Letter to a Fellow Aspie

11/26/2011

I liked the phrase “meaningful meanderings” that you wrote in the previous email. It sounded a bit like poetry. The email got my mind wandering about the point of life, wealth, and living here in Texas. It’s so funny that I now have this “American dream” with the house and the kids and enough money to be happy—as taboo as that is to mention. It’s the sort of dream that many people work for and think is the ultimate goal. But to me, money has never been about spending. I’ve always seen it instead as my get-out-of-jail-free plan to not have to work again, as strange as that may sound.

In theory, if you save enough money in the bank, you could live off the interest, and that is my idea of how I could reach freedom. A life in which I could never again be forced to do something that made me feel so bad. A freedom to always be at least “okay.” In the meanwhile, I’m just sort of “meandering” life because I can’t find a place (a niche) that works for me.

I had so much potential once. I had scholarships through high school. At university, I won a prestigious summer scholarship at the University of Queensland and graduated from the University of Melbourne in the top 3 or 4 percent of chemical engineering students. I have bachelor’s degrees in science and in engineering. I worked so hard to reach my goals and achieved outstanding results. I was driven. The world was my oyster, and I really felt like I was heading somewhere back then…

But that was then. I’m not exactly sure why I went nowhere.

Sometimes I think that something really special is there in me, still. I daydream about all the things I could be. But somehow, I’ve lost it. And I honestly don’t know if I will ever find it again. Work hit, and it didn’t work for me in a way that I can’t even explain. All I know is I can’t ever do that again. I don’t ever want to feel that way again. I don’t think I could keep going if I did. So that circles back to the idea of living off money.

I’m waffling here, but I think you are so much like me that you will understand my meaning. You seem to have found a little niche and a way to wander through life that has meaningful things in it for you. I’d like to find that too. Something that makes me want to wake up each day and get going.

I mean, looking after my kids is important, and I would never stop doing that, because they need me to. I think I am a great parent for them. So I’m not complaining or saying my lot in life isn’t important. I was just thinking going down the track how nice it would be to find some of these little things that are meaningful to me, for ME. Not for someone else’s sake or to impress or appear to be doing the right thing. Until then, I’m just wandering and sometimes looking for little things that make me feel alive.

But it’s been good. Somehow, talking to you has momentarily snapped me out of thinking about the little things and viewing the big picture as it sits now. Sorry about the long train of thought. For some reason, I feel I can talk openly with you. I don’t really write stuff like that to people usually.

Michelle