It occurred to me the other day that I would really like to convo with people who get-it, so I dialed up google and found Wrong Planet.
I’m diagnosed Asperger’s and non-Asperger’s, which is amusing to me. On the other hand, most things amuse me. I really like laughing and you can find humor in darn near anything. I’m also a father and chronically ill with a fatal auto immune disorder. Oddly, I have little stress from my disease, like everything in life, I take a cold, clinical view and observe it instead of living inside of it.
In 1979 I was diagnosed ADD as a child. Had an Osteopath doctor, so I spent the rest of my childhood not eating candy, which was the treatment for ADD for a holistic doc back then. In 2002, after nearly getting fired again for interpersonal problems at work, I called up a psychiatrist to talk about adult ADD. After a few visits, he queued to my lack of eye-contact, thinking social disorder, but we eventually ended up on Asperger’s for a few reasons. Results of the few tests available then was one reason, but the biggest was my compulsion to build analytical models. See, I love both collecting skills, and making computer or math models that simulate the systems around those skills. To the point that while flunking out of high school, instead of doing homework, I would endlessly calculate mortgage schedules by hand or build min/max tables that predicted the probabilistic limits of tabletop board games. Well, at least when I wasn’t sleeping in class.
More recently my insurance company changed their rules and I needed to see a psychiatrist instead of my hepatologist to refresh my provigil scrip. The new doc said my “lack of repetitive activity” showed I didn’t have Aspeger’s. His opinion was social avoidance complicated by advanced sleep phase syndrome (ASPS) and hepatic encephalopathy. Who was it who said, “the simple solution is the most likely”, was that Sherlock Holmes, or Spock? Social avoidance was a funny diagnosis imo. Yes “eye contact burns” for me, and I’d rather go hungry than call somebody to deliver a pizza, but I’m also married, father of four kids, a cub scout den leader, leader of an online gaming guild, play Star Wars tabletop RPG every two weeks, active at church and frequently travel for my job. I don’t avoid social contact, although they do wear me out faster than lifting weights. Instead, new social contacts are uncomfortable. It’s a big difference to me. But he wrote a scrip for the provigil for the ASPS, so he can have opinion, I have mine.
So how does one delineate repetitive behavior from bizarre behavior? I say I collect skills, let me elaborate. One skill is growing mushrooms. I discovered mycoculture and it appealed to my off the wall sense of reality. So I spent a year or so learning about it, collecting books, reading and finally set up a small biological lab and grow room in one of the out buildings on my farm. I grew mushrooms a few times, ate them, started collecting them. Then something else caught my attention. So I put that hobby aside, having mastered the very basics of it, and earned a Master’s degree in my new interest. I constantly find compulsive interests that I follow until I play them out or as my wife says, “I see a new shiny”. Oh, I tend towards verbosity too, my first therapist pointed that out.
Anyway, I’ll ask questions in general, more likely to be seen there. So, um, hi! Or bye!
14 Oct 2010, 4:51 am
