Anonymous - Thank you for posting. I'd like to say that for someone who is going crazy, your post is very sensible and diplomatic. I'd also like to say that I have no idea if you are an addict or an alcoholic, or could be, or was. You're the only person here who knows that, so what you chose to put in your body is up to you.
Even though you may have only dabbled in a way that may not have caused you harm, you're now realistically living with a secret that would most likely change the way that most people in your life feel about you. You've done something that you've just spent a long time learning is the ultimate evil. Why wouldn't you feel crazy?
It's a horrible thought that you should loose your parents because of this. I think that Antigen's advice to you is valuable for this subject. Can you tell your parents that adjusting back to life outside of AARC is hard and you need them to stay connected with you?
As for feeling like a bore, that something is missing, having no social skills.... I can completely understand this and have spent many years trying to fully overcome it. When you said that something was missing, it took me a long time to understand that the hardest part about overcoming AARC for me was regaining the passion for life again, along with regaining my strength in never caring what people had thought about me, and always having faith that what was in my heart was the right thing. That had been taken and felt impossible to rebuild.
In AARC I was taught that anger is a defect. Lust is a defect. To disagree, question, or debate is "fighting". To day dream, be creative, or relax was an "escape mechanism". Also almost everything I'd enjoyed was no longer allowed incase I have too much fun and then am "escaping". Connecting was "cliquing". We were only allowed to feel "hurt", "powerless", or "serene". That doesn't leave a lot of the human brain left, does it? Something feels missing? Maybe it's the rest of you.
It also took a while to learn how to have silence, when anything other than being in raps, 1 on 1's, or on a feild trip was "in your head". And learning how to deal with feelings without having to call someone up and "spill" to them can be a rough hurdle. Spilling and confessing all the time made it hard for me to understand when it was okay for me just to handle something on my own, rationally.
As for social skills... They'll come. My first 2 tips if you haven't learned them already: STOP HUGGING! And when someone asks you how you are today, all that they want to here is "Fine. Yourself?"
I know that you are probably sick of the idea of therapists, but what if you found someone who understood what you went through? Most therapists/psychologists will. If I didn't have someone there to talk to when I got out, I don't know what I would have done. My friends were overwhelmed when I tried to explain it to them. They were overwhelmed already by how much I'd changed, they didn't understand any of it. I needed to talk about everything that had happened and that was happening then to someone who could keep my confidentiality and remind me of what "normal" was. If you can't find free services, I'm sure that your family would pay for therapy if you told them that you needed some non aarc support.
I'm sorry this is a really long post! I hope that some of it is useful. Sadly, there are so many graduates feeling the same as you, probably located near you. You're not alone. There are also many graduates who have overcome it. On that note, the fact is that whether you had used or not, if you drifted away from AARC someone would start a rumor about you using so that nobody else would continue to assocaite with an outsider.
