Hi guys, sorry to waffle but get ready for a long one. My name is Matt and all my life I've felt like I didn't see the world in the same perspective as everyone else, people felt alien and unknowable and I sought comfort in numbers, recognizable patterns and geometrical shapes. This made me feel very guilty for a long time. People would feel hurt by me or get the feeling I really disliked them when for me I was being quite personable. For many years I shut myself away from the world and turned to gaming and drugs as a form of structured control and a way to quantify people and the things I didn't understand. I felt disgusting. I felt weird. I felt like no one loved me. This went on from my first memory to the day I met my (now) fiancé. I met her while at University and was hooked from the start, someone could finally see me for who I was because she'd been through such a similar thing and yet she was so confident in herself and happy and carefree. She was an enigma to me, how could she be so full of love and compassion when she'd been through what I had? I had to know. I'm sure you can imagine that for a high functioning aspergers sufferer University was a nightmare. So many people I had to understand, so many roles to fill so I didn't upset everyone, so many false emotions so I wouldn't get called a psychopath or a nut job. Anyway, I met Ruth (fiancé) and we hit it off from the beginning, for the first time I felt like someone understood me and didn't try to smash me into place like an out of place jigsaw piece. And we had tough times, like all relationships, and almost all of it was down to the simple fact that we spoke a different language and we didn't even realize! We as sufferers of aspergers literally have our own language (more on that later). How awesome is that?! And still I felt this missing piece, like that somehow I wasn't worthy and I almost deceived MY OWN MIND to believe I was evil and I had no idea why I couldn't just be happy.. One day I would feel numb and the next I would be completely suicidal. I felt like I wasn't a person anymore, I had no personality, no friends, I didn't deserve anything and I was just worse than everyone else. Fast forward a year and everything is much the same. I have my amazing girlfriend, I have a house, but I fundamentally know that something isn't right. I become more and more depressed. I self medicate more and more. I pushed the one person in my life who really knew me away and almost killed myself because I needed to fill this fictional role that I was somehow a bad person! Yet still I couldn't see these things. It's like I knew them somewhere, deep down, but I had no idea they were the entire reason I was so miserable. I wasn't being myself because I felt like myself wasn't worth anything. Then we travel to amsterdam. to have a getaway and try to help distract me from my crippling pain. The flight is tense, I feel stressed.. Why are people staring at me? Why don't I look normal? What is everyone thinking? How can I respond when there are THOUSANDS of things I could say?? It was overwhelming. We arrived at our beautiful apartment and, at a time when I should have been happy and carefree, I wanted to kill myself and absolve my humanity into nothing. I wanted to destroy myself, because I felt so worthless. But then we have this most amazing night, completely out of the blue, and we talk for hours and I pour out my soul to my girlfriend, things I didn't even realize I had inside of me came rushing out and it turns out... I was abused by my step mother emotionally and, in a way, sexually, and had repressed it. And we just talked. And communicated. And everything just... Clicked, the reason I pushed people away and didn't understand them is because my step mother was, for lack of a better phrase, inside me. She was the voice that told me I wasn't good enough, she was the knife constantly twisting in my back. From my first memories I can think back on times she told me I was disgusting, that God hated me because I watched porn, that my dad was ill because of me and that everything and everyone had hidden meanings, nothing was ever simple or honest and that's why I found such comfort in numbers and lines - they couldn't lie, they couldn't hurt me and they related so much better to me in terms of how I saw the world! I didn't see pictures and colors, I saw numbers and patterns! My Mona Lisa would be made of numbers. My fiance inspired me, I feel like a savant now rather than a cripple. Almost all the best artists and musicians thought a bit differently and there's so much beauty in our way of thinking. Love can conquer all. All we need is love. Love is eternal and has transformed some of the most tortured souls in history into the greatest artists and now I want to paint and get tattoos and love everyone! It really can be that simple. The cycle of abuse ended when she turned my father against me. My father is a great man but he has many mental health issues as well as Parkinsons and is completely dependent on the physical and emotional care of this woman. I was kicked from my house to live with my friend. This was in gcse level (or high school in America) and I repressed it as deep as it would go. I felt emotionless, cold, I could only think of death and hatred and how, when it boils down to it, the fact that the whole world was probably like Therese! I missed my dad and I couldn't talk to anyone, my only comfort was in numerical patterns and my own head because at least I could pretend this was how everyone felt. But after I got all this out I realised I AM a good person, even if I do think differently. I AM happy, even though this has been done to me. Now I know I had aspergers everything makes so much more sense and I can own my problems instead of letting them control me. And all the pain, all the hate, all the death just faded away in the face of love. And it's true what Toulouse Lautrec said guys.. “All that we can ever learn, is just to love and be loved in return”. And now I see that people like us aren't bad we are just DIFFERENT! It’s okay to feel awkward in a social circle, it's okay to sit in your rooms and play games all day because you can't face the world, it's okay to feel comforted by numbers and shapes rather than people and colors - Dogs literally see in smells… is that a bad thing? Does it make them insensitive to our eyes because they prefer to use their nostrils? Of course not! It's beautiful that they see the world so differently. And I promise all of you that one day, your Ruth will come along and she/he or whoever you connect with will the see your uniqueness and love you just for the awkward, nerdy slightly aspy awesome person you are. And the most amazing part of all is my fiance can now bring me into the normal world peacefully, and I can introduce her to the world of geometry and number porn! :p life is just so beautiful guys it really is.. I have gone from wanting to die and fade into nothing to going out everyday and owning my aspergers and I owe it all to love, so open your hearts, open your minds, love yourselves and know that it is absolutely fine for you to be yourself in every situation. Different;not less

Ps, I used to HATE art guys, with a passion - it represented emotion and uncertainty and anxiety - the opposite of numbers and angles. But now I can love myself and love other people , everything is just so much prettier, I'm now the one who loves looking at buildings and stops to look at art because I've felt the love that all these ‘normals’ have been going on about for so long and it is incredible! And you all deserve it and will find it one day, and if I've even helped one person in a tiny way to feel like there IS hope and they can be themselves, I'll be happy :)Pps, I'm currently developing a coded language for aspergers children that can be applied in a way that they understand emotion and humanity and love, purely through geometric numbers! I call them geoglyphs (because they look like badass Egyptian hieroglyphs In a geometric shape) and they essentially personify numbers and shapes in such a way that autistic and aspergers children can use numbers, rules and structure to literally quantify a human being and how their emotions might just be a bit different to theirs! It can even be made into a logical puzzle game that makes them really think and broaden themselves so they can discover who they are in relation to the world. If there are any interested parties or families that like the idea please let me know as I think it would have really helped me cope with my struggles and I want to give others that chance, to logically work out what love means :) and after reading some of the posts on this site I really think they could help so many aspergers people just be relatable and to be able to relate. Why can't some of us feel loved and fabulous just because we're a bit more like spock… everyone loves spock! Different;not lessYou can get me on my email at mattythomson54@gmail.com