... since my late adolescence maybe. I grew another foot taller after I'd left high school at 16. At 19 things got really weird (three more inches to go) and I was "asked" to take time out from college twice, which is why it took me nine years to earn a four year degree. Along with the autistic spectrum super-power of obsessively extreme focus came the voices in my head. Which I ignore. I ignore a lot of "reality" voices too.
When I was twelve I knew everything in a weird "little professor" Asperger's way. I started building computers. It's something genetic, fifty/fifty inheritance apparently, with various levels of functionality. My grandfather was functional as an Army Air Force officer and then as an Apollo Project aerospace engineer, but his personal life was always a flaming catastrophe, smoldering at best. Two of his siblings were entirely dysfunctional in ordinary society. The more functional siblings and other members of the family supported the dysfunctional whenever they crashed and burned but it was nothing anybody talked about. Mental illness was hidden in the closet, much like LGBT issues. My grandma and her sister were wild things in roaring 'twenties Hollywood and had many diverse friends, including my grandpa. They protected their friends. I grew up in a family that was friendly and protective of "eccentric" people. I didn't realize I was one of them until later.
I thought I was doing okay in this present until last summer when I landed in a locked psych ward. The first thing that flies out the window is my ability to judge my own mental state, and I've got lots of experience pretending to be all right even when I'm not. I'm pretty sure I've never in my life been a danger to others, but I've frequently been a danger to myself. Okay, so add a new antipsychotic to the meds stew, it's got blech side effects, they all do, but the alternative is worse.
Maybe we're all here to collect stories. I feel sorry for anyone without a story.
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