I've been an introvert by nature all my life, due in part to my legalistic upbringing, but also due to the fact of being born with Asperger's Syndrome (which I wouldn't discover until I was 33 years old). This made it extremely difficult for me to have any friends, or even maintain any desire to associate with people outside my home. One symptom of A.S. is having an advanced vocabulary, but another is the tendency to take things very literally, and not always read facial expressions accurately. Combined with my elders' incredibly short tempers, quite honestly my formative years were 90% hell. And when my hormones kicked in at age 13, everything instantly got monumentally worse - the word "sex" was even spoken by those around me. My aunt was barren, and I never saw any joy at all in her marriage to my uncle (they fought like crazy), so I was pretty sure nothing physical was happening behind their bedroom door. But my own issues just kept going into the stratosphere, uncontrollable and insanely maddening beyond reason. I battled a porn addiction for five years, wound up in an adulterous affair multiple times over another five years, and then spent more than a decade blaming myself after it all ended (because it was never solely about sex for me; I truly loved the woman involved).
Then, in early 2015, my beloved Mom suddenly passed from an unexpected lung cancer attack; she was only 55 years old. I completely lost it, raging against God and staying in a reclusive emotional state for two years. I tried journaling, but I eventually became so infuriated with my perceived lack of progress than my handwriting devolved into a series of indecipherable scribbles. Once I moved to my current location in 2018, a cousin from my Dad's family helped me get on a better medicine for my epilepsy, and my previously-insane fear and anger eventually stabilized (taking the wrong drug for 8 years was a total bitch). These days, I'm 44 years old, single, and my mood ranges every day from fairly peaceful to a stress level on par with a nuclear bomb. I want to be married someday, but my previous relational problems continually haunt me (its not easy for someone with an obsessive or addictive personality to let anything go for long). I go to church every week, and I've developed some fairly close friendships there, but most of them are old enough to be my parents or grandparents. The folks I see who are anywhere near my age are already married with kids, so that makes me feel left out a lot of the time.
