This is the third big move I’ve made in my life, I moved to Trinidad from my birth home (Ireland) when I was five, I moved to Barbados when I was thirty-one and now I’ve moved to the US (temporarily) at fifty-three.
With each move I seem to get more and more alone, moving to Trinidad I was with four other people, my mother and father and my two sisters, the move to Barbados I was with only one person, my ex-wife and now, with my latest move I am by myself…by progression the next move should be my permanent one, where even I stay behind.
At the beginning of each move I remember feeling very much alone (except for when I was five, I do not remember much of my early years at all) and not just alone due to a lack of friends but truly alone, stranded in an unnatural environment.
At the best of times I feel alone due, I’ve since learnt, mostly because of my Asperger's, in what most people see as a sea of normality. It always amazed me when my friends could feel at home in radically different environments with just the addition of a few known elements, a Starbucks’, Timmy’s, MacDonalds’ or in the case of most Caribbean men a bar.
But alone is what I feel, I mean even if you change my planned daily activities, I get lost is a sea of uneasiness. Order to me is familiarity, I know what is coming, what is expected. It’s what I’ve planned for and what I’m comfortable with. Change that and I get lost immediately and it takes me time to get back up to speed with the new things, even a change in the order of events can put me into a tail spin.
I wasn’t as alone before I was diagnosed with Asperger's, in the pre Asperger's days I just could not understand why people acted and re-acted as they did, and I spent a lot of time trying to find out why. Since my diagnoses I now know that I am the odd man out and no longer part of the maddening crowd...Alone!
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