I'd like to share my story...I've been waiting to meet others like me for a very long time...

[Rose]

Hi all, I'm Rose from Australia terrified of anyone I know in person ever reading this so I'll keep my intro limited.... I'm 23 and have a full time job, I'm single but have a great family and close friends. I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome when I was 11 so I always put my 'MD' down to this, every time I tried to explain MD to people they'd just say it was a (strange and uncommon) part of AS, and one doctor even said they'd never heard of something so strange. Anyway, here's my story, it's more just for me to get it off my shoulders but it may have some things in common with some of you. Warning though, it will be long!

My earliest memories contained 2 prominent imaginary friends. One was a toy horse named Dave, the other was Garfield (yes, the orange cat). Dave and I just hung out at home but Garfield came everywhere with me. He was one of my AS 'special interests' and once mum had a fight with me saying Garfield wasn't real, and of course I knew he wasn't a real orange cat who followed me everywhere, but he felt 'real' in the same way as I used to pretend the car was 'alive' and when we sold the car and got a new one I felt I betrayed it. Garfield came to school with me and I would write stories about him and Dave. I also had a large number of 'monsters in the closet' who I felt lived in my bedroom, and some of these still terrify me to this day. I felt the head honcho of these monsters (which were all pieces of inanimate objects, e.g. a door knob which looked like a face) was basically God and controlled everything that happened. I wasn't raised in a religious family nor am I religious but this is the only way I can describe this guy. At school I would talk about Dave, Garfield and the 'monsters' and the older kids were fascinated by them but thought I was completely crazy and would tease me about it. It was always sort of strange though, because Dave was always just Dave but I wanted to be Garfield so there was this blurred line where who or what Garfield really was. I used to draw a lot and Garfield featured in many early drawings, sometimes a cat, sometimes a human (or both?) sometimes as me, sometimes male and sometimes female.

After I grew up and learned to hide them from people, I started using the teachers at school as 'characters' as I called them, and from ages 4-8 my imaginary world, where I'd meet Dave and Garfield every so often to hang out with, go for a walk in the garden with or have lunch with, changed to this whole universe called Dreamland. It was called DL because during the day the teachers would go to school and have ordinary lives, but at night (when I was in bed supposed to be sleeping) they'd all go out to DL which was this big convention where they controlled the dreams of everyone in the world. I thought they did this because it was at night and I was meant to be dreaming. DL was inside the TV and how I got to DL was I'd imagine I would float out into the lounge room on my bed where all the teachers were, and we'd turn on the TV and if I concentrated hard enough on the picture of the TV in my mind I'd end up in DL, which was sometimes held at the school hall, sometimes at home, and other times in random places I had no idea existed. Of course I knew all of this was not real, but I couldn't tell whether it was a dream, my imagination or a hallucination. So almost every night I'd go to DL and there'd be a designated teacher who would be controlling the dreams, but everyone else would just party. The monsters were always there but I felt safe with the teachers because they'd always defend me. When I was younger I was always just me, floating around the place in my bed, but as I got older I had a series of teachers who I'd 'be' and I'd call them my 'characters.' I have a number of drawings of DL I've kept too. I told my brother (my only sibling) about this when I was about 4 so we both used to stay up and 'be' teachers and play games in DL or make teachers out of lego men or dolls or whatever, so he was always involved. He had his own characters too, but most of the time he was an incarnation of himself. Even though I always had a friend or two around, I was bullied pretty heavily at school and used to argue with my mum a lot, so I guess this is the reason why I invented families for whichever teacher I was at the time. It never made a lot of sense that the teachers were way older than me, so I invented 'young' versions of themselves who I'd 'be,' so I could have a better family that wouldn't fight with me and go to a different school where the kids didn't pick on me, etc.  For instance, when I was 7, my character was a young incarnation of the principal, and I had 4 brothers and 2 sisters and a best friend called Duncan who went with me to our made up school. My real life brother made a young version of another teacher at our school and we used to play together as these 2 teachers. I decidedly picked a male teacher too because I really wanted to play football and do things I couldn't do without getting picked on as a girl. In the DL universe, except for when I was very young on my floating bed, I never really existed. I was just more of  an overseer.

