Opening up: A stressful couple of weeks

I’m sure you know how it goes. You don’t find a release for your frustrations, and they very quickly build up, giving you an uncomfortable dose of anxiety.

Well, that’s certainly what has been been happening with me these last couple of weeks.

There are a number of things at play. Firstly, I’ve decided that the time is right to let my parents know about my Asperger’s. Secondly, work has, for one reason or another proven to be quite stressful over the last couple of weeks. Thirdly, I’ve not been writing here.

Why have I not been writing? Well initially it was just the way that the dice rolled – it was a long bank holiday weekend here in the UK, and I rarely write outside of work, through habit rather than anything else. I’ve also been quite busy at work, and also busy with point number one this week, and so didn’t write on Tuesday either. I then decided that maybe it would be nice to take a little break from writing for the rest of the week, to recharge my batteries as it were. This, it would seem has turned out to be a mistake, but perhaps only because of points one and two above also being on the go.

So – I told my parents I has AS. In many ways, the direction of this blog has been working towards this since I set it up. I needed to get my own head straight about AS before I could tell others, and in particular my parents. That’s because I’ve always known I would have a hard job selling my self-diagnosis to them, and in particular to my mother.

And I was right. I send a long but well considered and tweaked email to my parents at the start of last week. It barely scratched the surface of AS and me – how could it? AS is a big and all encompassing condition, and I’d need to write a book (or a blog!) to capture it all. A couple of days later I got an emailed response, that spent some time trying to point out how various aspects of my life meant that I couldn’t possibly have AS, as someone with AS wouldn’t have been able to achieve what I’d achieved, or wouldn’t have acted as I did. To cap it all, my mother flat outright rejected in writing that I had AS, after two whole days of consideration.

I was disappointed, but not at all surprised. This was the sort of thing I expected. Instead of a considered response that this was all a bit of a surprise, and that they didn’t really know enough to form an opinion, I got a flat rejection. I couldn’t possibly have AS, and I shouldn’t be so silly as to suggest it.

I wrote an angry email back, that argued that a snap judgment based on a couple of days of research and a small amount of background knowledge formed over the years that my mother served as a teacher (she retired seven years ago) was simply not valid, and further more was extremely insensitive. I’ve since followed this up with a series of emails that point out how the examples she gave of why I couldn’t possibly have AS actually missed a huge amount of subtlety in the situations that did show underlieing AS; or in some cases how the judgments were just plain wrong. I’ve not had responses to these as yet, as my parents disappeared abroad on holiday at the end of last week, and won’t be reading the correspondence until today at the earliest.

Despite the fact that I was expecting this sort of response, and was well prepared, I still felt as though the whole experience was a kick in the teeth. My stress levels are correspondingly up, as is my anxiety, and it took a few days from the first response for me to recover my composure and confidence enough to put up a well thought out and thorough rebuttal to my mother’s dismissals.

So when you add work stress to all of the above, it hasn’t been a great week. There are various mind games going on at work, with individuals such as myself, who are contract rather than permanent staff being subject to veiled threats regarding the stability of our jobs. It’s not much fun.

In hindsight, I picked a bad week to decide to open up to my parents, but I wasn’t to know that the work stress would start. It’s also been a bad week to decide not to write much here, as bottling up my thoughts has just lead to further stress and the associated anxiety.

So today has been different. I have worked hard to clear my to-do list of the most important work related tasks, and have cleared a half hour of schedule to write this, so I can get some of it off my shoulders. It feels good.

The next week or two are clearly going to be difficult, but I hope that a bit of time and patience on my part will allow my parents, and my mother in particular to accept that I do have AS.

Time will tell. Wish me luck.

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