New Member. Aspergers a vulnerability, not a disorder

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I've just been reading from this forum, and decided to register.

I'm not diagnosed, but I seem to fully match the description of Asperger's.

Let me word-for-word rewrite my "bio" here:

Age: 72

Probably mostly due to Asperger's, I was completely vulnerable to bullying by parents and kids at school

That resulted in complete loss of my early life. I completely missed my youth.

But, if I could have survived childhood, then I wouldn't consider Asperger's a disorder at all, and I wouldn't want to be any other way.

So i call Asperger's a vulnerability, but not a disorder.

Michael829

Welcome to Wrongplanet ! I'm so sorry you were bullied in your youth. I like how you refer to it as a vulnerability instead of a disorder, since we are getting too caught up on labels ands negative connotations nowadays. I hope you have a good experience here .

A warm welcome to you. You are two years older than me, and we lived through a time when bullies were given a pretty free run. What do you like most about your Aspergers self? It has been an advantage to me in a number of ways.

B19--

Thanks for your reply.

I feel that I'm more serious and conscientious than most people, Neurotypicals. At least that's my first sense of how to express the difference that I feel.

I feel that I'd otherwise be missing a lot, and wouldn't be myself at all.

Of course, due to my unusual vulnerability, I completely missed my youth. But if I could have instead somehow survived, I'd want to be the way I am.

If I had to choose between early survival and being me, with my seriousness and conscientiousness, I don't know which I'd choose, even though those attributes evidently contributed to my not surviving.

Yes, in the '50s and early 60s, there was no protection at school.

If one adult committed assault, battery, or even harrassment or stalking, against another adult, anywhere, that person would be prosecuted. Adults on the sidewalk have full protection.

But a child or adolescent on a schoolground is completely without those protections. ...or at least was when I was in junior-high school (pre-secondary school, now often called "middle-school).

Michael829

StampySquiddyFan--

Thanks for your reply.

You seem to know what's going on a lot better than i did when i was your age. When I was younger, I didn't know that I had any rights.

I expect to get along well here. For one thing, this forum is one place where a person isn't necessarily expected to have great social skills.

Michael829

Can I suggest you start off by getting to know members in the General Autism forum. Generally we are a friendly forum though things can get somewhat rocky quite often in the Philopsophy Politics Religion Forum, probably not a good place to start for new members!

Thank you! Yeah, I have been "studying" autism for a little over a year I think now. I am very thankful that schools have gotten to the point where nobody at my school is really bullied. I'm very sorry you were, though. I have gotten along well here with everyone, and I don't have good social skills whatsoever !

Welcome! Sorry to disagree with you right off the bat, but...

You can't get diagnosed with a "vulnerability," and there' a lot more to autism than just being bullied.

It's a neurological disorder, there's no two ways about it. Hypersensitivity to sensory stimuli, which is to say, being incessantly bombarded by physical and mental sensation, unable to filter out what is irrelevant, from what is essential to survival, the inability to determine what's going on around oneself in any social context and function on a par with one's peers - that's a definite disabling set of handicaps. Add to that the anxiety attacks and depression that go along with the frequent disorientation, and you've got a major disability, no different than missing limbs, fainting spells, or uncontrollable hallucinations.

Being vulnerable to bullying, or even being taken advantage of by unscrupulous types who realize that your social blindness leaves you easy prey, are just fallout from the central problem.

I also lived through a generation during which autism was unheard of, and I knew all along I had a crippling handicap, whether or not it had an official name. I just grew up thinking it was a weakness and it was all my fault - because that's what parents, teachers and employers told me.

Can you imagine telling people with Muscular Dystrophy that it was all their fault their bodies were twisted and they couldn't walk or stand? Just because my disabilities are invisible doesn't make them any less real.

B19--

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll check out that General Autism forum.

Sure, philosophy, politics and religion can sometimes encourage some terrible manners, and so I'll be cautious about that. But I'm already on a philosophy forum somewhere, and so I might eventually visit Philosophy-Politics-Religion, just to find out if there's a philosophical discussion that I can comment on.

