The quote I wrote down yesterday was from a Asperger specialized therapist. Here’s another one by the same person:

Most clients I’ve met are dying of loneliness.

Most are guarding, full time, against a pervasive and nameless panic, or, in Sylvia Plath’s words, the “o-gape of complete despair”.

Asperger’s Syndrome is a weird animal. Among other things, there are hard to concile contradictions within it. As read in a review: ” the need for social interaction and the stress it causes; the desire to be alone and the fear of loneliness;” Being with people, even people I love, is draining. Being alone is dying.

I need time alone to charge, but it’s a very delicate search for equilibrium: I need to have people around me. I need interactions. I falter when I have nobody to connect with. Actually, I might need human interactions as much as any other person, it’s just that it’s a need than exhausts me when I fulfill it.

Without it, I’m just back to my inner self, and despair is a fitting description, in its age old meaning of hopelessness. It’s not about a huge sadness always looming, it’s just about not expecting anything from life. For what happiness is there for me out there?

I wrote about that long ago, in another place: people are quick to quote Horace: “Carpe Diem”, “seize the day”. What they usually forget is that the end of the sentence is “quam minimum credula postero”, IE. “don’t expect anything from tomorrow”. I’ve been told I’m not projecting myself in the future, it’s because when there’s pleasure to have today, the last thing I want to do is to think about when it won’t be there anymore.