Hey all,
I'm a 24-year-old queer / gay guy with an academic background in Women's Studies / Gender Studies, anthropology, and other branches of cultural theory. I will be going back to grad school for Anthro next spring.
I've always had some pretty significant social difficulties and 'quirks', and these things have been given a lot of explanations over the years: depression and anxiety; OCD; social phobia; Sensory Processing Disorder; ADD / ADHD; various auditory processing disorders, and, yes, austism / Asperger's. All of these notions have been useful to me at various times and some still are.
I know that some of my teachers thought I was was potentially autistic as a child, but that my mother refused to have me tested because she (probably rightly) did not believe that the special needs and disability services in my school district had the resources to do me more good than harm. This fact came back to my mind when I started a job about 10 months ago that has turned out to be pretty terrible; my manager is pretty emotionally volatile and sees mocking and insulting as appropriate every-day tools for motivation / punishment, and I have not been able to function well in this context.
After some therapy and a whole lot of research and introspection, I've decided to leave my job, and I've come to the conclusion that [a] this is abusive crap and no one deserves to be a treated like a human dumping ground for their supervisor's stress and anger, and [b] a lot of the issues that have been going on have been about her interpreting as lazy or disrespectful some of the social and personal 'quirks' that I've had all my life - 'quirks' that research has suggested have a whole lot of overlap with many common indicators for Asperger's / ASD.
So, anyway, that's about where I am with this right now. I'm not certain whether or not it'd be worth my while to seek a formal diagnosis. I do know that being able to see my quirks as value-neutral neurological anomalies that might be responded to and managed in a variety of ways rather than terrible moral failings has been vital to sanity during the course of this terrible job. At the same time, I've had a certain amount of amount of ability to learn decent social skills in certain specialized contexts, though, which makes me a little ambivalent about how well I would fit an ASD diagnosis. (The 'neurotypical' vs 'non-neurotypical' dichotomy doesn't make the problem of other minds go away: how do I know that *everyone* doesn't just basically feel weird and out-of-sync like this, at least sometimes? No one is perfectly social all the time.) *That* notion in turn takes me off in the opposite direction and makes me worried that I'm working off of an unhelpful, caricatured idea of robotically asocial ASD folks that doesn't fully reflect the real variety of experience of people who engage an autistic / Asperger's / ASD diagnosis or identity ...
As a cultural studies person, too, it's been interesting to watch myself start to assimilate an identity as (potentially) ASD, with all of the varied scientific and moral claims that this way of interpreting my life issues brings along. I think there's a good chance that I will work on thinking through the social context of Asperger's / ASD discourses as a significant part of my graduate work, which is exciting.
On that note, I'd love to connect with other social theory / cultural studies people on here - the number of weird folks with significant ASD-like behaviors that I've met in the humanities makes me strongly suspect that at least *some* of the tendency to see ASDs as being pretty much just for computery or mathy types is pure diagnostic bias (i.e., a strong tendency to read some ASD-like symptoms as 'really' being side effects of depression or anxiety when they're displayed by artsy or social studiesy types).
That's about it; thanks for reading and feel free to PM me!
mew.
27 Apr 2013, 8:25 am
