Let It... NO!

Let it… No? Those aren’t the words to a familiar song, but as the familiar song goes the purpose is to let it go but that’s a concept foreign to me and I was having an issue a couple nights ago and my dad told me to just, “let it go” but it was then I realized that, quite simply, I couldn’t.

This is a story I hear frequently; an event that stays days, weeks, or even years after the fact and for me the stories I hear are just a reminder of my inability to let things go. A good example, and this didn’t happen to me, was there was a student that hit a student with Asperger’s in school and the student with Asperger’s complained to the teacher. This was investigated at the story was true, but the timeline of the incident was that the event occurred years previous to when the student said it. The student informed each teacher throughout the years and yes, it was fact but the ability to let it go and move on was not.

Why is this? Why is there this inability to move on form something? First, the concept of time is different for myself and others on the spectrum, in that everything is now. Events of grade school are just as fresh in my mind now as they were then. Secondly is anxiety. In the previous paragraph the student that talked about being hit, to him, was always at risk because if it happened once it will certainly happen again because it feels as if it just did.

In my life this has been one of the most constant echoing themes which has brought me down the most and it doesn’t take much. In a conversation one single word can get me caught up on it and the ability to move past it isn’t there. It festers and then it grows in size and eventually it becomes so big it begins feeding off its own size and what to most would be an irrelevant event has become this gigantic monstrosity that has essentially paralyzed my ability to focus.

Going back last week to my post regarding the contradictions of Asperger’s is important because I know I should just be able to move on, but I can’t. My body tells me otherwise and maybe this is all rooted in fear. Of course, dwelling on something in the past doesn’t help a thing and I know this and yet when I get hung up on something be it something I did, or something someone else said, I can’t simply let it go. It stays, lingers, and much like the hideous aroma of rotten milk it dampens spirits.

This is something that you’ll either understand or you won’t. If you live with it you’re thinking, “Yes, someone gets it!” and if you haven’t lived with this then you’re probably perplexed and this is understandable because I can’t see living with the ability to let things go. I talk about the fact that “understanding is the foundation for hope” but the art of understanding is becoming more complex and I hope to, in tomorrow’s post, expand upon why I feel the dimensions of understanding are more complex than I used to realize.