I'm not really sure where this fits, so I'll let a moderator move this if it needs moving.

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Quoted from one of my posts in the Autism/Asperger's forum.

It's a thing I've thought about time and again over the years but especially the past year or two, ever since I discovered the Autism/Asperger's thread on DragCave and took the Rdos Aspie test, v2. Autism carries a negative stigma and so I didn't want to talk to my parents about it because why would they want to believe their child has a disorder? More than a year later I opened up to my mom about it and she admitted that she had considered the possibility that I had Asperger's but had never wanted to say anything to me because she didn't want people to slap a label on me. I mean, it's not like I never had any issues, social or otherwise, when growing up. :roll: We brought the idea to my dad and he just got really quiet and distant. I think he took the idea worse than my mom.

There's some fear of what people's reactions would be if I were to tell them things. Will they not take me seriously? Will they overreact? (I'm more worried about the overreacting, thinking I'm some sort of sicko.) And that's normal I suppose.

What's disconcerting about it are these:

• Sometimes these issues are really important, things that would greatly affect finances and things like that. Things like, "Oh hey, I'm bored with my major, I want to switch but that would also mean switching colleges and I'm already a full two years into my current degree and I don't have all the "right" classes to have my AA which is what would qualify me for an in-state transfer."
• It leads me to not talk about things at all either because I'm afraid of their response because it's so deep and dark (or ridiculous), or I feel there's nothing I can do about it and that there's no point in talking about it, or I haven't been able to find a way of wording the issue so that I'd be comfortable saying it.
• Ergo, I can't tell anybody anything. What if they ask questions and get into that darkening area that pokes maybe a little too close to what it is I don't want people to know?

And yet....

I can tell complete strangers online about this stuff. It's probably because by the time I've gone through the above bullet points, I'm bursting at the seams to tell somebody, somebody whom I would not have told if I knew them in real life. And they can't do a thing about it, which is why I'm so comfortable with it.

But even then, there are things I'm not even comfortable writing in my diary. (I actually don't keep a diary; don't log enough, can't keep them up to date, etc.) Or the occasional journal entries that I write only when I get all introspective like this. Even though I'm a Christian, I don't even pray to God about this kind of stuff, which is probably one of the most hypocritical things I can do.

Different things can trigger this mindset for me, but the latest onset came from marathoning the first two seasons of House, M.D. One of House's favorite things to say and live by is that "Everyone lies." Patients never tell the whole story unless coerced somehow by their life-or-death situations (or, if the patient is incapacitated, their spouse/partner/relative's difficult decision to have a test, the results of which could indicate that they lied at some point), and it all leads back to a trust issue that runs rampant within the human race. And it should. Because everybody lies.

So here's my question. Do you have anyone, in real life or a religious deity, to whom you can tell absolutely anything, including your deepest darkest thoughts and personal secrets? Do you trust anyone enough to show them the whole you?