I really hate not being understood.
Yesterday in class my phone randomly shut off. I always keep it on and set to vibrate just in case there's an emergency. I was fiddling with it whilst I was waiting for the rest of the class to finish up a quiz, trying to make sure it was still working, and I ended up being told off.
I hand-wrote the text of this post in my notes - I was sick to my stomach and almost tearing up, just because a professor thinks I was trying to disrespect him. It's things like that - little situations where I do something that is misconstrued - that make me really unsure of myself as a person.
I really have never been too good with making mistakes to begin with. When I was a kid, I would get so frustrated with myself that I would scream and cry. Much to my parents' dismay, I would even do this in school, which made things rough for me at Somerville Elementary. Naturally, this means I take social criticisms really hard, like this.
I never, ever intend to disrespect anybody. Things like this, however, are very hard for me to deal with, because I end up being perceived as a bad person, which I don't think I am. I just wish other people could see through my social mistakes and understand the person behind them.
Is this one of the differences between someone with Asperger's and someone without? If the same thing happened to me (and similar things have), and the professor thought I was disrespecting him, I simply wouldn't care. I know that I wasn't, and I would just take it and shrug it off. In general this sort of thing doesn't bother me. If it weren't a lecture class, or I really liked the professor, I would explain to him later the exact details and hope he understood. I guess what I'm asking is, how exactly did Asperger's make this confrontation worse? (I think one of my shy friends would react in the same way.) Is it difficult to explain yourself, or your prof didn't give you a chance?
ReplyDeleteI hope I don't come off as flip or dismissive; I would like to understand how you feel. My best friend's brother has Asperger's, so I also feel like I should learn some more.