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Hello everyone!

My name is Joost, I am 27 years old. I live in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and am currently pursuing a Master's degree in Logic, mathematical logic to be specific. I'm currently working on my thesis, but lately I have accumulated quite a bit of delay due to motivational issues and a lack of self discipline. That said, I'm almost finished and expect to be done in a few weeks - and not a clue about what I am going to do afterwards. Outside my studies, I have a rather wide range of interests, ranging from computer stuff to philosophy to linguistics to things like mythology and religion. Music also plays a big role in my life (although I am not a musician myself, except for having some lousy piano skills): some styles of music that I particularly enjoy include metal of various kinds, classical music, folk music, and progressive rock.

I have (as far as I know) never been officially diagnosed with Asperger or anything else, but, for a long time, I have always suspected that something was 'wrong', or at least 'not quite like it is for other people' with me. I first read about Asperger's syndrome a couple of years ago, and at that point I was kind of amazed at how well it described me. Some reasons for believing this are:

- I have always had very weak social skills, despite having an interest in friendships and relationships. I have gone for years without any friends at all: between the ages of 6 and 13 I always had one or two friends only, and between ages 14 until 17 I had no friends whatsoever. Also later on, for most of the time - including now - I have not had any friends in my own hometown, Amsterdam. In high school I made a grand total of one friend, and in all of my years at university, I did not make a single friend at my university. I never really quite understood why this was the case. There seemed to be a problem in my ability to 'bond' with other people but I never really understood why or how. Also, up to now (27) I have never been in any intimate or sexual relationship.

- Especially in the past, I often more-or-less alternated between withdrawing into myself and a kind of state maybe best described as 'trying to impress people', which, more than anything, resulted in them seeing me as odd and was, in hindsight, rather uneffective overall.

- Often people, if they talk to me or get along with me, seem to think that I appear 'nervous', even if I am not. People have described my appearance as kind of 'restless', citing things like 'randomly playing with objects if I talk' and stuff like that.

- From time to time, people tell me that during conversations, I interrupt them at annoying moments, even though I definitely do not want to do that, and even try to avoid it.

- My ability to recognize faces kind of sucks at times. This isn't a very common problem, but it sometimes occurs when meeting people unexpectedly, or when the appearance of people somehow changed (e.g. a new haircut, or contact lenses instead of glasses, etc...).

- Often I have a tendency to really want to create order within chaos: creating lists of things in which they are nicely categorized. This used to be much more strongly so in the past, though, and I guess I have kind of reduced this tendency to socially acceptable levels now.

- I have always had quite bad motor skills, up to this day.

- Often I tend to be obsessively interested in one thing or another for a while, which may fade away later on.

- I have been described as being pedantic or other things along those lines, well, pretty often. ;P

- I sometimes am a bit afraid of new social situations (although it is not an overwhelming fear: I almost always am able to force myself to overcome it), and especially, of calling other people on the phone.

- I have a hard time expressing my emotions to other people, or appropriately reacting to other people's emotions.

- I'm very much a perfectionist, and often I have the feeling, that if I really focus on something, I'm easily able to become good or even outstanding at it. At school I always excelled at mathematics, and in language classes, at stuff requiring more precision and analytic thought, such as grammar.

- A lot of these things have played from elementary school onward. When I was 6 I went to some kind of special lessons for little boys with bad motor skills/clumsiness, and when I was 15-16 I for a year went to some group of people who had sub-par social skills. Also, in elementary school, according to one of my teachers, my reading skills were excellent, with the only problem of me reading in a monotone voice.

That being said, I have heard from several people that things have drastically improved comparde to a couple of years ago. Also, a number of autistic traits (e.g. extreme sensitivity to noise, or being unable to understand other people's mental states and thoughts) don't really seem to apply to me at all. I even think I am - or have become - quite decent at being able to empathize with other people. At the moment I manage to live, have a few good friends, and often I tend to think that life could be (and has been) a lot worse than it is now. Still, right now I feel that some things in my life could be, well, better than they are now, and I am considering to see a psychologist in order to, well, find out what's the matter really. Other than that, there's also some kind of wanting some 'acknowledgement' for being kind of different, and some things being not quite the same for me as they are for other people.

So, what would you say or recommend me to do?

Welcome to WP!

Tim

Welcome Joost

Sounds very similar to me, welcome aboard

I think I have HFA it sounds very similar to Aspergers.

I'm going to get diagnosed soon.

Regards

Mark