inadvertantly found i may have AS through my art?

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hello to all.

i'm a 22 year old female from the south-east of England, near London. i joined this site in the hope that i could find answers to some of the questions i've had about my personality for my entire lifetime.

i've always seen myself as different. i've always been the 'quirky' one among my family, various groups of friends, and among my peers in general, and for most of my adolescent and adult life i felt i may have some form of mental disorder. i became highly interested in psychology after a couple of years ago when i was going through a period of deep depression, which triggered me to research many personality disorders to try and figure out what has been wrong with me all these years.
i am also an artist who spends my spare time writing amateur comics, and around the same time i began writing a new project based deeply on the theme of psychology, as much of my work is influenced by other interests and events in my life. as part of this comic i developed a character whose personality formed into a set of very specific symptoms- at the time i wasn't aware of what these actually described, but as i continued my search of various mental disorders i came across the subject of autism a few times. although i never considered it related to my own problems, it kept creeping back up on me that it was somehow connected to this character. eventually as i looked deeper into it i became highly fascinated with the autism spectrum specifically, and through research on related subjects to uncover this personality i was led towards the name Asperger's Syndrome.
i'd always known vaguely about AS and even more so because my best friend's younger brother has it, and from the limited idea i had of it in my mind it seemed to fit my character extremely well. but when i hunted out a couple of books specifically about it from the library i was struck right away by how closely i actually related to the content. i decided to find out more on the internet, and began reading any articles and watching all documentaries and videos i could find on it- more and more it felt like seeing passages of my own life story, as an alarming amount of these different experiences mirrored many of my own in some way. broken memories all the way from my earliest years up to my experiences throughout the rest of my life and recently, gradually made sense as they fit together under this umbrella.

i continued to do more research and spoke to a couple of close friends and my twin sister about my thoughts on the discovery, explaining experiences they have known about from my childhood etc; and hearing my enthusiasm about how much i felt like i'd found out what i'd 'been' all my life, they agreed it was worth looking into getting an official diagnosis.

in my search for some kind of relation to others who have been diagnosed with AS or are in a similar situation to mine, i came across this site. i hope to describe my experiences to some extent and hopefully get some feedback on my suspicions that i may indeed have gone my entire life so far without knowing i've had a name for my 'difference' all along.

well thankyou so much for reading, i look forward to getting to know many new friends here

Welcome! I hope you find the answers you seek!

Hi. I think you would enjoy Autscape

http://www.autscape.org/

It's fully subscribed for this year but that will give you a year to consider it for next year! A lot of us are on Facebook, where there is an Autscape group.

Welcome to the WP community, tarento.

Welcome. You have a twin sister? (I know that sounds all Darth Vadar-like)

Are you fraternal twins? How do genetics play in your life? I know a set of fraternal twin sisters here near me where one is AS.

Welcome aboard, tarento!

I hope you find the answers you are looking for.

thankyou all for the welcome replies!

Hutchscott- yes, we are fraternal twins- we look alike but only so much as normal sisters go; you wouldn't guess we were actually twins. our personalities are also quite opposite. it's very certain she does not have AS or anything for that matter.

as far as how genetics play in my life, i'm not sure exactly what you mean.. in terms of genetics of AS, i have no knowledge that anyone else in my family has any traits on the autistic spectrum. my mother was certainly on the bipolar/manic depression side, and i'm pretty sure my brother had ADHD when he was younger. unfortunately my entire family on my mother's side was completely estranged from us so i have no idea if any of them had ASD traits, the only thing i knew was that she had a brother and sister who were fraternal twins, and on my father's side there are certainly no traits but his dad also had two brothers who were twins! so that was obviously where the twin genes came from.

AardvarkGoodSwimmer- yes, i agree. if you were perfect i certainly wouldn't fit in, that's for sure!!
and your artistic forays sound very interesting! are you mainly into the creative writing side?

Hi tarento,

I too was excited when I found out I had AS, only to give me better insight into my own personality and to participate in studies. I had been told several times I might have AS but dismissed it, mainly as I don't think psychology has much substance. But what really hit me is when I found out that obsessive special interests is part of AS, then it kind of all fit together. I was very excited to find this web site.

The excitement has worn off a bit. I have less confidence in the professionals who diagnosed me. I'm not even sure there is such a thing as AS. I'm not even sure psychology has advanced much past popular personality tests.

Hopefully, you will have better luck finding like minds here. Me I set my hopes pretty high and am now disappointed, maybe it's just my lack of social skills. But you are younger and should have better luck. I wish there was a sight like this when I was younger.

Welcome To WrongPlanet.)