Behavioral Modification Training

Can you alter your behavior? When you do something annoying can you change it? For me it is very difficult. Things that I do become ingrained and I find it difficult to make changes. Other AS people who are not as self aware as I am, cannot make any changes, because they are not aware that they are doing anything wrong.

In High School, I was attracted to one particular girl. I would pray that she would be on my bus everyday and at night. I could therefore never miss school and always had to catch the bus home. I lived in a rural area and used a yellow school bus every day to get to school, for those of you that never had this option. I missed about four and a half years of High School opportunities because of this girl. Stalker. I was not a stalker. I was just inept at social things and could never figure out how to do something like ask her out. I figured out how but that is another story.

I was and still am an avid cyclist. I would cycle to school and cycle home when I could, about ten kilometers per direction and my goal was to get fast enough to beat the bus home. After school in the spring and autumn I would often go for another ride it varied in length but it almost always went by her house. Which was not too far outside of my reach. But I would go other places too. I would drive all the streets to the end in my rural neighbourhood, which was not too extensive as it turned out. It was on this long route that I started trying to do different things, like riding no hands, up hills and down hills. It got that I could ride for kilometers without my hands touching the handlebars except to make sharp corners and to stop.

Fast forward to the high school drunken party for the graduates I was taking a younger friend of the girl in question home as she was wasted and she started to tell me that she and everyone new that I liked the girl. And that they were talking about my bicycle rides through her neighbourhood. I was a stalker, essentially. I was mortified. I began to invent anti- stalking behavioral modification protocols. When ever I was doing something I would question why and if there was some girl involved; I became paranoid about my own motives. So that no-one could ever call me a stalker again.

The problem with the modifications was that they did not stop with people I liked, it gradually applied to everyone I knew through little tweaks from little mistakes I made to the point that I feel great discomfort entering former workplaces, former schools, workplaces of people I know and even seeing people who I know outside, especially women. More so if I don't know that they will be there.

I did not know how bad it was until I walked into a former colleague's new workplace and felt the panic that I was stalking them.