I'm a mess and need help

[MikanPachi]

This will be a long one so please bare with me.

to start off I’m 32 years old (turning 33 next month) and am high end autistic (aspergers) and have undiagnosed depression. I got my first job january of last year and i’m an aspiring twitch streamer. I have few offline friends who i maybe see twice a year at best. I get to see my girlfriend once a year as we live in different states.

The thing is i am very open about my emotions and how i feel which upsets people. Too many people find me overwhelming and are put off by that. I try to be friendly and caring but people get upset with me. My eagerness to make friends and spend time with them has pushed away a lot of people to the point they have either blocked me online or outright banned me from streams, discords, and servers. I’ve been abandoned by people i considered friends so much in life that i’ve sort of developed a complex where i feel i have to shower them with gifts and praise just so they don’t leave me. this leads again to them feeling overwhelmed which starts the whole loop over again. I’ve actually told people not to gift me anything back cuz I just want to give to them but this has made people think i’m trying to pull reverse psychology when i’m not. On top of that I’ve never felt jealously EVER in life until the past year in an incident with my girlfriend (which we semi resolved) and once this past month which ended up making a lot of my twitch friends get annoyed with me and hasresulted in me getting banned from one friend’s channel and risking being banned from another’s. This has caused me to question if I’m a toxic person or not and if i should even bother trying to make friends anymore. I’ve been told to go see a therapist, but due to my insurance I can’t afford one as I also have tourettes which prevents me from driving and I have to rely on my dad to drive me places. Another thing that is causing me to get more depressed is my awful job which I can’t quit as they are the ONLY ones who would hire me in all my years of job hunting. My job has gotten me so stressed and upset that there’s some days when I’m pushing carts on lot I wish a speeding car would hit me. It gets so bad sometimes I lay in bed at night wondering if people online would even know if i were to die. I’ve never felt I’ve done anything nor will do anything worthwhile in life. when i was in 5th grade and diagnosed with tourettes, a priest told my parents i should be locked up and kept from socity. i’m starting to question if he was right.

help

[anon17277947]

Hi Mikan.

Your post really hit home for me as these are a lot of things that I have faced many times in my life. I too am autistic.

I have always had this thing…when I’m around people that are strangers or new, one of two things happens:

1.) I don’t talk much. I’m too anxious due to social anxiety so I just clam up and stick to observing more than talking.

Or

2.) Anxiety gets the best of me and I end up talking a LOT. I think this pairs with my ADHD. They often go hand in hand and it causes me to talk excessively. Like, out of my control. I don’t know how to stop myself. I talk fast, I become really wordy and it puts people off.

I bounce between those two. Quiet and excessively talking in my anxiety.

Like you, I tend to be very open about my emotions. I try to express how I feel and often feel like I have to explain in length or detail to help people better understand. Maybe this comes from living in a broken family that always made me feel unheard and not understood. I felt like I wasn’t ever allowed to talk so later, I would express myself in length. People would become very overwhelmed by me. They wouldn’t know how to respond, so they would distance themselves. When typing, I talk a lot and am very wordy which too would make people feel exhausted not just by my words but my emotions. So the natural response would be for them to not respond at all, respond vaguely and in short purposely making it hard to respond back, or them distancing from me.

I have never been banned from somewhere due to these things, but I’ve had a lot of people including friends and family push away and slowly talk to me less and less till they didn’t at all. It caused me to basically isolate and fear being social with people. I started to feel very insecure about myself and how I am.

As an autistic I am just naturally awkward. A lot of people have seen that as me being “weird” and have called me weird many times. Not in a fun or silly way. But just in a way “You’re really weird…” uncomfortable kind of way. And I hated it because even when I tried SO HARD to appear normal, I still would come off this way. It was awful.

So I totally understand this complex. Because even though I am a little bit better at it, it’s still a problem. Even with being almost 35. You and I seem to be close in age.

I have tried really hard to be aware and learn boundaries. I have tried to be more compact with how I express myself. I have tried to step back and take a breath and collect myself before speaking, but I often still find myself stuck in these awkward situations in social environments. I struggle to fit in.

I feel like we both could benefit from therapy but like you, I do not have access to this. I lost my insurance. So I have had to work with myself to try to work in areas I struggle. It’s been a challenge.

Like you I battle with feeling like I will never do anything worth while as I cannot work due to a lot of health issues. Both from mental and physical health issues.

Look, I don’t know what priest told your parents this…but that is not true. We may be a little different, but that doesn’t mean we should be locked up and hidden under a rock. There are some things that we have to try to learn how to adjust to and practice that we struggle with and there are some things that may not ever change. But that doesn’t make us less than. It doesn’t make us undeserving or unlovable.

Ive had people treat me really shitty in my life, but I have a lot of really good people that love me despite my quirks, awkwardness and weirdness. They embrace my person and see beyond my struggles.

That priest was not right.

You are not alone. I have felt these things. I know these things. I feel these things. Just know that you are loved and cared for here. There is no judgement here. Sure we all have to set boundaries but its good to be open and honest when those need to take place. To communicate kindly and with love. This is how I have had to learn to better communicate. I am still learning. It takes time. But you deserve to feel better than the things you have felt and expressed here.

Much love.

• kitty

[SheetMetalHead]

My doctor has said that I “might be on the spectrum,” which I resent because I’m awesome and sexy , but I am very overanalytical, I bounce between saying nothing and talking nonstop, and I am too open with my emotions and life experiences. So I’ve made weird friends. My group of friends is a mish-mash of people who don’t always get along with each other, but I get along with each of them, they’re all special to me, and each of them love me in return. TBH you and @anon17277947 seem like the kind of people I would be friends with.

If your friends don’t like you or push you away, make new friends. Fuck 'em. I quit texting an old peer group after I got tired of being treated like an afterthought, and figured if they cared they’d reach out. They never did, so that answered that question.

Having no friends is better than having friends who don’t care about you or put you down, and in my experience, having no friends is temporary. We are social creatures, even the introverts, and naturally seek out companionship. What happens in bad friendships is you cling to them, hoping they’ll get better, looking for any glimmer of positivity in them, and fearing that you’ll be alone without them. And if you have to buy friendships by way of gifts and gratuitous praise, those aren’t real friendships. YOU and YOU ALONE should be enough of a gift for your real friends. When you cut bad friends loose, one way or another your natural tendency will be to seek out new ones. Congratulations, the world is yours. Go meet some people, friend.