In the 80’s when I was a kid, people weren’t talking about Asperger’s, it wasn’t a common term like it is today. I was labeled as shy, and my mom was labeled as having manic-depression. Looking back on my childhood, with the knowledge that I now have about ASD and Asperger’s, it is so clear that I was on the spectrum. Yes I was shy, and I also had (and still have) tendencies and traits that are very Asperger’s. Having trouble expressing myself is probably the biggest one, that and getting really thrown when things don’t happen the way I thought they were going to. 

The other huge marker for me is social skills, the ability to make and keep friends. In my adult life, I am the one who will go out and sit in my car during a party because I am feeling overwhelmed from pretending to be comfortable “mingling” and I have worn out what I feel is the appropriate amount of time to follow my boyfriend (now husband) around or linger at the chip table. And then there are the multiple friends who have just walked out of my life. The hardest hitting was my entire group of friends from elementary school no longer including me in the group when we came back from summer vacation to start the 5th grade. I didn’t understand. No one even said anything mean like, you don’t fit in or, you’re a nerd, they just stopped talking to me. It was clear, I was different, and I didn’t belong. 

I would later discover, while working with a life coach, that experience (combined with some other childhood trauma) had largely shaped how I viewed and valued myself for many years to come. And honestly, I feel very strongly that these social experiences had a huge roll in my academic struggles. It was around that same time that I began doing very poorly in school. But no one really knew, I kind of faked it, I was good at blending in. My educational downslide continued through high school, and I was struggling so badly with math that it was physically making me sick. Luckily things turned around for me over the course of many years of taking my time with community college, and then eventually going to University and hitting my stride with a subject I love and a group of professors who changed my concept of myself and my abilities. 

But I still didn’t know about Asperger’s or the fact that women all over were going through similar struggles and being miss diagnosed as well. After college, I went through ten more years of meltdowns, losing friends, inappropriate boundaries, questionable relationships, and self-worth struggles before I stumbled upon the book that changed my entire outlook on life and understanding of myself. It’s a short book, probably off the wall to those who do not relate to it, but the experiences and idiosyncrasies that she explains were like someone putting together a bunch of jumbled pieces I’d been carrying around and going, see, this does fit together to make a beautiful puzzle. I owe a lot to Everyday Asperger’s, and I am so thankful that Samantha Craft decided to share her story, It has truly been like changing for me and it is a huge part of what has inspired me to share openly about my own experiences.