Current location:	School (no internet at home yet)
Current mood:	upset
Current music:	Simon & Garfunkel - Scarborough Fair/Canticle
Entry tags:	personal

I'm sure that I screwed up tonight, but I don't know how or if (how) it affects things.
Wanting to cry is like wanting to throw up: It will make you feel better (in the short run) and you might really want to, but that doesn't mean that you can.

I learned how to not cry a long time ago. I had to. I never learned how to cry again.

Right now I want to. I was biting my lip "to keep from crying," but not really. It's just something that I'm told that people do to keep from crying, and I needed to show what I was holding in. I'm really good at not showing it when I'm sad, and unless I'm really close to you I'll do it automatically. It also helps that I don't have any body language of my own.

I have Asperger's syndrome (AS), a.k.a. high-functioning autism. I have no social instincts; all that I know is what I've worked out by conscious observation, correlation, and objective rule-learning. As a result, I'm pretty helpless. I offend people accidentally on a regular basis. I've mostly overcome my resultant crippling shyness, my social anxiety that causes horrendous, physically crippling IBS attacks, and my near-suicidal depression, and now I actually have a few friends. This is good, because I've gone through all that (and continue to go through the AS, which is incurable and basically untreatable) as an extrovert. I want to have friends, I really, really do; I just can't. I offend too many of them. Also, I'm getting old.

I am, by years since admission, a seventh-year student. I have watched my friends in the year ahead of me graduate. I have watched my friends in the year behind me graduate. (I never made any friends in my own year.) Not that I had many friends in the year behind me left; I accidentally offended a couple of them, and the others had to ask me not to hang out with them because it was easier to throw just me out of the group than to throw out everyone who no longer wanted to see me around. As a result, I lost the first girlfriend that I'd managed to keep for more than two weeks. I didn't make any friends for the next two years, and by the time that I started making new friends again, I was so much older than everyone that I got odd looks from students and interrogated by ResLife. I'm too old to keep making friends with people who would rather just call the police about the creepy old guy wandering about.

Tonight I got the distinct feeling of having serious screwed up again. I don't want to lose my only real chance at any new friends this year, but until I find out if I have screwed up so badly that I shouldn't even talk to people again, I can't talk to people in case I have. After all, I don't want to make things any worse. But if I can't talk to them, I can't ask; I've lost by default.

There's a million more things that I want to say, but I've forgotten them by now. I'll remember them some other time when there will be no way to get them off of my chest or to let people know about them so that they'll understand when I screw up or don't know what to do or say.

C'est la vie (si vous etiez moi).


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