I mentioned in some of my articles I made earlier that I was affected by Asperger’s Syndrome, such as examples in special interests & in AS. This syndrome made me who I am and give me some strength, but it created a big burden in my life, especially at school. I never knew that I was diagnosed with AS at first, hence my denial of myself affected by one, and I didn’t understand why I’ve taken so many therapies such as occupational therapy & speech therapy back then.
In addition, I didn’t feel as autistic as my other classmates suffering from the same disorder. I started noticing that I had troubles related to autism since the 2nd half of my 1st grade in elementary school and decided on using shadow teachers to help me with my school work & relationships with my friends. I suffered from loneliness as well, and wondered why did my friends just played with their gangs, didn’t invite me to play, and didn’t make as meaningful friendships that I wish I had but I didn’t do anything wrong with my friends, in addition of my disinterest in playing with them.
I felt jealous of my friends getting along really easily and learn without LSD (Limited School Development) and not involving in any therapies like I did every Wednesday afternoon. To add an insult to injury, I suffered from teasing, insults, isolation, and singling out as categories of kids with ASD as ‘second-rate students’, from both friends at school within a socially hostile environment for someone like me, as well as my ex-driver in which I was forced to listen to nasty Campur Sari music and endure several insults from him for my 1st 4 years of school.
Back then, I viewed being autistic as a sort of joke, a sign that the person with it should be singled out as bully targets, and as a tag of inferiority compared to the rest of my classmates.
This gets nastier from 4th grade up to 7th grade in which I went to school without any shadow teacher and my sister came to the same Madania Elementary School as I did. Not only enduring bullying from my driver & classmates, loneliness, and perception of someone with ASD like me, my sister didn’t help either. Back then, she didn’t accept the fact that her big brother suffered from autism like this and added the pain I have to endure every weekday.
In my family, only my mom understood me, accepting me & be there for me through every sorrow & pain I have to go through. In addition, I wasn’t as expressive or have as much courage/confidence to speak like I am now, and I really felt the burden of constantly masking in front of my classmates in order to be accepted & considered cool to get as many friends as much as possible.
Unfortunately, it didn’t go as well as I hoped, I only get a few and the ones suffering from autism that my ex-driver thinks that I deserved to stay with them for life, which I didn’t feel good if I hang out with them, which is the reason I want to keep communication with them as little as possible & keep distance as much as possible in order to move on. From this point, I felt the social environment gets even more hostile since hitting 5th grade, with a tight-knit social hierarchy & exclusivist mentality that permits only specific kinds of kids are allowed in their gang, and the extracurricular activities, vocal, theater & musical studies didn’t help much.
I didn’t really have the extracurricular, vocal, theater & musical studies that really suit me or picked up my interest, that is until I went to comic club extracurricular activity in 7th grade. If the students there are more accepting & open towards me with friendlier social environment, my life would be very different.
I also mentioned about my special interest in cars, which is started from playing with toy cars like my nephew does now, but it got even more intense since my dad bought me an Auto Catalog magazine which literally includes almost every car sold in the world back then.
Since then, I read car magazines & brochures thousands of times until it’s almost torn off, and I eventually know car brand’s country of origin (ex. Peugeot is French, Holden is Australian, etc), engine configurations (ex. V10, Flat 6, etc), engine the car has (ex. A ’01 Honda Civic has a 1.7 liter Single Overhead Cam Inline 4 Cylinder, a Ford GT has a supercharged 5.4 liter dual overhead cam V8, etc), car segmentation (ex. Honda Jazz is in the same segmentation as Toyota Yaris, VW Polo, Mazda 2, etc.), and more.
My special interest was so strong that my mom banned me from reading car magazines & comics, as well as playing video games during weekdays in order to keep my mind focused on my studies.
To cope with stress from school, as well as the lack of access of things that are my special interests, that was before I had internet at home, I turned to cartoons/anime shown at cable TV, and I watched them to calm myself down & distract me from the pain I suffered at school, which eventually turned into one of my passions besides automotive. I was also introduced to sports (especially soccer) through playing Winning Eleven insoccer game with my sister, which opens up my interest to the sport.
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