I hope you have enjoyed this short biography of sorts.
In the next days and weeks I intend to post my conclusions on my research into these topics and many others I have studied over the years. Above all, I hope my articles succeed in conveying to you the very knowledge that has helped me help others.
Wellcome to steemit
Wellcome 2 steemit
Welcome to the community!
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Hello @hashtable. Welcome to Steemit. I am David. I wish you have a happy journey here.
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Thank you for sharing your story. My 9 year old son has autism, and it is helpful to hear what it feels like for him, how he thinks, he , like you, has many obstacles to overcome to try to fit in with societies norms...you are an inspiration -
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