In late primary school I got picked on very badly so I invented a planet called Pezrock, and made it that DL was one continent on it, and another was called Racealia (sort of like Australia but with more race tracks and racing...I was obsessed with motorbikes and cars at this time). This meant I could make up some new characters which weren't limited to teachers, but could still interact with the teachers if I wanted to get on a metaphorical plane and fly to DL every now and again (DL and Racealia competed in the olympics too...) although the act of 'being' a character I used to be either felt wrong or I just couldn't do it.  Pezrock was similar to DL in that I could 'go there' at night in some strange hypnotic way. I had a number of characters from Racealia:

-one was very loosely based on a teacher, but came to be a much 'cooler' version of me, who was everything I wasn't (the popular girl in school, confident, funny, friendly, pretty) and did everything I couldn't or wasn't allowed to do (rode motorbikes, played football (I had to make it that in Racealia girls were allowed to play professional football haha) drove a car, drank beer, beat people up she didn't like, was a punk rocker in a rock band and lived on the beach). I had her for years

-a crazy guy who had a secret lab in his basement, carried guns on him, was an expert computer hacker and was friends with a Russian spy and a mad scientist, and played in a band with them. At one stage I was the mad scientist

-the crazy guy's dad and sister ( I really liked this family...) The dad was a Racealian which was a different race to humans, he was an IT guy who played in a band also and was a motocross rider on the weekend. He was into extreme sports and bushwalking/rock climbing. The crazy guy's sister was a version of my best friend at the time who I thought was way cooler than me. The brother and mum in this family were versions of my brother and my mum, except from when I was 'being' the dad, then the mum character was a female version of my boyfriend, and the dad's horrible cold and tormenting parents he escaped from when he was 12 were versions of my parents

-the Governor of Racealia who was this lazy guy in love with his car who dressed like a salesman and owned a dodgy hotel to make extra money and was dating the sexiest woman in Racealia (who was a cross between a cool version of me and a female version of my boyfriend)

-a friend of the crazy guy, who was this dorky biker who lived in a crappy part of the city with his gardener dad, hippie sister (me, basically) and beach bum mum. Ended up playing in the band with the crazy guy. He dated the girl who rode motorbikes a lot, and was essentially my 'ultimate' boyfriend

-a girl from their school who played for the English Premier League

- her friend who was a beach bum surfie and lived near the beach in an old cottage with her cool family and surfer boyfriend

-a cop from the capital city who was a total hoon and completely corrupt, who was divorced and fighting on and off with his ex, and lived with his dog in an apartment near the beach. 

All the Racealians' lives were pretty much intertwined, and some characters I could go back and forth 'being,' and some I could be for a certain time in my life but not after this time. I remember when I was predominantly the governor character and a certain song reminded me of the dorky guy, and I knew the more I listened to it the more I'd change into the dorky guy, and I tried really hard not to let go of the governor character but everytime I heard the song on the radio I'd become more the dork and less the governor.

The Racealians were very extreme and I was really 'into' this world. My brother was in it too as a number of characters, and so was my best friend and boyfriend at the time. He had his own characters as well. Everyone at school knew about them and would call them my 'cartoons' because I used to draw them a lot. It was great fun, and in Racealia I was God, and all the Racealians knew who I was, unlike in DL where I was just 'watching' the whole time. I used to go into this world and act out how the characters would deal with bullying, then go to school and emulate them. I was also very bored with school work because it didn't stimulate me much, so this gave me something to write about and draw about. Eventually, mum told me I couldn't do it anymore because in the end 'I won't know who I am' and I had to see councilors where they diagnosed me with AS. Everyone at school picked on me a great deal about them, and eventually my boyfriend got so sick of me constantly being the cop and not me, he deserted me. My brother also hated the cop character because he was reckless and rather depressed, and stopped playing with me for a while.

When I went to high school, the bullying stopped for the first half year or so, and the Racealians changed and I would be the motorcross girl more and do things like hang out at the beach with my friends rather than fight with the other kids at school and drink beer and ride my Harley around. I became obsessed with a guy at school because he looked lie my cop character, that I left Racealia for a few months just because it felt weird being the cop when there was someone at school who resembled him. This guy rejected me a few times, and people started bullying me again, so I guess that's when I got back into the cop character. I started hanging out with the extreme sports dad again, but this time because my friend and my brother weren't involved anymore, I got to choose what happened and who did what. I started a band with the dad and the mad scientist (I wrote songs for them because I learned how to play the guitar...) but started to feel a little bored with Racealia because I had invented it when I was 8 or so and I didn't feel the need to be a cop anymore, so I started to shift my world again. Keeping a few people I liked I invented a very large city, which included amoungst other people, a couple of factory workers. I really liked one of them and one night when I was in Pezrock, decided to just switch cities and become the factory worker. He was originally married but I later got rid of his wife because I 1. wanted him to be single because I liked him, and 2. his personality was such that he was only in love with himself. This factory worker and his friends: a machinist, a fitter, a chemist, a heap of futuristic militarial sort of people (there was a nuclear ops woman who I rather liked) became my new character, and because I was older I could draw and paint and write about his life in much more detail than before. I introduced him to my friend at school and he, being a gamer and having obsessions with his gaming characters, liked him. Except for being selfish and a bit crazy, he was fairly normal until I started getting very badly bullied through school, and my friends deserted me because I wasn't 'cool enough.' There was one stage there where I was so 'into' this world, I just wanted to spend every day 'being' the factory guy, living his mundane and boring life in the suburbs with his dog and friends who would come over every now and again to play poker, and not have to worry about my real life which was terrible. The factory worker changed into a psychotic maniac who swapped his factory friends for 2 psych ward escapees and a homeless guy and they lived in the sewer together where they were in charge of drug runs and organised crime (and whatever else I could think up). I wanted to be him in his world so bad I told my dad about it and when he said 'you just can't. There's not way that could happen.' I would cry. It made me even angrier when I thought that if I did magically change into him I would be even lonelier and my life would be worse because my psycho and homeless friends wouldn't exist. I still painted and drew him, and this worried a lot of people (teachers, parents). Those who knew about him thought he was disgusting and horrible (which now I look back is what I wanted them to think because that's how I felt about myself) and those who didn't know him thought I was completely mental. People at school thought I had schizophrenia also. Whatever people thought about me I'd offload onto him, so in the end he had schizophrenia too. My art teacher however loved it and she said 'the weirder the better!' She was my only real life friend.

