I had a good visit with the counselor today.

[Wapsie B]

Things in the career testing I had triggered ideas on where my life should be and needs to be. There was a lightbulb moment when we were talking about something and in my head popped event planner. That was very cool. Makes sense and it's an evironment I like being in. I just don't want to work 2o hours a day at it some weeks. Don't have a job fuck with my sleep time. That's no way to live.

But there were other things unearthed that felt good to me; finally putting things into perspective and pointing myself in the right direction. Now I'm going to make a list of possible careers that come to me from all this. That was the good. I didn't really have time to dwell on the bad. The testing did show that I'm still WAY too hard on myself, doubting my abilities and putting myself down at times, at least without thinking about it anyway.

Naturally, on the drive back home all I could focus on was the negative shit; dealing with the feeling of being left out of life earlier. Visiting my parents last weekend Mom was talking about kids being so on the go and even wild at times. I told her not everyone's a wallflower like I was. And she said there's nothing wrong with being a wallflower. I know she means well by it but she really doesn't have a clue. I still have to deal with the feeling of being the kid that obeyed Mommy and Daddy, saying no when most others were saying yes to sex, booze, drugs and whatnot; having this feeling of entitlement, and resentment towards those who did live a little. That I denied myself for so long and now watch the fuck out. That my sisters were the ones who stood up to the parents and were the ones who had some semblance of a normal teenagehood.

I dredged it all up, trying to sort things out and make sense of it all rather than contemplating the good. It only shows what the testing did, that I've still got a long road outta depression.

[DemExpat]

1. I recognize in your post how I also was the "good" child....

who ended up with the most serious mental health problems.

I'm fortunate that I understood this when my kids were going through their teenage years!

I hope that you can do something good with the info you gleaned from the career test, bushwentawol.
:hug:

DemEx

[Wapsie B]

4. Thanks DemEx.

I know what you mean about teens. I have a teenage daughter who has already been more out there than I ever was. By all rights I should be the most angry of repubs, having not had any kind of teen years that many people fondly remember and wanting to deny everyone else that chance to live and grow. But something inside me knows that to hang onto that mindset is a way to slowly kill myself. The career counseling validated a lot of things that I already had on my mind with work and revealed new things as well. So in that respect I'm very happy.

[hedgehog]

2. I've been talking with some of the people on the Asperger's group

Our doctor says we are depressives, not Asperger's, but we certainly share a lot of the traits. I think what I have is to Asperger's as migraine is to epilepsy; on the spectrum but not so visibly disabling. I'd have to say that I was never energetic enough to even think of being bad. After dealing with people all day, I just wanted to go home at night and hibernate!

[Wapsie B]

5. Oh yes I can relate to that.

People can just drain me completely at times. I need my space with anyone.

[hunter]

3. I guess I could have been called a "good" child and a wallflower...

... but it really wasn't like that at all. I don't have regrets like that, I never have. As a child and as a young man I sort of see myself as a little animal person that a lot of random stuff happened to, some of it bad. There ain't no way of changing what I was, so it's only interesting as a story or an experience. I can't really draw a lot of insight out of it except maybe to explain my emotional reactions to certain situations, but even that's not accurate -- it's pretty easy to come up with some storybook explanation for something that might just be intrinsic, like maybe I'm extremely anxious about flying because I'm extremely anxious about flying, and not because I have trust or control issues arising from some bad childhood experience.

Someone was always claiming I was "denying my own needs" or something like that, as if I was a monk sworn to chastity and poverty, or worse, praising me for that, which is why I often have such an adversarial relationship with religion because they can be so wrong about things. But I wasn't denying myself anything.

Sex? That would have been nice, I wanted to have sex, most people do, but I also knew it could turn into something too complicated for me. And it's also funny because people I knew as a teen and young adult have told me years later that they'd wanted to sleep with me, and that I'd been so clueless I'd missed their signals. Thinking back, yeah, I did. I think there were only two times I recognized what had happened afterwards, after the opportunity had slipped by. One young woman, I hurt her feelings, she thought I was rejecting her, and I recognized that later and felt bad about it; not bad that I'd missed the opportunity, but bad that I'd hurt her feelings. She was always sort of mean to me after that too. The other was like, "Oh well, there are plenty of other boys."

Drugs? For some reason the common ones people abuse are pretty boring to me. My moods can go all over the place without drugs, and I can hallucinate too. I have to take drugs so that doesn't happen.

Rock & Roll? Most music with words is too hard for me to listen too. I have enough difficulty remembering what people say when they talk, and if I'm not focusing on the music, I hear the composition, but the words hardly register unless I've already made the effort to pick out and decode the words of the song, or seen the lyrics written down. I can sing in church because I've seen the music.

So anyways, bushwentawol, it sounds good that you are thinking about it. If I can offer my own experience, maybe you are never going to make any sense out of it; there's a lot in my own experience that's never going to make sense to me or anyone else. It's all a random pile of broken stuff that I leave in the attic mostly untouched. Maybe there's something up there that will be useful someday, but probably not.

[Wapsie B]

6. I can appreciate that Hunter.

I seem to be an expert at beating myself up. The counselor told me as much.