Introducing Myself - My Background

It is difficult to know how to start a new blog, so I decided the best way was for me to give you some background to my life so far as social interaction goes. This is just an overview, details will follow in due course in later posts.

The majority of children with Asperger's Syndrome wish to make friends with their peers but find themselves unable to know how to do so. I was not like this. Up until the age of about 20 I had no real interest in making friends with others my age. I lived at home with my family and always wanted time to myself. Oftentimes when I was growing up the first thing I would do on Saturday morning was to go outside and talk to my imaginary people, and would spend the school playtime doing the same, wanting the other kids to leave me alone. That said I did develop a few friends in my primary school years, even going to their houses after school on occasion, quite how that happened I do not know. However by the time I started secondary school I really was not interested at all in making friends with my peers. I think that might have been to do with the impressions I had of teenagers when I was a young child and thinking "I could never possibly be like or fit in with them."

In my teens, my social life outside the family basically amounted to latching onto my parents' friends occasionally, usually other middle aged couples, because that is what I found safe, easy and comfortable. For instance when my parents invited another couple round for dinner I might join them for the meal then go upstairs once I'd had enough and talk to my imaginary people. 

However, about a year after I had started working, which was around late 2002 - early 2003, I started to want my own friends of my own age. I felt I was missing out on my youth. Now today I have a good social life, although I still do many things by myself. I have some great friends, from a mixture of different places, and I have found a means of being able to meet more new people regularly, which is very important for me. However in the past seven years or so I have worked hard to develop and build friendships with some key opportunities and many frustrations along the way. I have learnt much about the social world, something I was clueless about when I was 20, and this has caused me to analyse the social dynamics of different situations that I am in or observing.