This continued until the year before I had to move out of home and go to uni, and I told one of my friends about him who had a brother with AS and how I just wanted to be my factory man so bad (or meet him in person and run away with him) I didn't care what I would have to do. She told me she didn't want to lose me, and for the first time I thought 'I don't really care about me. There isn't a me and there never was, I'm just an empty shell and a puppet for my imagination.' I met a guy not long before I had to go to uni, and we went on a few dates and started hanging out, and I noticed that when we hung out I would completely forget about my factory man (I'll call him Bob. That's not his real name though). One day it just hit me like a tonne of bricks...I might be losing Bob. I freaked out and told dad and he said it was silly and I couldn't lose Bob, Bob was part of me, and I was so confused because I wanted Bob there but I wanted to grow up and go to uni and be me. I was scared to be me, it felt so naked and horrible. I had a mental breakdown and I couldn't eat or sleep and I had days off school. When dad asked if I still had the chance to 'be Bob' would I do it, I said yes, and he cried and said that he had tried to help me but now it was too late. I was terrible, I have never been so lonely in my life. I couldn't just go and talk to Bob about it, or jump into his life and see how he'd deal with it. There was no Bob anymore. I talked to councilors about it and kept asking dad if I could still be Bob, and he just kept saying 'only if you know he's not real, and you know what you're doing.' Well obviously I always knew he wasn't a real person, but he was always a very 'real' companion to me, and to even hear the words 'Bob's not real' were terrifying.

It took me about a month to understand what dad meant, and we spoke about it often. He kept telling me that instead of Bob being a psycho, why can't Bob be like he used to be? I tried to think of Bob as the guy in the suburbs with his chemist friend again but if he wasn't psycho Bob he wasn't real Bob and I just couldn't do it. I was also terrified that if I lost Bob forever I would lose all my creativity and painting ability and everything. Everything in my life was just so dull and grey I couldn't stand it. 

In the beginning, Bob was loosely based around a couple of characters on kids' shows I watched when I was young, and one of these I could barely remember what this character looked or acted like, but I always felt that if I watched this show again it would destroy Bob forever because he was just a cheap imitation of a background character on a 90s kids show no one remembered but me. So anyway Iwas starting to kick back up again until my brother found this show on the internet and showed me, and I broke down again. I had to either find a new character, change Bob into how he used to be or something different,  or go character-less. I tried the first option to start with, I tried 'being' one of the politicians Bob idolises, the tax collector and Bob's boss. I had brief stints as Bob's parents, brothers and cousins, but if I couldn't be Bob, the old Bob, I couldn't be me. So I changed him slowly into a 'guardian of the underground' figure, and started liking the new him. I was nearly proud of him, and started painting and drawing and writing about him more than ever.

I had no more problems with Bob until in second year uni a celebrity debuted on TV who I was obsessed with and they looked a bit like him. Instead of being a creepy villain or a psycho, this guy was professional, interesting, friendly, fashionable, and everyone liked him. The thing that annoyed me the most is that he was a real person. These things annoyed me so much I had a break down, and they annoyed me because

1. People liked him but I didn't want people to like Bob. I wanted to be the only person who likes Bob because he's an underdog, and because people didn't like me, so why should they like Bob/the celeb?

2. His personality wasn't like Bob's

3. He was a real person. So am I, but my personality and everything about me sucks. This just reminds me again of how I am me, and I didn't like being reminded that I'm me, because it means that I'm not Bob.

