how to be happy part I: my life's story so far

It is our default state to be happy and we all work to that goal, one way or another. We all want to be happy and so this whole ‘how to be happy’ will be separated in four parts:

The first is about my life
The second is just pure theory
The third will be practical tips
The fourth will be about self-reflection

So in this post I am going to tell you my life story and how I went from a depressed and suicidal to happy.
Since the start of primarily school I’ve been bullied and later on my parents want to see what we can do about the bullying so through some psychologist test we found out that I have ASD ( autism spectrum disorder) and in that you have various subtypes and I have Asperger. That means couple of things which made me to the perfect victim for my bullies. Someone with ASD and Asperger has a difficulty with:

Recognizing a joke
Isn’t at ease in crowed places
Can’t read another body language
Trouble making social contact and keeping it
And much more

So because I reacted ‘strange’ to my peers, they started bullying me. It was when I was 12years old and went to high school that my parents began to tell me what my difficulties are, not that I have autism. The first year at high school was great; people respected me, called me their friend and so on. For the first time in my life I wasn’t alone anymore. The second year every changed: the bullying started again, worse than it was in primary school and I was alone again. The bullying escalated until my third year where they hit me on the head which resulted in a concussion.

Although I talked with my parent’s I couldn’t get my voice heard. It seemed to be my entire fault. My parents wanted to do more than they already tried to ‘help’ me with the bullying. By then I got medicines, talked to a teacher, talked to someone who was going to help me with my social skills, I was in therapy and now they wanted me to go talk to a counselor. That was the most painful moment of my life: I tried everything they told me that would work to get the bullying stop and to increase my social skills and it only resulted in having a concussion.

That did it for me! So I stopped listening to everyone, I stopped with my medicines, stopped with therapy and stopped going to the teacher. The only thing I kept doing was going to the person who was supposed to help me with my social skills and I only did it because my parents paid it already. So I started to read books, read things on the internet, tried different things out, failed couple of times, made friends for 5 minutes, read some more, analyzed people their behavior, tried out my conclusion, failed again, adjust the conclusion, tried again, … step by step I evolved.

Although the bullying stopped and people reacted better to me as the time went by, I felt terrible. The better my social skills became and people began to appreciate my company, the more the feeling of being terrible grew. It took me 2 years before I had a friendship that lasted long and he was asking me to do stuff together. Mostly it was me asking people to do stuff and mostly I heard excuses. My social skills started to be getting better: I started to vibe with people around me, I easily could build rapport with people so basically I could make a great first impression.

But the feeling of me being a terrible person, didn’t went away in fact it grew more and more as I tried to examine where it came from. I felt like I wasn’t being me, that I was wearing a mask and that people just loved the mask and not me as a human being. That was also the moments that thoughts like ‘life is too beautiful for me’ and ‘I don’t deserve to live anymore’ came up. By this time I was 18 years old and because those thoughts were running through my head, I thought that having a girlfriend would fix that problem.

So when I was 19 years old I had everything I could dream of when I started to work on my social skills. I had friends, I didn’t get bullied anymore and for the first time I had a girlfriend and not for four days like I had one when I was 18. No, this time I had a girlfriend for 3 weeks before she dumped me to get back with her ex, to come back to me and eventually dumped us both. The fact that she wanted a relationship with me but that nobody may know of, should have been an indicator, but I didn’t though it through. I had friends and a girlfriend, life was just awesome!

Yet as quickly as I felt happy, as quickly I fell in a black hole. So the moment she dumped me and her ex, she started to talk behind my back and the friends I had were I fought so hard for start taking distance from me. My parents didn’t want to hear to me and so there I was: all alone again. No girlfriend, no friends and now even without the listening ear of a parent. So I did what my terrible feeling told me to do and that was trying to kill myself.

When I was lying on the bed in the hospital I was thinking if I even want to be happy again I need a girlfriend. So when I went to college I started going out, which I had never done in my whole life just trying to pick up girls. First I needed to get used to being in an environment with loud music and lots of people. When I overcame that, I needed to learn to go up and try to talk to a girl. I did the same thing as I did when I wanted to work on my social skills. Reading, trying, failing, adjusting, trying again, failing again, reading again, trying new things out, failing again… little by little I got better.

Yet every time I came close to ‘get’ a girl I froze up and I blundered tremendously. Time and time again, until 4 years later after my suicidal attempt. Me and one of my friends became closer and closer with each other, but nothing specifically. Although it came close to sex and if one tried to kiss the other, the other dismissed it or the other way around we never defined our relationship. Not until the moment someone else came in the picture and in a desperate way to find happiness, I wanted to know if there was something going on between us.

The answer was ‘no’, although I knew better. I couldn’t handle that I was rejected. The whole week I was drunk, I was thinking more and more to kill myself because I still had that terrible feeling. I didn’t bath for a week, nor did I brush my teeth or shaved myself. A whole week it was just working, drinking, eating, sleeping and then working so the cycle could repeat itself. Eventually a week later after I got rejected I made a discussion to not feel like I did that week.

There was just something that didn’t add up. So I tried to reflect on myself and came to the conclusion that I hate myself, that I have a low self-image and low self-esteem. So I did what I always have done: I started to read again on how I could accomplish it. Reading, trying out, failing and reading again and little by little I start to realize which things I can do and how I should reflect on myself to get in the default state of being happy.

I’m not there yet, but the terrible feeling is away. I don’t think any longer that people like ‘the mask’ I am wearing, nor that they don’t like me as a person. The things I learned in the past three years are amazing; life is so much better and healthier when you know how everything works! All the things I learn from theory to practical and even self-reflection I am going to share them with you in the next three articles.

Until then take care!