"Oh, you have Aspergers? -I just thought you were lazy.

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when I asked my husband if there were any Asperger's type people in his home country, he told me there weren't any, but just "socially-lazy people" who would perform perfectly socially (make eye-contact and make polite small talk) but rarely ever do except by absolute necessity. I then mentioned that, perhaps, those performances were especially difficult for those people and that they did not socialize a whole lot because of that difficulty. He was in denial about it until I found some autism and asperger's forums from his country.

On another note, I had a job stocking shelves when I was younger, and I would do things like arranging all of the cans with the labels facing exactly the same way (not just visible, but exactly the same angle), or actually make sure every single greeting card was in the right spot, and I ended up getting "laid off" for being too slow--no one cared about the aesthetics, which I think they probably couldn't even see. Most people are blind to minute aesthetics.

I want to quote someone from another thread:

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postx198046-15-0.html

I've been told I was lazy my whole life and have accepted and embraced that label.

I took a lot of comfort from the hippie "work is a four-letter word" approach to life. I still feel tempted to rattle people who push this work ethic thing too much for my taste. To me, there's no such thing as hard work. Either I can't start working or I can't stop. It must be infuriating for others that I seem to have to feel some genuine interest in a thing before I can start, but I'm not bad at taking an interest, if I'm given a bit of time to get used to it.

Been there. Done that. Got the perfectly-folded, expertly-arranged, symmetrically-stacked t-shirt.

I worked at Goodwill for a while, and I took a long time to do my job. Cognitively, it is harder for me to do something imperfectly than to try for perfection. That means that I start out very slow and very accurate and gradually speed up to somewhere around low-average. Only in science is such accuracy appreciated.

Have you considered becoming a lab tech or similar? If you have that same tendency to consider perfection the default, that may be an asset in one of those highly-detailed jobs.

I have suspect I may have ED but I still call myself lazy. I am not used to having a label for it. I still wonder if I am just lazy is all and lot of people are lazy.

I am never use to having "excuses" and I always expect things to be said the way they are because I grew up with it. Heck I even call myself a b***h because of my anxiety.

It honestly took a lot of time for me to convince *myself* that I wasn't just lazy. Over time, I've accepted that I'm just not going to be able to handle the same type of workload that other people (even other aspies) can, and that I have to do things at my own pace. I've also accepted that there are some things that I'm never going to be good at, and have focused on the areas where I *can* improve myself. I think people generally underestimate the importance of knowing your limitations.

Thankfully, the professors in my graduate school program have been understanding, as are my friends. I still get some flack from my family, but I try not to let it get to me, and they're at least more understanding than they used to be.