How would you describe your life with Aspergers?

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AJisHere
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16 Sep 2016, 3:58 pm

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and if you don't get help it will get worse, ebbing and flowing but worse, until you reach your 50s. then it will likely abate. help does exist. you will have to search for it. it helped that belatedly and briefly I had a flukish GF experience, which was just enough to show me that it is basically counterfeit. once you find that out for yourself you will have great clarity and the pain will diminish.


There's a lot more than pain here. I can explain more later. But I don't think I can endure ten more years of this, let alone 20. It will destroy me. I'm trying desperately to find help but it's been very elusive; a lot of false hope.


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16 Sep 2016, 4:25 pm

AJisHere wrote:
There's a lot more than pain here. I can explain more later. But I don't think I can endure ten more years of this, let alone 20. It will destroy me. I'm trying desperately to find help but it's been very elusive; a lot of false hope.

I hope you muster the oomph to keep on searching until you find what you need to survive. each one that finds their way boosts the hope of the rest of us that we'll find our way also.



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16 Sep 2016, 4:51 pm

That's true. Everybody with Asperger's has autism. Not all autistic people have Asperger's.



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16 Sep 2016, 5:31 pm

Hmmm... It's complicated.

My life is an odd range of best and worst of both worlds of being in the spectrum within my current short lifetime.

Worst? The anxious wreck of a child who refused to leave the comfort zone, being a burden and a useless at home. The one who needs things. Moody, frustrated, depressed and bitter. Is not free and full of hate. Overwhelmed and tensed, and wanting it to stop.

Best? An active but odd who teaches her obsessions with everyone who asked or sought for it. A learner with an odd charm. A needless one who doesn't suffer and internally wish she could give and love back to those who need. I can handle it! The chaos, the unpredictability... The goddamned unplanned future...

Both worlds are my past, latter's my current present. And I'm aware that it might change some day since it's possible that I might regress.

But one thing is certain: I never fake it to make it. I'm still the odd one. The norm is still as confusing. My conscience still holds me back. Still as clueless. And still as bad with words.
There's nothing special about it. :lol:


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Dr.Pepper
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16 Sep 2016, 5:56 pm

I find my interests to be very entertaining.



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16 Sep 2016, 6:11 pm

Well life is hard. I only have 3 best friends. But who I am is who I am. Because of Asperger's I'm able to remember a lot. I'm able to make models and art and develop games in my spare time. I'm able to do stuff that requires a long attention expand.

OK FINE. Yes I do have a lot of negatives when it comes to living with it. But that's life. :lol:


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AJisHere
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16 Sep 2016, 8:51 pm

auntblabby wrote:
I hope you muster the oomph to keep on searching until you find what you need to survive. each one that finds their way boosts the hope of the rest of us that we'll find our way also.


My oomph supply is getting low! :lol: I'm working on getting the help I need and attacking the problem from new angles, but every day is a battle.

The most frustrating thing has been how elusive help is. There's no shortage of people who will pat me on the back, reassure me, tell me everything will be ok and praise my successes. While I appreciate the sentiment behind it, it's totally useless and does nothing to help. There are no solutions there. There is no proposal of a solution, not even a hint of where I could search for one. We're talking "umbrella made of Kleenex" level of useless, here.

On the other hand, there's plenty of people willing to go "eh, AJ is capable of wiping his own ass... what more do you want? That's enough."

Like... you know Maslow's Hierarchy? I've been struggling with my tenuous grip on the "safety" level for a long time but as a consequence of my personality I have a deep, driving need to be on top.

Then there's issues with my identity or lack thereof. My efforts to pass effectively as an NT have cost me... well, me. I don't like who I was before, but don't know who I am now. I don't have any way to reestablish this, and autism makes it far, far harder.


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16 Sep 2016, 9:32 pm

I'd much rather have a life as myself, with no labels. Unfortunately, right now the "Asperger's" (is this even a current medical or psychological term?) label is keeping me from starving, at the expense of honest taxpayers :-?


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auntblabby
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16 Sep 2016, 11:05 pm

AJisHere wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
I hope you muster the oomph to keep on searching until you find what you need to survive. each one that finds their way boosts the hope of the rest of us that we'll find our way also.


