Emotions And Autism: How I Feel And Why I Feel It

For a long time I couldn't feel pain emotionally or physically. The famous story of pain is when I broke my finger in three places trying to field a grounder barehanded, look at a gorgeous female, and throw it to her at the same time with the ball underneath and work the next day at a volunteer job sounds like legend, but it's fact. I couldn't feel a thing and wasn't allowed to play the whole season, but if I hadn't gone to Primary Health I wouldn't have known it. And that wasn't too long along, relatively speaking. Part of autism spectrum symptoms is apparent insensitivity to pain and I took that to the tee for my whole life. Even now as I struggle to walk on my ankle, I am hesitant to see a doctor because I want to be seen as a macho man but will probably see one Tuesday or Monday if I have time prior to Power Abs. I hardly ever even take Ibuprofen, not because I don't feel pain that well, but because I have the false impression that I will get addicted to it. Autism sometimes has a hard time of explaining itself with pain. Today as it's over a hundred I was walking on the pavement and grimacing without shoes on and realized it when I was outside of the fence and had to walk on grass. Physical pain is hard for me to grasp even as I've gone through more injuries that have been serious and semi-serious than almost anybody I know my age or close to it except for possibly my sister and one of my best friends. On an emotional side of things, I shut down sometimes when I am afraid of being burned by others. It took me a long time to grasp the idea of being close to a friend because I had a tough time being trusting. I had been hurt by so many people either physically, verbally, and emotionally, and I'm not that far removed from a relationship that was abusive on all of those levels. I guess in some instances I've had religious abuse too. Due to lack of understanding for things outside of my control dealing with or not dealing with autism, I've had to leave a couple of churches. I got to the place of forgiveness with one of them not too long ago, I will be working on the other one for years to come. The other one hurt because of reasons like some of them fostering close friendships with me, being in leadership for a while, and them being close in age. I thought I could trust them more. But due to circumstances outside of my own, I have a hard time reconciling forgiveness and I'm going to be bitter for a while. And that's OK. In other senses of emotion, this is a hard blog to write. Probably one of my hardest. I didn't cry for years and years, and since I cried at youth group as a leader-in-training, I have cried at school numerous times, at church numerous times, at conferences at least once, at sunsets a lot, at movies quite a bit (sometimes through most of the thing, ask anyone who has watched Soul Surfer with me, I'm a mess), and at home more than a few times. I'm almost crying right now as I write about my experiences with this. Emotions do not come easy for individuals with autism and it hasn't been any easier for me, but as I'm much more empathetic with age and not being afraid to be seen as an individual with a soft heart, it's gotten easier for me. Finally, the need of safety is a need I didn't have that affected my emotions for a while. I lived with a brain injured drug addict, a guy that was an elitist, and two felons prior to living with my current roommate, who has some pretty big issues of his own and while I can work around the issues with my current roommate and I could with the elitist, the safety issues of when I was living with the felons or the brain injured drug addict was such that I was afraid that I either was going to get hit or eventually killed on a semi-regular basis. My current roommate has issues of his own for sure, but they are seemingly minuscule most of the time compared to fearing for your own life. No one should be that afraid. I was spending whole days at school because I was afraid of losing my life and so I escaped and that caused a sense of bad conflict management (avoidance is a conflict management tactic), but I felt safer and no one should have to go through that, and someone with autism should have a much safer life than that. Stay tuned for my next topic: the Iantern: or what I've learned on the first month-plus with a non-profit.