Your Aspie Moments

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I didn't get that joke, either. And everyone would like me to refrain from trying to make jokes.

Still not 100% sure I'm an Aspie but very very likely, I've been told lol.

I can relate to the sniffing my hands/fingertips.

Not sure if it's an Aspie moment, but I can't fall asleep unless I'm rubbing my feet together.

When I'm at home I make weird random noises but I've come to control that in public a little :0

I bounce my leg when I'm anxious, nervous, overwhelmed etc.

I can never figure out when it's my turn to talk in a conversation. I always end up just listening or tuning everything out. When I do get brought into the conversation it's painfully awkward and I ususally only get to say about one sentence before I stop talking.

Not sure if any of those are actually just bad habits, or Aspie traits.. Still trying to gauge if I'm actually an Aspie or not lol.

When I spin on a chair and somebody walks into the room.

LyraLuthTinu:

That´s funny! This happens to me too. I know, that my balance is easily disturbed, but I feel slightly ridiculous.

Aspie-moments?
Moments of literacy - or when somebody tells me something, and I miss a substantial part of it despite my best effort to catch everything. Maybe its adhd-moments?
When I talk to someone and my left hand flies up, fingerflickering. Ooops.
Or when I talk to myself in the street, maybe repeating one Word (verbal stim).

Kortie, a growling, miauwing, purring man on the bus! I´d like to see that

I said "hey how's it going" to an NT pediatrician at my workplace yesterday.

He said "great, thanks for asking" instead of the more traditionally accepted "fine thanks how are you."

I think the pediatricians have diagnosed me unofficially

But usually when I do get "how are you" my response is much too honest and usually more likely to be negative or at best neutral. I rarely actually say "miserable as usual, darling, perfectly wretched" though that's quite often how I feel, especially at work. I feel I don't belong here. The real world is very scary, and most "ordinary people" are mean selfish jerks toward oddballs that don't fit in.



I so relate to this.



I can't stand to sit in chairs so high my heels don't reach the floor, too, not for very long. I get very uncomfortable and start to squirm and shift my leg positions and bounce. This is especially noticeable at lecture on Monday nights, when I'm also scribbling notes so fast it's like I'm trying to save a life (like the poster at top of this page).

Kortie I can't purr, I've tried. I'm sorry my long lustrous hair leaves you speechless I miss you talking to me!

Jensen I don't think it's adhd. I don't think I have that but I'm the same way with missing chunks of conversations no matter how hard I try to concentrate. There just isn't anything in my brain for stuff to connect to, so it makes no sense.

I get pretty confused by unfamiliar metaphors. I'm okay with common idioms, e.g., "what she said threw me for a loop." I intensively researched idioms when I was a teenager because they confused me so much.

Unfortunately, I now work in a corporation, where people come up with new, confusing, weird buzzwords all the time, like this:
Rightsizing=you're fired and the boss thinks it's great
Socialize risk=spread the blame (or dodge it)
Paradigm shift=I don't know, I still haven't figured that one out

Management especially loves buzzwords, which mostly seem to be a method to obfuscate their meaning, or obscure a lack of substantial information. One of our managers likes to use catchphrases all the time. If I haven't heard one before in a meeting, I'll start obsessing on it so much that I lose track of the conversation. The other week, she was discussing a major project that the team had been working on. It was in an early stage, and senior leadership liked the progress.

The Manager said, "It's time to start pushing the needle forward." I thought, "Ah ha! It's a metaphor! But what does it mean? Do they need new injections of money? Do they want us to work overtime to get it done? Is it lacking something they want? Do they want us to go to the next stage? Is progress too slow?" And so I am sitting in the corner, obsessing over some corporate jargon while the discussion has moved on to other things (turns out she meant "We like the project. Let's go to the next stage.")

Why can't people just say what they mean? I am not out as ASD at work yet, so I'm a bit afraid to say, "sorry, I'm metaphor-impaired. Please speak real English."

I had this just recently -
I was in a hardware store, and there was a display water fountain running. It was sort of seed-shaped, with closely stacked rings carved all the way down it, so the water ran down over the rings thus giving the rippling effect. I had the autistic-near-slowly-running-water moment, and stuck my fingertips in it, moving them around slowly. No idea how long I stayed there before there was a shop assistant touching my elbow and repeating "can I help you?"
I'm sure she thought I was on drugs.