My oomph supply is getting low! :lol: I'm working on getting the help I need and attacking the problem from new angles, but every day is a battle. The most frustrating thing has been how elusive help is. There's no shortage of people who will pat me on the back, reassure me, tell me everything will be ok and praise my successes. While I appreciate the sentiment behind it, it's totally useless and does nothing to help. There are no solutions there. There is no proposal of a solution, not even a hint of where I could search for one. We're talking "umbrella made of Kleenex" level of useless, here. On the other hand, there's plenty of people willing to go "eh, AJ is capable of wiping his own ass... what more do you want? That's enough." Like... you know Maslow's Hierarchy? I've been struggling with my tenuous grip on the "safety" level for a long time but as a consequence of my personality I have a deep, driving need to be on top. Then there's issues with my identity or lack thereof. My efforts to pass effectively as an NT have cost me... well, me. I don't like who I was before, but don't know who I am now. I don't have any way to reestablish this, and autism makes it far, far harder.

forgive the following stream-of-consciousness word salad- I guess the oomph or spoons [another more useful meme of energy expenditure] of energy are a finite resource, and passing for NT gobbles up the lions' share of them every time, and often results in oomph debt, IOW you have to borrow some energy spoons from the next day on a revolving account with usurious interest, that eventually leads one to the psych ward. I was fortunate to be "hiding in plain sight" much of my life, people just saw me as the invisible weirdo who did nobody any harm, and just neglected me. I met a distant relative of abe maslow, he was a cool dude for sure 8) [a surgeon in the hospital I worked in]. anyways, I was in some kind of head shrinkage for most of my life up until my 40s, from early childhood on up. I have long seen them as somebody who will at least pretend to listen to me and validate my existence in a basic way. from them I learned that if I want somebody to listen to me, eventually it comes time to pay the piper and I had to claw my way up out of myself and reach out wherever possible and pay it forward, and in doing so I found a kind of redemption and live-affirming purpose, to at least atone [iow "At One"] with others who struggle, which has taught me that at least my own travails are not unique, that I am not alone in this respect, that I am at least [figuratively speaking] in "Holland" if not the Riviera, and not in some bona fide hellhole. I hope this ramble made sense. :nerdy:



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16 Sep 2016, 11:21 pm

It's like being shot at by the opposition within the family unit at the worst and being a sweet, cuddly Nazi at the best.


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AJisHere
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16 Sep 2016, 11:36 pm

auntblabby wrote:
forgive the following stream-of-consciousness word salad- I guess the oomph or spoons [another more useful meme of energy expenditure] of energy are a finite resource, and passing for NT gobbles up the lions' share of them every time, and often results in oomph debt, IOW you have to borrow some energy spoons from the next day on a revolving account with usurious interest, that eventually leads one to the psych ward. I was fortunate to be "hiding in plain sight" much of my life, people just saw me as the invisible weirdo who did nobody any harm, and just neglected me. I met a distant relative of abe maslow, he was a cool dude for sure 8) [a surgeon in the hospital I worked in]. anyways, I was in some kind of head shrinkage for most of my life up until my 40s, from early childhood on up. I have long seen them as somebody who will at least pretend to listen to me and validate my existence in a basic way. from them I learned that if I want somebody to listen to me, eventually it comes time to pay the piper and I had to claw my way up out of myself and reach out wherever possible and pay it forward, and in doing so I found a kind of redemption and live-affirming purpose, to at least atone [iow "At One"] with others who struggle, which has taught me that at least my own travails are not unique, that I am not alone in this respect, that I am at least [figuratively speaking] in "Holland" if not the Riviera, and not in some bona fide hellhole. I hope this ramble made sense. :nerdy:


I think I follow! It's great that seems to have worked for you. Everyone's different though; not quite my style. I think you have some recognition of my issues and I like where you're coming from, my destination is just... different, I think.


