A promise - A break from our regularly scheduled programming

When I found out that I had aspergers, and was made aware of some of the ways it had been contributing to who I was, I made a promise to myself.

You see when you have a brain that is wired in this way, there is an increased chance that you will settle for what you have and convince yourself of a few things...
It is the best that you are capable of.
This is what is comfortable.
This is where I feel safe.
These things combined can (and in my case did) trick you into convincing yourself that this is what happy is, or this is the amount of happy that I deserve. In my case neither of these was true, it just took me a lot of time to come to grips with.

The promise that I made myself was this. I would no longer stop myself from going after the things that I want, simply because it was outside my comfort zone or I was scared of the consequences. I started to write the words 'if not now, when...' on my arm in thick black texta every morning so that I would have a constant visual reminder of this promise I had made myself. I did this for six months, every single day (a habit like this one is an easy one to keep going for someone who has aspergers, it's the starting that is hard). After that point I decided that it was important enough to me that I had it tattooed there instead.

Yes I am sitting here at uni on a beautiful Sunday morning writing in my blog.

This promise of course is a difficult one for anyone to keep, and is especially difficult for someone who deals with anxiety, and brick walls when trying to expand. To be honest it is something that I fight against myself every day to try to continue doing even though it has been 7 years now. And to be brutally honest, I hold myself up to a very high standard and when I set this challenge to myself I had no idea how hard it would be. I have failed to live up to this promise as much as I have succeeded, and when I do fail, I tend to beat myself up about it pretty bad. But I get better at it every single day.

Without having to trouble your imagination too much I'm sure you can imagine that there are risks involved with a strategy such as this, and those risks are increased greatly when another person is involved. One of the things that I have always struggled with is reading a situation and knowing the best course of action to take. As a result, I tend to have to guess, and as much as I'm sure it is a surprise to everyone, I'm not always right. So in the case of personal relationships (be they boy/girl type stuff or just regular friendships) a person like myself might need people to be a little bit more patient than they are used to being. I will make the type of mistakes that you will think to yourself "how could he not see that was the wrong thing to do?" but as long as you point those mistakes out to me then I can try and learn from them. A person with aspergers, even one who is lucky enough to be high functioning such as myself is high maintenance for anyone who has to deal with them, not in a constantly needs to be looked after sense (because for the most part they will be fine just sitting by themselves) but in a patience and forgiveness sense. There will be mistakes and we learn differently, so if you don't take the time to point them out and why they are mistakes we can not grow from them.

This morning I made a mistake. I pushed when I should have pulled. Deep down, I knew that I needed to pull. I made this mistake because of the promise. There is something I want, something I feel is worth fighting for. And so I looked at my arm. 

Just as a side note here, it is important to note that I have spent the last two days straight being quite hard on myself for certain things that I considered failings. When I do get to the point where I am being hard on myself it has been pointed out to me that I am not good company and in some cases I'm actually a bit weird, and not in a good way. So when I looked down at my arm, the last thing I needed was to add another failure to the list.

So I looked at my arm, and as I lay there I thought about the risk involved and the fact that either outcome was going to feel like I had failed. Then I chose the one where I was keeping the promise to myself. I thought about the words I had chosen and I went for it. I created a hope in my head that it would play out a certain way, like my life is some stupid fucking movie and things will work out for me because I'm the protagonist (I do this more often than I would like to admit). It backfired of course, played out in the exact opposite way and honestly I feel like absolute shit about it. There was a line there and I could not see it. It was the perfect example of "how could he not see that was the wrong thing to do?" 

Every day a mistake gets made, some of them are small, some of them are big. This mistake somehow feels like it could be both. I am sorry for this mistake, I honestly am, and not because I may have harmed my chances of getting what I want. I'm sorry because I upset someone that I care about a great deal. But unlike other mistakes I have made I would not ask for a do-over, because I made this one by trying to be true to myself. The timing could not possibly be more awful, and so I now must ask for the patience and forgiveness...

Please forgive me

If I act a little strange

For I know not what I do

Feels like lightning

Running through my brain

Every time I look at you

That's from a song, it's not mine but sometimes even those of us that do not struggle with words feel like someone else has said it perfectly.