28 Oct 2012, 2:29 pm
I'm wondering if anyone else out there with Aspergers has gotten positive feedback from colleagues, to whom you've disclosed AS, on your ability to effectively deal with your challenges. I don't mean positive feedback in general but specific to AS struggles. Not just in a lame kind of way like "oh, I don't think there's anything wrong with you, you don't really seem to have Aspergers, we all have those struggles" but when they genuinely appear to applaud you for going through what you do (and not so much because of it, but in spite of it). 
An example was a former colleague from several years ago called Bruce, really nice guy, and I told him about my Aspergers (because he mentioned his wife worked with developmentally challenged kids). This was in about 2001, so not everyone had heard of it - he said he sort of knew about it but not much - and while he said that he was cognizant of how I didn't intuitively process nonverbals, emotional nuance or "the big picture" like others, he said I was still really good at what I did (IT-related!) and told me that he appreciated how I still go to work with a burning desire to make a difference AND interact with others - which he said that I did well, with occasional stumbles, but he applauded my effort to do so in spite of what I had. 
But that's the rarity. More often, when I struggled with these challenges in a couple of other/similar positions w/in the past decade, I got comments like "I don't know why you make simple things so complicated", "You need to stop over-analyzing things and just go with the more obvious", or "You need to stop trying so hard." 
Needless to say, I got VERY frustrated by these flippant remarks, but held in my anger b/c I certainly couldn't afford to unleash it. As far as I was concerned, what they were doing was like telling a blind man that he's making things "complicated" by reading Braille and attempting to hear everything that's around him. 
