Hi. I'm here because I suspect I have ASD, though I'm not totally sure. I'm 97% sure that my dad has Asperger's, though he's never been diagnosed.
I'm a graduate student in physics, and as you might have guessed from my user name, I like surfing, and many other sports as well. My whole life I've struggled agains some kind of unidentifiable, undiagnosable internal force that has caused me all sorts of problems, especially career and relationship problems. I'm 38, and I have two bachelor's degrees (one in music composition and one in physics), and in spite of having a plethora of talents and abilities, I've never been able to hold on to more than an entry-level job, and I've never had a romantic relationship that lasted longer than a few months. I've had plenty of interested women, and they are often excited to meet me, but over time they sort of lose interest and wander off.
I'm considering that autism is the thing that I've been struggling with, possibly among other things. The symptoms are subtle, especially because I've learned well how to mimic the behavior of "normal" people. I think that I would have qualified for a diagnosis in high school, though I'm not sure I would now, possibly because of all the social skills work I've done. But still, I find that romantic relationships are not intuitive, and I often find that my friends wander off after a few months.
I'm a longtime veteran of therapy, and I've had 17 different therapists in my life. Almost none of the therapy was overtly helpful for me, I assume because we never got to the correct diagnosis. With my last two therapists, after several months of therapy I told them that I didn't think the therapy was helping, at which point they seemed to get quite offended, and I stopped going. I never discussed the possibility of autism with any of my therapists, which is becoming more surprising to me, because I would have thought that being a scientist with social problems would be a dead giveaway for autism.
So here I am, and I'm interested in further discussion.
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Your neurodiverse (Aspie) score: 107 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 122 of 200
You seem to have both neurodiverse and neurotypical traits
01 Feb 2017, 2:24 am
