COMING OUT: I have hid my Asperger's Syndrome all along. (Part I) (Personal Entry)

Foreword

Some will think "TL;DR" if the note is too long, therefore I’ll limit each installment to 750 words and place the overflow in a "Part II" and beyond.

This note stayed private until I gained my 560th friend on Facebook. I chose 560 as the threshold instead of 500 because now that I've surpassed such a wonderful milestone, I don't want to slip back below it.

Passive pruning of narrow-minded "friends"

I predict up to a classroom’s amount of friends will defriend me upon reading my admission that I have Asperger's. This note is a form of "passive friend pruning." I'll let narrow-minded individuals take me off of their list because I don't need narrow-minded people in my life; if they cannot accept me especially for what I was born with, they were likely to be a hindrance all along anyway.

Date of Draft Creation

I started the entry on Monday morning, September 8, 2008, underwent revisions thereafter, and saved it as a "Draft" until somebody became my 560th friend here.

Onto the subject at hand

For quite a long time now, I've hesitated revealing my Asperger's Syndrome to other people save for psychologists, (some) family members, and very few friends. The reason why was because I've been bitten for it multiple times.

I'd often be treated worse for revealing it

Instead of cutting me slack, some peers would pick on me more, so I kept it under wraps until I knowing someone whom I thought I could trust with this information. Some of those people still liked me less even though I was confident their stance toward me would either get better, or at least remain unchanged.

Therefore, I haven't revealed it to even some of my best friends, fearing being liked less by them as well. I had no idea how Kyle Baack and Jacob Holland would react to my coming forward with this "new development" so I kept it from them as well for a long time. Now that they'll have seen this note, I hope to hear from them their reactions.

Issues surrounding Asperger’s in Japan

Another set of guys helped me a lot back in Japan - Garrett Fine and Craig Henry. (It is quite likely that Garrett will have taken me off his friends list by the time I posted this. If so, he'll have missed out!) Every little inkling of rejection from anyone anywhere hurt still, so I kept it from them (Unsure about Garrett; maybe Armstrong told him while I wasn't present?) in case they were going to like me less.

I only told Andrew Armstrong (the guy with a shouldered chip) and Robert Hyde because I was drunk enough not to care one night. (Since Japan, drinking at parties isn’t so appealing now.) Hyde said Asperger’s was a "beautiful disease" and sounded quite accepting about it. He even said geniuses have Asperger’s too, and something about Asperger's makes them more academically intelligent than the norm, so I had hidden talents too. (Yes, I do.)

Showe's "Tatemae"

Garrett warned me about the concept of "Tatemae" (outer, shown feelings) and "Honne," (inner, true feelings.) It turned out Hyde was only giving me good tatemae.

“Ronald” (name changed) even took me off his friends list in June for some reason; when I told him about my finding this out, he claimed that his sister called him (All the way from Britain?? How about a free Facebook message?) He said she called just to tell him to take off another guy named "Christian" because the fiancé betrayed her. Since he said he was so drunk early in the morning, he deleted me by mistake. “Ronald” even showed me who the other Christian was he talked about so he sounded quite believable in the meantime.

“Showe” also claimed to have realized the mistake a few minutes later, and thought, "Oh, if I send him a request to add him back now, he'll realize I took him off." After (apparently) clearing it up, I friended him again; he accepted.

“Showe” took me off again on August 7th. He knew that I've left Japan (and he stayed for 2-3 more weeks until returning to the UK,) so I couldn’t go face-to-face about it. I decided that he harbored some inner ill feeling of me, and since now he'd be on the other side of the world, I'd let him slide.

(Next Topic Continued on Part II)