I diagnosed myself with Asperger's this weekend. I had been seeing and hearing things about the disease or personality characteristic for some time, and started to think how some of it sounded like me. I felt like it was there for me, but I circled around it for a while and then I got the Attwood book and that confirmed my initial impression. I am a 51 year old married man. I am financially successful programming computers. When reading the diagnostic criteria, I noted the 'little professor' stuff. As child I was once told I had been bullied and ostracized from the kids at camp because I 'talked different' maybe like an adult. This struck me as a poor reason for hassling someone. My dad was a PHD in physics, and I think he has ASP too, and I attributed my white collar vocabulary in a blue collar neighborhood to that until I read Attwood.
I had the requisite physical awkwardness, unable to catch a ball, and was picked last or second to last in informal sports games with neighborhood kids. I also keyed off the attribute of having encyclopedic knowledge of something, unusual for a child. At the age of 10 or under, I had memorized and could draw diagrams of certain molecules like the plastic lexan. This did not translate into academic success, though. I read lord of the rings in grade school, and more than anything, I wanted that to be the world I lived in--I read it a number of times and had encyclopedic knowedge of it.
And from a standpoint of personal pain, I recalled the social awkwardness. The knowledge that people got angry at me, and I had no idea why. I will wrap up with one quick story--the event that I considered the first shot fired in the educational system's war against me. In kindergarten, someone brought some chicks in (baby chickens) I was fascinated and full of joy looking at them All of a sudden, the teacher pulled me aside and made me sit in the corner while the rest of the kids played with the chicks. She said that I had been pushing the other kids out of the way or something, and my sadness, shame, and disappointment was joined with my puzzlement that I had been feeling joy and no animosity towards anyone and I had somehow done something wrong.
School was a hellish ordeal for me and my mother until high school when I manged to fit in to the point of enjoying it.
And just the other night, maybe a week before I got the book and decided it fit, I had been imagining that I was a member of some alien race of beings and I was spending time on earth, almost never meeting another of my kind, and hoping that after my body dies I would be reunited with those who would accept and value me. Now I dismissed this as silly thinking for an adult, but when I saw the phrase 'wrong planet' in asp literature, I found it astonishing. Not only are many people uncomfortable with me, I believe I see somethings far more deeply than most people, and I rarely find someone who I can have an interesting discussion with.
So, its good for me to understand my social discomfort--if not disability--will never go away, and I can start to let myself off the hook for all the blundering I have done over the years. I have lots more to share, but just wanted to show why I self-diagnosed, and why I come here.
Last edited by Cicero on 10 Oct 2010, 12:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
10 Oct 2010, 11:21 am