You know these chairs with flexible backs? I really like rocking on them and didn't even consider this "wrong" before learning about Asperger's.
I've done that so many times in shops and at appointments...

I act childishly all the time, but there is no way I would ever want to change the best things about myself, so it all works out in the end. Heck, I even dance around in the grocery store when I find a box of my favourite cookies on sale or something. I am occasionally fidgety, especially in uncomfortable situations, but I also dance around the living room or sing for no apparent reason. I also have a weakness for cute and fuzzy things, so I love cats and kittens and nice, soft blankets. When I was little, I had absolutely no control over my meltdowns, but nowadays I hardly have any at all. Listening to my favourite music or touching the covers of my favourite books helps me calm down when I've had a long and busy day.

I don't know. My every moment is an Aspie moment. (shrug)

But I guess I did just have an Aspie moment, so to speak. My son's teacher called with information. I was so repetitive that I could eventually get that "dear God, get me away from this woman and off the phone" sense from her. Happens pretty much daily! LOL!

kraftiekortie, I do the growling when I'm not talking with people, but it feels like what is going on around me is either too invasive or too much in my space. As for the meowing, are you doing that whether or not there are cats around?

Really interesting post and replies!

I do a lot of these too.

I get really (!) vexed if someone moves anything of mine. I have 3 kids and a tidy husband so this happens a lot!

I also wiggle my toes - I think this is my only unsubtle stim. I do it all the way through a dental appointment - what a trauma!

The last couple days it's been nothing but one aspie moment after another for me. I've been helping train a new coworker, and it's becoming really clear that I can't communicate detailed instructions in a way that's easy to understand. I end up getting frustrated and physically demonstrating things that I'm unable to describe verbally.

I was so Aspie at work yesterday. They made me answer the Operator phone line all day, even though I've handed in my Dx and a couple printouts of Job Accommodation Suggestions for Aspies in the Workplace. I also showed them an "Aspies in the workplace" article stating in no uncertain terms that running a company switchboard is likely to quickly overwhelm an Aspie while giving them a huge stack of papers to sort, categorize, document, file and/or attach electronically to the company database (this is my usual job function) is a good fit for Aspie skills.

Anyway the headset switched back and forth between making lots of static so I couldn't hear the callers, making lots of feedback so everything was too loud, failing to connect so I had to grab the phone handset to converse with callers and echoing back my own voice at about ten times the volume of the caller's voice and I got so overwhelmed I started saying really strange things to my co-workers between calls. And then there were the strange random calls that I wasn't sure what to do with, like labs calling with results (am I supposed to take a message or try to get a nurse on the phone?), people who work for other doctors wanting one of our doctor’s e-mail address (somebody got busted so big a week or two for giving out a provider e-mail address), and a really angry daddy who wanted to talk to his kid's doctor and nobody else (your child's doctor is busily seeing the rest of her patients for the day, I really can't do anything but take a message) because he was confused about the immunizations his daughter got. The manager finally came in and told me not to take any more calls/messages from that dad, because four different people had already called him and tried to explain that the child really did receive all her shots, just some of them were combo shots so instead of six jabs she only got three but they really were all done.

Anyway at one point I took off the headset, went for a walk back to my regular workstation to get my mini crescent roll snacks, and said out loud to my regular partner that I was on the edge of a screaming and throwing stuff meltdown.

Plus there were three different times when a song came on over my headphones while I was doing my piles of documents that made me cry. Tears rolling down my cheeks, not out loud sobbing, but it was still embarrassing.

My desk faces the front reception area at an angle though a doorway, so when that door is open the parents can see me while they're waiting for the receptionist to check patients in. I get very uncomfortable at the best of times, and it's much worse when I know I'm being Aspie enough to lose control of my facial expressions and stimming behaviors.

That sounds perfectly awful, LyraLuth.

I think you may have to do more than provide readings and expect supervisors to figure out your needs. After all, their main job is to figure out the organization's needs, not the employee's. I think you may have to be verbally assertive, along the lines of "This switchboard task is very overwhelming to me, and I think it's in everybody's best interest if I'm not asked to do it again." Then, most likely, they would only ask you to do it if there is no other option, and they may provide you a break in that case.

I appreciate your sympathy and your advice.
When I told NThubby I was thinking about insisting that I not be pulled for switchboard unless there were no other choice, he told me "you're going to get yourself fired." So now I don't think I'm capable of asking for specific accommodations tactfully without getting in trouble