Michael829

StampySquiddyFan--

Well, I know that some people experience worse, and I know that things always turn out right, so I'm content and don't really have any complaints.

Michael829

That's good . You're a strong person.

Well, actually I wasn't diagnosed. Just self-diagnosed. I seem to remarkably match the description of Asperger's.



Of course. That's why I said that, if I could have survived childhood and adolescence, I wouldn't call it a disorder at all, and I wouldn't want to be any other way.



Well, the system of medicine is oriented toward disorders and maladies. But we needn't adopt someone else's view of us.

Sure, strictly speaking, of course it's evolutionarily counter-adaptive. Natural selection selects against it, because it makes a person less likely to produce a next generation like him/her. I don't deny that.

It certainly prevented my survival, allowed my life to be quashed at the time of life when it particularly matters, when life is at its most intense.

When I'm eventually close to the end of my life, if anyone is concerned for me, I'll be able to assure them that I already died, in 1957.

So it certainly isn't without its drawbacks.

But, as I said, if it hadn't prevented my survival, I wouldn't want to be any other way.



What's wrong with that?




Well yes, that was the problem. Figuring out what's relevant, and what's going on socially, can make all the difference between survival and non-survival. No argument there.



I didn't have the endurance for sports or games that required it, and that difference was noticeable, and would have made a significant difference in a fight.

I wasn't any good at distance-running.

But I excelled at 50 yeard and 100 yard dash.

Different people are good at different things.

When I was partway through highschool, my grades were affected by the fact that I lost interest in school, due to (understandable) unhappiness.



I still don't understand exactly what happened, what went wrong, how it happened. The bullying by my parents, and the school kids, certainly had a role, and I was evidently completely vulnerable to it, due at least partly to Asperger's

(but I don't know exactly what else, if anything--We're all different, and I don't know what the causes and influences were at that time).

There might very likely have been intrinsic, physical-origin problems that helped spoil my life then, and Aspergers looks to be the most identifiable one. But I don't think I'd have done so badly due to Aspergers (& maybe other phlysically-intrinsic problems) alone. The bullying by parents and kids definitely had a strong role.


Yes, Asperger's hadn't been noticed or defined when I was a kid.

I actually feel a little better about it now that I know that what happened to me was partly due to my intrinsic vulnerability, and not just due to external adversity. ...because I don't have to wonder why i didn't assert myself or overcome them and live my life better.

Michael829

I bet will@rd's eyes flashed and he had the sudden "rush" to set a person straight when he read "Asperger's is not a disorder."

I personally agree that it is a disorder, but that shouldn't stop you from calling it whatever you want. You deserve it after all these years! Some of our members here have...er....shall we say strong opinions? You don't have to pay attention to them if you don't want to. I like to read what they have to say because most of the time I agree with them and I find it somewhat interesting/amusing . I hope you can still have a great time here on this forum!

StamphSquiddyFan--

Well Aspergers' seems to have had a negative effect on my early life, and so I have to agree that it could be called a disorder for me then, in that regard. But i wonder if the Aspergers, by itself, under different external conditions, would have had a bad effect. Maybe not. All i know is that it evidently made more vulnerable, under conditions where vulnerability wasn't ok.

But I don't mean to sound negative about it. I emphasize that I have a good life now, content and no complaints. As for that earlier life, that was just the way this life was going to be. The fact that that I couldn't have done different means that there's nothing about it for me to be bothered about now.

Michael829

I believe that it defines who I am. The bulling is the part I hate. At 54 I still get bullied at work and they knew I am an aspie, but they didn't care. And after over 6 years I quit, but not before I recorded them. Unfortunately I can not get no one to listen.

I can't imagine being any other way, and still being myself.

I guess there are people who will bully whenever they perceive that they can get away with it. Lots of times people will start on me, and of course my first inclination is to try to be polite, to assume that there's nothing wrong. My politeness is always taken as weakness. But (nowadays) eventually i catch on to what's going on, and I answer them back. That causes anger, because they're thinking, "Hey, what happened to my pushover!".

Michael829