Friends Without Faces

It was now June of 1999 and the anxiety that was taking over my life was beginning to have more of a profound effect on me. As I have said before, routines are very important to people with Asperger's syndrome. We thrive on routine. It helps us navigate through what can be a very confusing world that we live in. I had a daily routine when it came to doing house chores. I came up with 7 different chores that needed to be done at my little studio apartment and did one a day. Monday was take out the trash, Tuesday was wipe down the tops and so on. When I was doing well, I kept up with the routine. Going to work is the same way. You have a routine. You work the same 5 days a week and get up at the same time and catch the bus at the same time. When I was doing well, I was rarely sick and never missed the bus. If I am distracted or not doing well ,this routine gets affected as well.

My room started to decline. I don't remember this being a conscious decision or how it just crept up on me, but the apartment started to decline in appearance. I began to be late for the bus a couple of times as well and even took a rare sick day. Clothes started to be scattered all over my room. The mess I would make from eating would not be picked up. When I would go outside my nervous twitches were more pronounced. My level of discomfort continued to rise tremendously. Even when I would talk to people my patterns would change a bit. Things I was thinking would slip out and I would say them out loud. Sometimes I was even unaware of it. Then things in my room got really bad. The cockroaches came out. And the more the apartment was a mess, the more cockroaches I got.

All of a sudden over a few month period my apartment was just over run with cockroaches and I was so deep in anxiety I didn't even think about cleaning up my place. The basic thought of getting a can of Raid or doing a deep cleaning was not even running through my head. I was just on survival mode I guess. Just going through the motions and struggling with work as well, I was getting write ups with work. Struggling to adjust to the new section I was working in. Our tight knit group of co-workers was no more, We had all been split up with the change. Just when my place got really bad and it was swarming with cockroaches the tv in my room lost the picture.

The simple solution to the tv going out would have been to notify somebody who worked there so they could fix it. The problem was that my room had become an absolute disaster. There were cockroaches running all over the place. I mean ungodly amounts. They were out in the open. One time I went to microwave some food and when I took it out a cockroach scurried out. I think he thanked me for the sauna. So I just dealt with having a tv with no picture. I remember listening to the Nanny. For some reason this always sticks out to me. How depressed does one have to be to listen to the Nanny without seeing it? Fran Drescher is beautiful and she did a great job with that show and all but that voice is something else. It was not a pleasant voice. And here I was without the benefit of seeing her lovely face listening to the Nanny. At least I had seen the show before so I could envision her as I listened.

At this time the show Friends was really hot. I had never actually seen an episode of it. I had seen billboards with their faces on it. I can recall seeing a billboard with all of their faces on it. I had seen Mathew Perry, David Schwimmer, Jenifer Aniston and the rest of them but I didn't know which characters they played. I started to listen to Friends on the tv. I had no idea what Ross looked like or Joey or Monica or any of them. I loved the theme song though. That doesn't require a visual. And I remember thinking I'll be there for you" was the greatest Tv show theme song I had ever heard. "So no one told you your life was gonna be this way, your jobs a job you're broke, your love life D.O.A" Yeah what a great song. Still pretty catchy to this day.

When I think back to these days an obvious answer comes to mind. All I had to do was ask for help. All I had to do was tell somebody how much I was struggling. I needed to reach out and say I am not okay. This seems simple but for me it was not. I had never been comfortable asking for help. I had never been comfortable showing that I was vulnerable or anything less than perfect. At this point in my life I had always tried to carry my struggles by myself. At a very young age I realized I was different from other people and I became very uncomfortable with this. I always wanted to prove to myself that I was normal. I always fought so hard internally to challenge my difficulties, to not acknowledge them and because I was uncomfortable knowing I was not normal, knowing I struggled in any area that can be considered social then I was really going to make sure that no one else saw what my issues were. So asking for help while I was living amongst the cockroaches, struggling at work, dealing with the highest anxiety levels I had ever known, well, that was just out of the question for me. Because that would mean admitting that I had a problem. So I just kept going. I had been sober for 3 years now, I no longer had Shawna in my life, I had given up on dating as I decided celibacy was much needed at this juncture as a matter of fact I hadn't had sex since 1996. I had nothing to fall back on. Even the anger which I was used to carrying around with me had given way. All of my coping mechanisms I had I no longer found useful and maybe that is why I fell into depression because I didn't know how to cope.