Sometimes...

Sometimes I wish I'd never been diagnosed.  If I hadn't been diagnosed, I wouldn't have had to go through "training".  If I hadn't gone through training, I wouldn't know how mean people really are (or were) to me.  I could go on in my blissful little world oblivious to the cruelty.

I've had a hard couple of weeks.  Sleepless nights full of nightmares, my past running over and over through my head, only with a new perspective.  One where friends I thought I had weren't really friends at all, and people I thought were pretty awful anyway are nearly inhuman now that I know what they were doing.

It's pretty obvious to anyone that spends time with me on a regular basis that I'm "different".  It's not hugely significant or anything, but my behavior is odd at times.  My affect is flat most of the time, unless I am excited or passionate about a topic, and then I become nearly childlike.  My manner of speaking or delivery is different at times, enough that strangers have noticed.  I rock a little when I'm nervous, and I self-stim by rubbing my hands on my jeans between my knees to calm down.  My brain processes things differently; therefore, I think in ways that neurotypical people do not, which leads me to ask questions that seem logical to me, but completely odd to others (particularly in group settings, this can be embarrassing).  As such, I find it impossible to believe that in my entire 30 years before my diagnosis, NO ONE KNEW ANYTHING WAS WRONG.

This thought invades my brain often.  WHY didn't anyone do anything?  WHY didn't anyone at school tell my parents about my behavior?

Thinking about my past, I've come to the cruel realization that some people didn't do anything about it because it was better for THEM if I was different.  It furthered their agenda if I didn't fully understand what I was getting into.  I was easily taken advantage of.  So easy, in fact, that once one person figured it out, he passed it on to his friends who could then take further advantage of me, and my idiot, naive, ridiculous ADULT self couldn't even tell the damn difference.  Some groups went so far as to figure out something wasn't quite right with me, take advantage of me for their own economic furtherance, and then add insult to injury by asking me to do things that seemed logical to me but were completely ridiculous to gain amusement from my disability.

With all of these realizations comes a very painful conclusion.  My disability wasn't all that well hidden.  It was just hidden from ME.