The story of us

Aspergers

After the letters, things became slowly-very slowly- better in my life. I began to stop having the obsessive thoughts, I felt I would be accepted no matter what happened from that point onwards and so I felt I could face life again.

Back to my life at school, I was beginning to really enjoy my drama class, making new friends in some other people, one of the girls who would even have been considered popular was a friend of mine and I'd never seen that one coming. Of course the closer I got to the other people the closer I became to Holly. I slowly began to admit to her that I wrote fanfiction stories and was met by a reaction of curiosity. I'd came across the curiosity before- in fact most of my friends were interested to an extent about my writing and drawing but once they got involved and I began bouncing ideas off them they lost interest. This girl, the quiet one who I knew very little about, she was different. Holly gave ideas to me, would argue her points and her views on characters, she got involved in my stories and adored telling me more. She listened too, listened to every word I said and remembered every detail held in those words, recalling them even months later. We continued to be friends and I began sitting with them for lunch, with her, Robynn, Ailsa and some other girls I won't mention. We exchanged email addresses and would talk endlessly through the night about my writing and the vast histories of my characters (those who have read the Twilight Saga will understand) I still knew very little about this girl. I knew from our friend Robynn- who was in my registration class and Holly's German class- that Holly's parents had recently split up, I knew she had an older brother and sister and now lived with her mum. That was it. That was all we needed to know until the night where we both opened up for the first time. I decided, at around , that I needed to tell Holly my one of my deepest secrets- not that I was gay, that would come later- but that I had aspergers. As I've mentioned before Asperger's syndrome is a now outdated diagnosis for a form of high-functioning autism. It is characterised mainly with high levels of intelligence and a lack of social skills. This lack of social skills, for those who don't know, isn't something we can't gain. I describe it as being like languages. Imagine a world where everyone is bilingual from the beginning, but you aren't. You have to learn every word of your second language. Some words are like some emotions and are easy to learn, the comparison between bonjour and happy, others are more complicated like pronouns and embarrassment. However this isn't all that Aspergers is, it's a childhood without many friends, it's panicking because you have an assembly rather than your scheduled class, it's knowing what you feel but not being able to put those feelings into words. That night I explained all this to Holly, and she listened, she asked questions; she wanted to learn about me. She confided in me for the first time that she'd always known there was something 'wrong' with her, something in her brain which didn't work as it should. From that confession a good deal of time passed and I collected more and more information about Holly, including one day when she came to me stressed because she had been made to temporarily move seats in her maths classroom and it had set her off guard. The more data I gathered on Holly, the more obvious it became. She too, had Aspergers.