Tasia

“I swore to myself that I would do everything in my power to protect myself from being hated and targeted again. The only problem was, I didn't have a clue how to do that, or where to start. When you're not on the same social wavelength as anyone in your general vicinity, figuring out when people stop liking you isn't the only challenge. You also don't know WHY the don't like you.
So I made the kind of desicions that make sense to a scared and rudderless eleven-year-old desperate to become less of a target: I obsessively studied people and characters who weren't social pariahs and tried to reproduce anything that might play a part in the way other people responded to them. Then I hepercitically overanalyzed every interaction I had for any hints that I might be screwing up again.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“Recicprocal conversation, for example, had always been a major stumbling block for me. It's not that I didn't care about what other people were doing or thinking, I just couldn't wrap my head around the necessity of asking them specific things to demonstrate that interest. My ideal conversation would be an exchange of interconnected statements. One person could initiate by bringing up an idea or point that they thought another person could be interested in. The second person could then relate their own ideas or points to those initial statements. The first person could bounce further sentences that were punctuated with periods and the occasional exclamation mark off of that, and so forth. As I have been repeatedly informed, though, this fails to convey proper investment to most other parties. Apparently it can make you sound self-absorbed and aloof. I tried to remedy my natural conversational style for years, but could not properly wrap my head around finding the right things to ask, putting them into the proper words and then making my voice appropriately rise at the end of those assembled words. My awkwardly crafted and even more awkwardly worded questions stopped conversations almost as dead as my lack of them had.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“There was just nothing that I accomplished during my time there that gave me any indication that real life wasn't just as mercenary, scary and completely outside of my skill set as high school. I was still awkward and strange, still missing cues and feeling like I was on a thirty-second (or thirty-minute) delay from everyone around me. I still thought that tolerance might be the best I could hope for.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“I wanted people I could cry and laugh with, share memories and inside jokes. I wanted to go to malls and movie theatres. I wanted to get invited to parties and maybe even work up the nerve to go once or twice.
To accomplish that, I was going to need a new plan to attack. Being myself was still. unfortunately, out. I was starting to like me, but I'd also established that I was a girl of obscure tastes, so I couldn't really count on anyone else being on board. My earlier method was also out now that I recognized its two glaring flaws: 1. No matter how hard I tried, the normals seemed to smell the not normal on me; and 2. I always seemed to hit a point where I resented the failing effort that I was putting into all of that bullshit and morphed into a snarky contrarian who wanted to set everything on fire.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir