I don't really know what I am. But I know I'm not normal.

I've been wanting to synthesize the sum of my gripes into one post. I can't seem to do that even now so I'm going to try and split this post into a few sections to summarise how I feel and why I feel this way. This isn't a post about how special I am. I hope I can find some answers.

All my life I remember being distinctly different from others. Not better, not worse but just different - like a barrier separating me from other people that we couldn't see but both silently acknowledged. Social conventions I was never good with as a kid; I would mimic what other children did but I always seemed to get yelled at by them. Back then I didn’t have an inkling as to what it could be that I was doing wrong as that was how I saw the situation; that I was abnormal and everyone else was normal.

Intellectually, life was great. I was top of the class in secondary school and my A-levels, and when everyone else seemed tired with the content material, I felt this urge, this need to learn more about it – not just the outline but the minutiae, the little details. I was always a perfectionist, I didn’t want to just do well but also do better than I did before, better than anyone else. The problem was it also meant I was again separated from other people; it wasn’t that I couldn’t talk to them but that I was so far ahead of them intellectually that I had little to no common ground to start a friendship with.

Emotionally, I was a stunted mess. Being attracted to girls just brought a myriad of confusing questions to the forefront: how do I talk to them? Can I just go up and say hello? I had a string of relationships but none ever really lasted long, or my crush on a girl would be too intense and it would end awkwardly. Controlling my emotions was always a big challenge, whether it was love or anger, and something I still struggle with today. I feel like a kid when it comes to handling my emotions, so frightened by their intensity but still swept along like an autumn leaf when they flared up – think Charlie Gordon from Flowers for Algernon. (Read that book btw, it’s very good)

I keep a close circle of friends – first come confidants who I talk to on a regular basis, and I feel comfortable and safe around. Second come colleagues, I can manage small conversation but anything else I sort of stumble and fall apart on. New people are frightening, like what am I meant to do or say? I get so paralysed at the thought that I almost rely on others to fill the air with small talk. I would curse myself for this, recalling some childhood bully’s words to wound myself. Why couldn’t I be normal? Why did I have to be the different one?

Last year I came upon a psychological report from my childhood where I was diagnosed as gifted and talented. At the time to me it seemed a summary of who I was, reading it helped clarify certain features of my personality others had called abnormal: an unusually large vocabulary, a very strong sense of justice, my obsession with collating information on a single topic (i.e. prehistory), this information was all there. I haven’t expressed it properly just then but when I read that report it was like recalling the name for a song whose tune you remember but not the name: I felt like I knew who or what I was.

Depression sent my identity quest into a tailspin. For 3 years I just stewed in my own self-hatred, just ambling by in life, doing what I could to keep up the appearance that I was alright. It’s still present today, but what it really did was mess up my sense of self – I didn’t know if I really was as terrible as I told myself, or if I was being unnecessarily harsh. Combine that with the intensity of emotion I described earlier and you can imagine how well that went.

It is a state of identity diffusion I feel – an incomplete sense of who I am, like a puzzle missing some of its pieces, therefore missing completeness. I can’t explain it, I haven’t been able to adequately define what this is to my friends, it’s a compulsion inside me to learn more, to find out more about myself and why I am the way I am; to ultimately find more people like me, kind of like in Odd John or X-Men. I’ve had Aspergers suggested as a possible reason and I’ve taken the relevant tests in r/aspergers and come off neurodivergent in those, but I don’t self-diagnose as it. I just can’t even figure out where to even begin. I’ve read Dabrowski and her works on gifted children, I’ve gone on the SENG website but now it’s just re-reading the same articles without coming any closer to figuring myself out.

I know I'm not normal, that I know for sure. But I have no idea how I go about exploring this further or what resources to access. I just want to know who I am.

(I’m sorry for the rambling nature of the post, I just feel this urge to get everything down as quickly as I can, structure or coherence be damned. I hope this makes at least some sense.)