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Since my diagnosis in March I've been researching alot about Asperger's and ASD in general. I've finally found myself, but the questions still abound.
Life as a child was hell for me and it feels like I've survived a war zone, traumatized... and all I can think to do is ask why? Why couldn't someone see this before and help me? When I would meltdown and throw tantrums as a child, they scared me as much as the adults watching them. If you were to as me now what's hurt me the most in my life: What' my most traumatic memory is, it would be me screaming "Help me please! Just help me!" while throwing things, breaking things, clawing at my crawling skin and biting myself, only for everyone to patronize me. Saying in a sickeningly faux sweet voice that they would "Get you the help you need."
I would be sent to an institution and locked in seclusion rooms, held in restraints, told I was bad and had to change this thing about myself that I couldn't understand, much less control. Being punished with medications that made everything I was experiencing amplified.
I don't know how I survived it, everyday I wanted to die, begged my lungs to stop the flow of air through my body. I read books of pain and suffering and unimaginable horrors because the protagonists gave me hope. I so wanted to overcome this evil seeking to destroy me, psychiatry. The worst travesty in all of this is that I told them what was wrong in the only way I knew how, and they callously betrayed that trust by calling me a liar, labeling me manipulative and defiant. Slashing every modicum of hope that I allowed them to see.
I will never understand how a psychiatric label can be used to justify the devaluation and depersonalization of a vulnerable child. how they can use that pain against you and call your torture, "treatment". How they can write "patient" in your logs when "lab rat" or "paycheck" is more appropriate. Then again self-serving motivations and greed have perpetrated greater systematized tragedies.
The light at the end of tunnel here is that I found the will to pull through it all and had the strength to fight for a correct diagnosis. My need for clarity haunts me though. Why! Why did they hold me down for getting out of my room? For running when I was terrified, for being a scared child screaming. why did they lock me in rooms rocking back and forth just beside myself with fear and pain? why did they force me to take medications that hurt me and stole my identity, changed who I was? Why were my cries for help ignored, why didn't anybody listen to me? Why was it not alright to be who I was then, but now that the name of the condition has changed it suddenly is?
I may have gained my right to be free, but the cost almost wasn't worth the reward.
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