An Aspie's Life: The Untold and Unknown Story

Chapter 9 - Standing Up for Yourself

Chapter 9

Standing up for Yourself

This chapter and the one following it are two sides of the same coin. There may be times when peer pressure sets in. When someone tries to force their opinion on you. Someone trying to make you go somewhere you don’t want to go or be someone you don’t want to be.

These become the times that can undermine an Aspie’s fragile mind and confidence as well. They are sensitive when it comes to their thoughts, feelings, and plans. They have to work harder than most to build up those inner walls of confidence. Standing up for their own well being becomes harder since they are all ready doing everything they can to make more friends. Should they give in to those pressures then they can easily lose themselves in the process. They will give up all their ideas and hopes just because it’s easier to follow the crowd than to be themselves.

Some people are taught how to stand up for themselves from the very beginning I’m sure. However, most of the times I’ve heard this happening is after this has already happened multiple times. They’ve all ready given up once, so it makes it easier to happen again. The advice to stand up can come too late for some to change.

These days everyone has heard they must stand up for themselves or what they believe in but only to a certain point. So why am I covering this here if it’s common knowledge?

As an Aspie, standing up for myself never came naturally. I was just sorta there in the background following after other people hoping to make friends by proxy. By definition, if anyone in high school or even college had known this about me and could have gotten past my feeble objects and barriers, I might have turned into a very different person, for better or worse.

In previous chapters, I stated the reason why Aspies have issues standing up for themselves though not directly. People with Asperger’s Syndrome aren’t outgoing. They have issues speaking their mind in a crowd of people they want to fit in with. Even if that crowd of people isn’t really the type of people they should be associating with.

It might take a long time for an Aspie to get up the nerves to stand up and go against the grain. While their thoughts may not be “mainstream”, voicing them isn’t something that will come naturally to them.

For Aspies, learning to stand up for themselves is crucial. It takes time and hard work. But being able to prevent yourself from being taken advantage of is a life lesson everyone has to learn at some point.

Although my diagnosis states I’m actually more suspicious of people’s actions, that doesn’t mean that I will naturally be able to tell someone no. A perfect example of this is when I was in college. At the community college I finally ended up in, I had a roommate that was just the type to do what she wanted because she could even though I didn’t see that at the time. I, on the other hand, genuinely liked helping people and was hoping to make friends in college as nearly all my childhood friends and I had gone our own ways.

My roommate didn’t have a car and I was going to get some food out. She asked if she and a couple of her friends could come with me. They would pay for their own food. It seemed like a simple enough request at the time. So, we went and hit up a drive through and they ate their food in my car as I started to head back towards campus.

However, she wanted me to make another quick stop; I figured it wouldn’t hurt so I allowed it without a thought or question. That was until she got a phone call and told the person on the other end that she and her friends were going somewhere to get tattoos. That’s when I started to have an inkling that I was being used and naive. I hadn’t even asked where we were going. Yet, there I was pulled up into the parking lot of a tattoo parlor.