I was a destructive alchoholic and addict for 18 years. It nearly killed me. I went to treatment in 1991 and have been sober since. My therapist thought it odd that my obsession with 12 Step recovery is actually the very thing that saved my life I did not think I was self-medicating. I just liked to get high. It made everything fit and it gave me a social outlet. I was deep into the drug culture and my odd behavior was easily explained away by my heavy drug use and alcohol consumption. I was a functional addict and as alcoholic and did not see alcohol and drugs as a problem until I got involved with the Crips out of South Centeal and found myself in a multistate drug distribution ring. I messed up the money and they were going to kill me. That's the thing about the drug culture. It can go real bad real fast. Recovery was a real struggle for me. I was undiagnosed and really didn't get into the fellowship. I did, however, get into the 12 Steps and have helped hundreds of alcoholics and addicts to recover. Quite a few of them are undiagnosed Aspies, and my diagnosis has them looking at the possibility that they are on the spectrum. I have a few Aspie friends on recovery. I am doing much better than they because they are at the stage where they want so desperately to fit into the fellowship. My experience tells me it's not going to happen, but they must figure it out for themselves just as I did. I had one young lady die from drugs at age 27. She struggled to stay sober. After I was diagnosed I felt I had the key to help her get sober and stay sober. Alas, she was too far gone. That was a sad day when Sarah went away.
That is an interesting story, one that would have me thinking fate were at work here if I believed in such things. Because
if I were anyone other than myself, if I'd lived any other life than this, I would find it extremely difficult to reconcile my concept of someone that has HFA with any capacity for something like gang affiliation. I'd doubtlessly label it in black & white terms and maybe call such a thing, IDK...mutually exclusive?
But I've been there myself. As you said, drugs take you very quickly down roads you wouldn't otherwise go down in a million years. It's a slippery slope. After using meth for a while, i decided to teach myself myself how to make it - not to sell or give toanyone, but to keep myself supplied & aviod associating with drug dealers. Since I lack any sense of "street smarts" (orcommon sense for that matter) I got myself busted with alacrity.
Prison is unpleasant for anyone, but for someone with HFA it's a very special kind of hell. The defense mechanisms & coping skills we'd previously relied on to get us through social adversity are simply not available. There's nowhere to be alone, you're surrounded at all times by people who specialize in exploiting weakness. You even shower in a crowd, and when you get to your cell you'll have a cellmate who does NOT read, whose only escape is * shudder* conversation - the ultimate Aspie deadend. For me it invariably went downhill as I could neither refuse to talk nor feign interest for very long. While all other inmates would beg, plead, and snitch on their best friends to stay out of solitary confinement, I did everything I could to land there as much as possible. It was the only peace or joy I had of any kind during the 7 years I was locked up. Any kind of trouble that puts you in a separation cell is aslo big enough to push your parole date back, and I had to do an extra 3 years because solitude was so necessary for me that I intentionally got into trouble, trading any possibility of parole for that year for a few sweet days of escape.
Anyway there's a point: In Texas we have a lot of Spanish-speaking people and hearing it spoken around me so much in prison I found myself fascinated with the language & it became my new special interest. I checked out books on it in the library, watched Telenovelas with the "Eses" and somehow my attempts to immerse myself in Mexican-American culture resulted in me becoming a member of Texas Syndicate. I think my social reticence was somehow misinterpreted by them as silent strength or something, and for my part I've always been susceptible to a Dances With Wolves/The Last Samurai kind of mentality (I've read that a lot of people with HFA, etc. do very well in foreign cultures where their social mistakes are easily forgiven & generally taken as unfamiliarity with the culture).
I might be wrong but I'm thinking an autistic gang member has GOT to be extraordinarily rare and only made possible by extremely serendipitous conditions (just pretend I'm using that word right).
Another thing I want to add is along the same paradoxical lines. I'm glad that NA has been so effective in managing your substance abuse problem. I am no stranger to those groups but have never been able to derive any benefit from them. I'm uncomfortable, I fidget, I'm bored out of my mind. I don't like "sharing" and I don't get the point when others do. I don't make the social connections that are crucial to the program. It feels like punishment the whole time I'm in there and I'm acutely aware that I'm not like the people around me. Once again, I don't belong.
Anyway, thanks for your input here.
