So I had to write the last post so that I could write this post. It ties into the one before too. I have Asperger's and it means that my social development is severely delayed. I have posted once before that my EQ is about 40 which means I am about as emotionally mature as a 16 year old, there about. Conversely intellectually, according to my IQ (141), I am equivalent to a 56 year old. Lastly I am physically nearly 40. This averages to 37, approximately; everyone do your own calculations please.
When I was in high school, I was the right age physically. I was about eight to ten emotionally, which is higher than the EQ of 40, but I believe that EQ is not stable; the difference in what a thirteen year old knows and an eight year old knows socially is minuscule, but the difference between a ten year old and and eighteen year old is huge.
The difference is key. When I was in high school, I felt all the hormonal changes like every other kid. I began to like girls just like every other guy, the straight ones anyways. Except everyone of them had figured out the social rules and the plays, the feights and the ripostee of the social matches and I did not. The self had been bolstered and brought low and rebuilt many times among the normal people. High school, from a adult perspective, is about socialization and not about learning; the learning is the setting, but the main plot is the socialization.
For me the introvert, I did not have much fun. Indeed years later upon meeting someone on the subway and trying to place her face, because we both knew that we knew each other. When we determined it was high school that I knew her from, I turned my back on her and left her that moment without saying a thing, even though my memories of her were all good, I had so thoroughly blocked out High School, that I did not acknowledge her at that moment.
Occasionally I notice someone in Boonieville, from my time there and I completely fail to say anything to them. Many of them I loathe. Many of them made fun of me. Some few humiliated me publicly. But most of all I felt excluded. Now I know that it was not them but me, because I could not walk in their circles.
Let me tell you what it is like to be a teenager, divorced from the hormones, divorced from the judgement center construction zone, removed from the social pressure cooker of high school; I am living it now. I have been living it for years. My current evolution of my teenage years is learning to stop talking about my social experiences with lovers to gain assuredness that I am doing the right thing. I am working on keeping my own counsel as it were. I know how to keep a secret, if you tell me not to tell anyone. I am learning to figure out what I should not share without being told.
It is tough. Really. I have been a teenager, emotionally, for a long time and it is habit forming. I like to share with my friend's what is happening in my life to get their perspective. Before, I did it to get there opinions, because I did not feel confident with my own. Now it feels like gossiping and it makes me uneasy and I am unhappy that I still do it, but catching myself is so very hard.
Sometimes I think I would rather be dead.
Ever since high school, I have been preoccupied with socialization to the point that I have neglected everything else. Now it is too late to pull anything important together with my life. And I have only raised myself a few years socially in twenty actually.
I am almost mastering small talk. I can look at people and grab small environmental effects from their surroundings and paint accurate pictures about them that lets me talk to strangers. I can almost be extroverted.
So you see, I am only sixteen or seventeen, it has taken a lot and It will take a lot more to get out of it. I feel it is too late. When I turn eighteen, emotionally, all my peers will have had all their children and you who are still young will be older, much or not, I don't know. I might take only a year to do a year or two , but it could take me ten year too. Is the journey worth it? Are there rewards for me at all? Ever?
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