Aspergers & Patience

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If anything, I tend to be too patient.

If you have read Robert Heinlein's book Stranger in a Strange Land about a young man who was born on Mars and raised by Martians, you should remember that the Martians in the book were enormously patient. Tell a Martian in the book to "wait here" and they would patiently wait here however long it would take. I'm not that patient -- after a while, I would give up waiting.

Right now, I'm waiting for something to get done that was supposed to have been done by August 2 at the latest and that should have been done by mid July.

I know I do. I hate stalling, people taking too long for no reason. I even got mad at a lady once in a parking lot for blocking it because she parked on the side in front of the store and I just thought she was dropping people off but no, they stay and are doing stuff in their car. I get very annoyed because dudes, do that in a parking spot, find a place to park your car and then start looking for stuff and doing whatever. But I raised my fist and the woman goes :"sorry" and I calm down. I drove by her finally when it was cleared of incoming cars. I am sure this would have pissed anyone off because no one likes it when people block roads causing back up. I am sure they wouldn't like it in a parking lot either when there is lot of traffic and there were lot of cars that day coming and leaving.

But if it's just normal stuff like traffic congestion, appointments, eating out and the place is busy, I am patient. I am only impatient when it's unnecessary to take too long.

You would hate my younger brother.

One night at the local movie theater, he tried to go through the parking lot against the flow of traffic just as the movie was over and people were leaving. When he couldn't get through, he shut off his pickup and waited for every car in that portion of the parking lot to move out of his way before starting it up again. It didn't take too long, though. Maybe half an hour.

I read that because of our generally perfectionist natures, we have very little patience with ourselves. This is very true for me - if something isn't going well straight away, I get frustrated and therefore worse, until it leads to a very unsatisfying 'ragequit'. This applies to almost anything in my life, and sadly means I'll never be good at a lot of things just because I wasn't instantly great at it (here's looking at you, Guitar).

With other people, however, I'd say I'm very patient. It takes quite a lot to aggravate me from an external perspective (I'm much better at annoying myself!). And if someone makes me mad, I'll cool off quicker than I think most humans would. If they're winding me up (say, by constantly pointing out mistakes in my reading aloud), I'll flip for a moment then quickly say "Okay, nevermind. Let's move on." because I recover that fast and feel better after shouting it out. I wonder if people always think it's genuine, though, or if they think I'm just saying that.