Explaing AS to those who don't know it

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I don't tell people that I have AS. I tell them that I'm an old Double Decker Bus in a community of flowered VW Vans. (Langley and Vancouver, BC both seem to have a large Hippie community at this time.)





<-------------This is me!

... or how about ... I'm a twisted, burly dogwood in a garden full of weeds. Most of the time I blend in, but at certain times, I'm the most dazzling spectacle in view.

I just tell people that I come from a long line of eccentrics. This is true. Both my parents were artists.

I think I just called the NTs weeds. Oops. That's what happens when I try to be colorful.

There's nothing shameful about being a weed. They're adaptable, resilient and common.

And now you've called them common

That's what I'm trying to do now. I don't say I have AS because they won't know what it is and I don't want to give them a verbal essay to educate them on it. Instead I just say what's relevant at the moment. For instance, today I told someone about my sensitivity to the sun while begging not to sit outside in the sun like EVERYONE ELSE ALWAYS wants to do. I failed to mention that it's a neurological disorder and I'm going to start saying that. Trying to eat while sitting in the sun for me is like trying to eat while someone is repeatedly thumping you (lightly) in the head. Not painful, but EXTREMELY annoying and distracting. He just ended up thinking I'm being weird. My friends all think I'm a little weird but my good friends just find it kind of interesting at most.

From now on I'm just going to say "I have a neurological condition that causes me to <insert immediately relevant thing here>".

This topic is like discussing the best technique for catching a bird by putting salt on it's tail. If somebody likes being around me - these days this is all hypothetical - they're going to be familiar with my habit of talking about odd topics, and aspergers will be just one more of them. I don't think it would scare them off no matter what I said.

If somebody finds my company annoying and boring, there is nothing I could possibly say about aspergers that would change their mind and make them think I was fun to be around.

I agree that someone's probably either going to like you or not. But when I'm getting to know someone, it's good to be able to put things in context so that I don't misinterpret what they say or do. I remember years ago working with a guy that I thought was a jerk, and it turned out he was going through a divorce, and that was making him feel and act like a jerk. We later ended up being very good friends. Then I worked with another guy who seemed like a total space cadet, and later I found out his child had died just a couple of years earlier, and he was still trying to deal with that (depressed, on meds, etc.).
People are more accepting of atypical behavior if they have some context for it.

There's a book coming out in November that might help: "All Cats Have Asperger Syndrome" by Kathy Hoopmann, who writes books about AS kids, but not necessarily for AS kids.

From the Foreword to "Autism and Sensing, The Unlost Instinct" by Donna Williams (who is autistic, and uses the term in this book to cover all related conditions including AS):

'Autism' is simply an internal human 'normality' with the volume turned up. We all have experienced moments when we aren't quite aware or when we are too aware to handle the world. Or moments when we aren't quite aware of the company we are in or so overly aware of it that it gets hard to function. We all have had times when we've had hardly any awareness of our bodies, even been out of them, or felt so in, weighed down by them, that we become hypercritical, eager to escape, tune out, or disappear. We have all had times when we've lost the plot, the why, the what or been distracted by the meta-reality inside our heads to the extent that we are suddenly jolted out of a daydream. So too, have we all had moments when we have been so aware that we have taken things in ... almost overwhelming, extreme detail. For me, the experience of 'autism' is not any of these things in themselves, but rather the frequency and extremity with which they are experienced and the degree to which these experiences affect how one expresses oneself and relates to one's inner world and the outer world. It's a matter of whether you visit these states or whether you've lived there.

Just tell them that it's normal, and that neurotypical syndrome is a horrible disease that evolution is currently trying to fix.

I tend to tell people, if I'm going for the short version, something like... well I try to actually avoid the abstractified word "autism" and just go for "autistic people", so I do something like:

Autistic people perceive the world differently than most people do, and this also means that we're going to react to it differently and think differently, in fact a lot of our thinking is carried out in areas of the brain usually considered merely perceptual, etc. Which leads to a whole lot of differences in how we think about and respond to the world, and which parts of the world we think about and respond to. Doctors tend to view the whole thing in terms of impaired social interaction etc, but it's more likely that the social impairment goes both ways, you guys don't understand us any better than we understand you, the social stuff is more a matter of two totally different ways of perceiving the world colliding.

Or something like that.

Then there are specific things I'll explain as necessary, such as:

* Overload
* Shutdown
* Difficulty locating and moving body parts
* Thinking outside language, difficulty translating
* Perceiving things in patterns, and very different patterns than most people perceive
* Being able (unlike, generally, non-autistic people) to turn off our mental hallucinations about the world and experience it directly
* Arriving at the same actions through a totally different cognitive pathway
* Different social perceptions, and different social actions, but the fact that autistic perception is uniformly different from non-autistic perception both in and out of social areas (so autism is not "social")
* Dealing with so much information that no more can be shoved in at the moment
* Difficulty with spoken language (largely because of the huge amount of things that need to be coordinated at once -- thought, language, complex movement, sound, etc)
* Being able to either move or perceive or think abstractly, but not any more than one at once
* Tending towards implicit rather than explicit learning

...and lots of other stuff.

Last edited by anbuend on 30 Sep 2006, 5:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It doesn't matter. If you meet an NT swine, he or she will judge you because of your Asperger's anyway. If you meet a nice NT, he or she will treat you nicely. Simple as that.

Actually, a lot of non-autistic people are reacting to us as if they are seeing something totally different. They see one little thing and kind of expand it to fill the whole in a pattern they've already experienced. If you can get them to shift their definitions, they can become nice where before they'd been hostile.

For instance, many non-autistic people believe I am snooty if I don't respond to them while they're talking to me, and they then respond in kind. If they understand that I might not while moving around even recognize that they're human beings, or that they're talking at all, or talking to me, or what the words mean, and that I might not be able to respond even if I figure all that out, they're a lot nicer suddenly. People who think they're being treated badly often retaliate -- not that it makes it right to judge us so fast, but that the judgements are not necessarily going to be final.

(I should note: I get that judgement a lot more often in this building, where everyone under 65 is disabled in some way and so I don't look too unusual and get judged more often by non-autistic standards. Usually when I'm outside this building, my social problems are of a totally different nature.)

Similarly, many people don't realize that I understand what they're saying to me at all even if I do, and in their case, I startle the heck out of them by responding to what they're saying, and often they acknowledge me more after that.

Plus people can become suspicious of what they don't understand or something that's new to them.