I don’t quite know how to start off this one. Those who've read my posts before know I was (self)-diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or Asperger’s syndrome last year just before I turned 25. Many of you also know about the problems I had with a certain girl I was very in love with at one point and how her rejection affected me.

OK, fast forward now, I am no longer in love with her (in fact I never really think of her anymore at all) and I've always fully accepted having ASD, I actually accepted it from the moment I found out because it made so much sense.

Those who also know me, know that academically, I am rather gifted and I have made it quite far in university, up to doctorate level at the moment.

So, with my mind now more sound and peaceful, and with no feelings of hurt or rejection clouding my mind, I've really sat down and thought about my interactions in the past with classmates, that girl, and just people in general.

I come up with two issues. The first is, I think I've really hurt a lot of people by me being smart. Now, conventional thinking would say that shouldn't be my worry, people should not be affected by gifts that others have, and 90% of the time I would say sure, that makes sense. But, I can't help but think a large part of the reason why I've never really had friends because they just couldn't look past this aspect of me. The problem is, I never showed other dimensions of me either. I hid my private life in class and at university and people only ever really saw the academic side of me, the gifted in the classroom part and never found out who I am when I'm not that person. Now, I didn't hide my private life because I'm too selfish to let people in, I hid it because it's not pretty. To this day, I don't have a happy, fulfilling private life as such, an extra-curricular life as people would put it I guess. I've never really seen the need to go out to parties and so on, or to go out and partake in all sorts of activities. It's a part of life I've never understood, I never did get why people have these two aspects to life – a private life and a work life. For me, my work life continued in private. The only reason I say private life is because it's that part of life at home and it's stuff I don’t want people to see. First of all it's boring to someone else (not to me though) and my working life is more exiting. Secondly, it's embarrassing. My private life contains lots of things that are not pretty and some of the issues with my family life and so on I have discussed on other threads before (my dad's alcoholism, etc.).

All of this only really began making sense after my failed attempt at a relationship with this girl I loved so much and her rejecting me. It was because of that I began asking myself why she would hate me. I'm convinced it is because of me being smart and being closed-off regarding my private life. She was quite shy and although I'm sure she was smart herself, she was one of the average performing students in the class, whilst I was basically collecting A-plusses with every assignment and test I did. Another aspect of our work in our course that we attended was that we did many presentations, basically a power-point assisted oral. I was quite possibly the top guy in the class with it, and my confidence in my work produced immense confidence in presenting my work, so much so that I was often praised very highly by the lecturers and as a bachelor student even attended a conference where there were masters and doctoral students, as well as professors, speaking. This girl on the other hand, whilst being moderately confident in conversation with our classmates, she became extremely shy when having to do these oral presentations, so much so that she would shake in front of the class and read everything off of a piece of paper. I used to feel very badly for her. I often even felt guilty for the ease with which I could handle my presentations and how she struggled.

I've only recently began realizing how much people must have hated me, including her. I was so confident and concentrated so much on performing well and it must have annoyed my classmates, and her, so much. I know one should do all you can to reach your full potential and that you should whole-heartedly go with what you love, but at what cost did I do this? People hate me because I cared so much about my studies.

What I wish I could tell them is that I cared so much about my studies because the rest of my life was a mess, and it’s such a disgusting mess that I didn't want to even show them what it was all about.

The question is, how many of them were actually so put-down by what they saw with me that it made them feel defeated? I can understand now why that girl hates me. It's like an emotional test and grilling to have been with me in the class every time because it's like a constant reminder of the things she felt she may have lacked. I feel so horrible about me being who I am. I killed this poor girl's spirit and probably those of hundreds of other people too. That's not what I wanted, ever. If I had known that my way of living my life was going to hurt so many people, I would've tried to change.

The second issue is, they never saw how I did it. The truth is, they were all smarter than I was all along. I've been thinking back to those days and I realized that I might be retarded. It was this girl in particular one day who told me how hard she had studied for a test we were going to write. It was a small test, we had three short articles we had to study, that was all. She said that she had sat from 8 the evening till 11 pm that evening, and she was proud, and I told her she should be, that was well done. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I had started studying at 8 am that morning till 2 am the following morning for that same test. It also started becoming more and more apparent as I began speaking with other students that studying and assignments which were taking them 2 to 3 hours to complete was taking me a day or maybe even 2 days. I was also taking about twice as long to write an examination. In my first years at university, I rarely finished an examination on time, I always left some questions blank. The scary thing is, if I were able to complete the papers, I would have got full marks, because it happened with a maths paper, I finished it and scored 106% (I had time to do a bonus section too). The only reason I never got full marks was because I never finished. I never realized it, but I was hiding this from people too, and it makes me feel so horrible because I am actually very stupid and slow compared to them (despite IQ of 150+). Yes, my brain is brilliant, but it has to be fed like a person on a drip almost, slowly and drop-wise, so it processes each little piece slowly but accurately. I don’t know if this is part of autism or if I am also retarded on top of being autistic.

All I know is I feel like a horrible monster for what I made others feel. I never wanted that, but, unintentional or not, I did make them feel bad or inferior. I am so sorry and feel so guilty.

I am not sure why I posted this, I just wanted to tell people I guess.