Some more:[br][br]I chose to share my recent autism diagnosis with someone at work.  There’s this girl there around my age who once told me some months back that her nephew is autistic, and I told her I have Tourette’s, OCD and ADHD.  I have no problem telling people that information.  When I have to get into the nitty gritty of it…well, without even thinking about it I guess I just automatically divide all the symptoms into two categories: shareable and not shareable.  Really, they all should be shareable, but I guess I’m still not quite at that point yet.  There’s very little about TS in the not shareable category.  OCD…it’s not really a shame thing; I suppose I just don’t think everyone wants to hear about all my thoughts about axe murderers and whatnot.   ADHD, I’m fine with sharing most things about that, I just find it hard admitting to people that sometimes I forget they exist.  Yeah, I don’t think I’ll be jumping to tell everyone in the world that, any time soon. [br][br]But yes…I just kept thinking, based on how interested she seemed when we were talking about these things, that she’d be interested to know this new information about me.  Also, I suppose I thought it’d give her something positive to think about because her nephew is quite young and I’m not some miracle worker but I think I’m at least proof that you can have these conditions and still lead a fairly normal life (job, relationship, child, friends).  If I, as a child, had met someone else like me but an adult, I would have been so happy to know my future would be okay.  I hope that doesn’t sound vain?  I only have my own feelings to go by.  At any rate…I sent it in a message on Facebook, I didn’t say it in person.  It’s not about worrying people will judge me so much as: I don’t like most people knowing things about me.  I am fine to talk to people one-to-one, but I don’t like information about me just getting heard and interpreted by everyone without my control over how it’s distributed and understood, that sort of thing.  Does that make any sense?  So I didn’t want to say anything about it in the office where someone might hear, even though, on my own terms, I wouldn’t care if everyone knew.  (The BPD, though…I don’t tell people that….) [br][br]Tourette’s, btw…it’s killing me this week.  My face hurts.  OMG my face hurts, it’s EXHAUSTED, I wish I could just stop moving, I wish I could stop clenching my jaw, snapping it shut, grinding my teeth together.  Sometimes I catch myself making bargains with God or whoever (I never actually say ‘God’, but it’s a kind of praying all the same), things like, ‘Please if I just didn’t have this ONE tic, I could deal with everything else,’ as if that deal is going to happen and magically that tic will disappear forever…and as if that’s true anyway.  I know a week later I’d be making the same deal about some other tic.  And by the time every tic was gone, I’d be moving on to the OCD, then the BPD, then the ADHD, then the Autism, and hell why stop there?  How about the asthma, the chronic sinus conditions, the near-blindness, the semi-deafness in my right ear, the way my right leg is out-turned at the knee and it’s painful to do too much stretching on that leg, or…I mean, you see my point.  In the end, I’d be begging to be a different person altogether…except I’d hate to be anyone but me, so then my only option is to wish I didn’t exist…but I INTENSELY love being alive, as well…so really?  There’s no deal that would satisfy me.  Is this a borderline thing?  I don’t know.  Maybe it’s just being human.  All I DO know…is I thought I’d accepted Tourette’s years ago.  I mean, I’ve been diagnosed since age 7, and I was ticcing long before that.  I’m 25 now.  Don’t you think that’s enough time?  But it isn’t, obviously.  Because in all that time, I’m still here at the ‘bargaining’ stage of the classic grief cycle.  Unbelievable.  And I’ve only JUST found out about the autism and BPD, so how long is this grief going to last? [br][br]And that’s not even to speak of my recent ruminations about the noises and voices I sometimes hear and attribute to latent psychic abilities…but which I’m now thinking just MIGHT be something psychiatric rather than paranormal…but as I said to a dear friend this weekend…no one can prove it to me either way….[br][br]And you know what?  In a place where I’m expecting people not to judge me for saying these things, because more than likely everyone relates to at least SOME part of what I’ve said…I’m quite alright with admitting all these things about myself.  I can confess I love being me and I even take a sort of dark pride in all my ‘problems’…probably because I have them, and so I’m drawn to things like that, just the same way that people without these problems might be repelled by them. I just wish I could be so confident and honest about my strengths and weaknesses in the outside world.