Friday 18 January 2013

An Aspergirl at Secondary School - Friends

Hello there. To my new followers, welcome to my Aspergirl series. For those newbies, I have Asperger's Syndrome, which is the lowest form of Autism on the spectrum. I have been blogging over the last months about living with Asperger's and how I coped with working in a small and large office and communicated with staff. Today I am talking about how I coped with friendships at secondary school.

I remember the day I first went to secondary school. I thought, oh my, this is a big building. I always thought that my being shy was down the school being bigger than I could cope with, and maybe it was in a way. Anyway, the only girl I knew in my class was a girl that I hated because she had picked on me at primary school (I hated the fact I had been put in the same class as her). I shall tell more about her later on when I talk about bullying. Most of my class either paired up or went into groups. A few of the girls I thought believed themselves to be better than us others and didn't really speak to them. I said hello to others in the class. In time, at school times, I did go with this girl I hated and another girl, whom I now think had a form of dwarfism.

Over the years, I made friends with another girl in another class, and she was part of a group of other girls. I ended up being friends with a couple of them, but always felt like the outsider of the group. I never really made any true friends in all the years I was there. Always on the outside. That was until the fifth year. There was one girl in my history lesson who sat behind me, she was friends with one of the girls in the other group of girls. This girl seemed to want to ping things at me. She has since apologised to me for doing that, as she is now my only closest friend I have. We became great friends and visited each other and went to each other's houses like friends do. Then came the sixth form, and my new friend went to a college whilst I stayed at school to do a business studies diploma. We stayed friends and have been ever since.

So that was how I coped with friendships at secondary school. Not very well. That is part of Asperger's as we do tend to find it hard to communicate with others and esp make friends.

Next time when I do this series, I will talk about bullying at secondary school.

1 comment:

Candy Gourlay said...

It can't have been easy having such communication difficulties in secondary school. It's hard enough just being a teenager. I have to say, if I had it all to do again, I would never want to be a teenager again.