One night I could've easily given up Bob to 'be' this celebrity, but the celeb didn't fit in with my world, and would've caused me more problems and made me more jealous of him. I spoke to my mum about it who hadn't heard of me having Bob for about 5 years, and she just said 'there are hundreds of Elvis impersonators. They're not really Elvis. They may look like him and sound like him but they're not. And Elvis fans don't get mad about it.' I got over it after a month or so.

The next year at uni I got repeatedly rejected by a guy who I was completely in love with. This broke me down a fair way, until one day I was on the bus and a guy looking spitting image of Bob got on. I was so happy, it didn't matter that it wasn't Bob, but just loved looking at him so I'd take that bus all the time to see if he was on it. I saw him on the odd walk to uni too, he lived around the area, and I started getting a bit stalkery and had a bit of a think about it one night. Not only was I acting completely stupid about a guy I've never met before, but also if I did actually meet him he'd be nothing like Bob, probably wouldn't be called Bob, and that would break me down again. I tried for the next year to cut down on Bobness but it was difficult, and It sort of hit me one day that I was 22 and still had him. I was on a roller coaster for months trying not to talk to him and feeling bad when I did. I wished he'd just go away. I tried to cut him out completely by 'being' the tax collector, but this just made things worse.

After a year of this, I went overseas on a holiday with my mum. The holiday was for a month and involved going to the city of Bob's apparent birth. On the first night or so I was there, it was amazing (Bob comes from this city because that's where I'd like to come from, and I'd always wanted to visit it) and I kept thinking that if I moved there, how would I ever 'be' Bob anyway because he was there in the 1970s and he lives in the mental city not this real city, and it just got too confusing I was rather exhausted thinking about it, so I didn't. One night I thought that just for the holiday and because it felt 'wrong' (being in the same room every night with my mum and being in Bob's supposed birth town) I wouldn't go into my world for the duration of the holiday.  At first I felt free and refreshed, as if there was a real 'me' inside there somewhere. It felt good to feel 'normal' (as someone with AS this is rarely so) and as if I had gotten rid of all these protective layers and could feel the wind on my skin. After about a week though I got very down. One night I wanted to go there so badly I nearly cried. I couldn't stop thinking about my world and Bob and it annoyed me so much because I just wanted to be normal and have a trip overseas with my mum. Everytime a street appeared with Bob's name on it I'd feel edgy, like an alcoholic trying to give up but being asked to go to a party. I hit rock bottom after another week, and by the end of the holiday it felt normal just to be me, and I didn't think much about him until I got home. My bedroom, with all the Bob paintings and my books and stories on him felt weird, I decided I'd drop into my world and say hi to everyone, but it felt strange because the real me had been on a big trip but Bob had just been to 'visit his parents.' It felt for a few days I was just a crazy woman talking to myself. I left a week later to work on the other side of the country, where I gave myself some rules:

1. No going into my world before I've had a shower after work

2. No going into my world as soon as I wake up

3. If I do go into Bob's world, I'm only allowed to talk to Bob's boss when I'm on shift and his 3 closest friends when I'm not. I should add here I was working 2 weeks on 2 weeks off

This worked, but I found my usual dreams of being in my imaginary world and waking up happy thinking about it turned into dreams of Bob dying or leaving or proclaiming in one dream he was 'going back into the paint.' I had dreams of teachers appearing saying he was 'sexually demading' and dreams of Bob's friends talking to me, telling me they know that it's me and not really Bob, and he's not even real anyway. This was rather distressing and I thought maybe the time had come to give him up, but I couldn't. I still enjoyed drawing and painting my world regardless. I didn't know what to do, and then my brother (who was always part of my world) got a new girlfriend and didn't want to be in my world anymore, which is understandable when you're 20. I just felt like a 5 year old who still wanted to play duck duck goose but no one else did. It was terrible.

Dad came over last year to visit and when mum and my brother had left, he asked me if I still had Bob. I said I didn't want to have him and I didn't want to talk to him but I still do. I told him about me and mum's trip and the dreams, and he said that my brother, who is very religious, talks to God. He asked me what the difference between my brother talking to God and me talking to Bob is? (sorry, I don't mean to offend any Christians here. Dad didn't meant that God was an imaginary friend but rather my bro talks to someone when he has problems and I talk to someone too). He always tells me there's nothing wrong with having Bob around unless the lines between fantasy and reality become blurred, or I spend more time with Bob then I do with real people.

Anyway. I am 23 and I still go into my world nearly every day. I still have Bob but he's more just me with a different background. I love my world but I hate it at the same time. I hate how everyone's grown up and I still have an imaginary world. Sometimes it gives me a huge rush like being on drugs and I hate that too. I wish there was a way I could keep it in the background. Also Bob started out as a 44 year old in 2003 and I have to keep changing his age and back story which is annoying and confusing because I want to keep him the same age but he can't be. I doubt anyone's worlds are as frustrating, confusing and twisted as mine is.