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17 Sep 2016, 12:01 am

AJisHere wrote:
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and if you don't get help it will get worse, ebbing and flowing but worse, until you reach your 50s. then it will likely abate. help does exist. you will have to search for it. it helped that belatedly and briefly I had a flukish GF experience, which was just enough to show me that it is basically counterfeit. once you find that out for yourself you will have great clarity and the pain will diminish.


There's a lot more than pain here. I can explain more later. But I don't think I can endure ten more years of this, let alone 20. It will destroy me. I'm trying desperately to find help but it's been very elusive; a lot of false hope.

If you find the help, at your age, yer damn lucky. All of the services are geared toward the children, and there's nothing for adults, except, perhaps scorn and psychoactive medications.



Last edited by Meistersinger on 17 Sep 2016, 12:25 am, edited 1 time in total.

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17 Sep 2016, 12:12 am

First of all, I don't have Aspergers. I'm high-functioning. It's OK, I guess, except for the fact that I have absolutely no friends since I'm homeschooled. My only friends are at my church youth group, who I see like, once a week, possibly less than that. I don't have a bike, my folks are too lazy and/or reluctant and/or "poor" (i.e. cheapskates on disability) to put me in driving school, I had to leave Trollpasta because people were making fun of me because I was "cringy". I have no sense of humor, and whenever I watch TV, I just sit there blankly because I can't freaking laugh even though part of me really wants to, and on top of all that I'm going to be eighteen on the 13th of next month and I saw this gif (imgur .com/gallery/bhxgRCZ) and I just completely broke down because I can't take it and I just want to have a pacifier again and get a bottle and have my mom sing to me. I can't handle this. This isn't a fetish, I don't want any diapers or giant cribs, I just need the cuddling and the nurturing and the soothing. But I'm worried my parents will call me ridiculous and refuse to buy me a pacifier and I just feel so conflicted. Most of me wants to grow up, be mature, but deep down inside the infantile part of me is just pleading to be nurtured. It's awful. :cry:



AJisHere
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17 Sep 2016, 12:14 am

I think your quotes got mixed up, Meister. Anyway, if there's anywhere in the world where I'd be able to find help for ASD-related stuff, it's right here. A lot of what I need may be easier to gain from services not focused on autism though. Most of those are worthless to someone like me, anyway. All sorts of feel-good "empowering" crap and telling me how to do s**t I figured out years ago.


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17 Sep 2016, 12:41 am

I am a non-corporeal alien being who flew down from space 23 years ago and inhabited this body. I tried to follow the instruction manual when wiring the brain together, but I didn't do it quite right, so now some things are screwed up. I set the sensory system calibrations way too high, so now everything is super touchy and sensations hurt and are overwhelming. I tried really hard to observe human social interactions, and to feed this information into the social part of the brain, but there are some dangling wires that I can't find any place to plug in, so the social system is running on minimal emergency power fed through by the logical data processor. Fortunately for me, I tuned said data processor at a higher frequency than normal, so factual information collection and storage are easy, and I can reformat some of the social information whose files are too large for the social system, and store them in the logical data processor, then run their programs from there.

This brain has a sluggish processor and crappy, dial-up wifi, so everything runs really slowly. Because of this, it's easy to cause the whole system to crash when it's fed too much information at once. Rebooting is a laborious task, which involves gradually bringing all the individual senses back online one by one, usually through providing a loop command, which repeats itself over and over. Pacing, echolalia, and counting objects visually typically allows the senses to reconnect, but depending on how bad the crash was, it can take anywhere from ten minutes to an hour to bring everything back online. Once the sensory systems are up and running, it's a relatively simple task to power up the data processor, but I have to be very careful restarting the social system, because it takes very little to cause a power surge to that area (because of how little power it can sustain), which then causes another crash.

I messed up the wiring of the physical operations centre as well. This body is not very well balanced, and is slower and clumsier than most others. I've never been able to fix the weird problem with the gait either, so the legs walk stiffly, and the core tips forward, and walking essentially becomes an exercise in perpetually falling and catching, falling and catching.

If I had known when I landed on this planet how difficult operating a human brain would be, I would have paid a lot more attention in my space academy lectures!


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17 Sep 2016, 2:11 pm

I love a good computer analogy, thank you, StarTrekker. :D


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