My personal thoughts on my disability are never far away and is the reason I’m putting out another personal blog today.
My anxiety and autism
The anxiety I deal with is centred around autism and is another issue I didn't know I had. It's something I’m going to have to deal with and manage. It was also something I was going to have to learn for myself.
What gets me is that as parents, it’s our job to help our children; our children’s worries should be our worries. It's important to carry our children’s concerns or worries, rather than expecting our children to carry their concerns or worries for themselves. Worries can eventually turn into issues.
When I look back I can see all of my struggles including anxiety and can’t quite get to grips with the enormity of being left with those. I understand now, why I could never escape my bad thoughts as a child, also.
Getting help would have led to a less fractious life
Getting the neurological and psychological help as a child will have paved may way into a less fractious life. With the help I would have had the right tools in place for me to deal with my anxieties and with school mainly. I remember my struggles as if they were yesterday. Knowing what I know now about having ASD, simply ticks another box.
Put me in a group conversation with four people and I’ll grasp one of those conversations. Put me in a class of 37 children which is what it was and I’ll grasp and learn nothing. Everyone knew about my struggles, but those were overlooked. It would also explain why I was discharged at 15 from the hospital, my doctors citing 'there's nothing more they can do.'
I reconcile
I reconcile, by telling myself my website exists because of the life I've had, that I couldn't write without my experiences. My experiences tell my story, through an unfiltered lens and as bizarre as my story is, the whole story needed to be understood.
Once again, it looks like we are running a parallel course, seeing as I am having to deal with my realities of having so many issues and having to learn how to live my own life.
The big difference now is that I don't have to do it alone, and it is actually okay for me to ask for help, which I am going to need to do.
It boggles my mind too, as to how it is that parents can just ignore the issues that their child is having and expect them to figure it out on their own.
This is exactly what I mean when I say that my siblings and I were 'thrown to the wolves' and had to learn to survive on our own without any real help from the people around us.
This is also why I despise the expression that they did the best they could with what they had, seeing as they could have done so much more.
It would have been nice just for them to at least acknowledge that we did have issues that needed to be addressed instead of trying so hard to sweep everything under the rug.
I ended up having to speak with a crisis worker after an event last week, who seemed very shocked and surprised as to certain traumatic events from my childhood.
Most parents would have tried to shield their children from these things but it was actually my parents who were doing the damage by oversharing things that kids don't need to know about their parents.
This seemed very bizarre to her, but in our world that was pretty much the norm, so it's no wonder that I don't get bothered by things that freak other people out.
What I have to do now is learn how to live my own life, instead of trying to deal with someone who is basically toxic for me and expects me to just get over it.
It sounds like you had parents who pretty much expected that of you, which is very sad considering how much easier they could have made things for you, by just giving a damn.
People expect you not have any resentments against your parents just because they are, but usually those are the people who don't have a clue as to what it was like.
The reality is that we can't change the past but that shouldn't mean we have to forget about it either. I tried doing that with alcohol and drugs which didn't work and ended very badly.
I just want to finally be able to live my own life for a change and not feel quite so guilty about doing so.
It's okay to feel what you feel. Don't feel bad or guilty about that. You don't also have to make excuses for how you feel Randy. You also don't have to feel bad about not feeling good spirited towards your parents. In time that will come.
As you say you can't change the past, you also don't have to forget about the past, but it will help for you to find a place for it, so that you can feel more at ease with it.
The time I realised I had to do the same was when I began to hit rock bottom. I didn't understand the guilt I carried until I began to think about it. That I had been blaming myself for my own shortcomings, basically everything I had failed at.
I had already thrown my school reports away because I couldn't bear to read the comments and that niggled at me even more. The more I thought about it the more guilt I felt, the worse I felt, the more rock bottom I hit.
Randy, you now have things you can work on. You have so much understanding, particularly for your mum. Perhaps you can start to use what you know about your mum to bring closure on certain aspects of your life.
What you've mentioned is very much a cliche Randy. I personally believe that people do the best with what they're given, I still believe we can change.
My story shows we can, but first we must want to try. Many people fail because they simply don't know how. I know my mum tried.