Difference between Aspergers and Introversion please?

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Actually I've known people who were classified (officially) as low-functioning who wanted to be gregarious, socially accepted, and to have a lot of friends. Also wanted to be seen as intelligent. They generally got neither one of those because others assumed their appearance meant they were neither interested in nor aware of people or their surroundings.

I don't know that there's a test for how much a person likes to be around people. I don't know that one is needed, either, because that's the sort of thing most people can know without being tested. I know, for instance, that I enjoy having friends, but have trouble keeping track of more than a small number. While I might want to have more friends than that, and in fact at this point in my life do have a fair number of friends, I have a pretty low tolerance for social events with lots of people at them, and a low amount of friends I can keep track of at once (so my friends have to be forgiving if I forget they exist temporarily). My social desires often exceed my social capacities (I have a strong biological need to be alone for a certain amount of time per day, at one point I was forced to live with a roommate in an emergency and ended up curled up under my covers for the better part of a month until I could get out of that situation, and that roommate was a close friend I am normally comfortable with).

I think I have less innate desire to be social than the norm, but I do like and enjoy a lot more socializing than would be expected if all you tested was how drained I got by it. Lots of people like things that totally exhaust them though, so I doubt I'm particularly unique in that regard.

Another thing with regards to groups of friends... there's also, as so many other things with autistic people, experience to be considered. I had experience with a small clique and then a larger clique at different times earlier in my life. In the first clique I was the gullible one that the other people used to get back at each other when they were fighting. I extricated myself as soon as I realized I was being used and they bullied me for that. In the second clique I was the crazy girl that few people liked except to make fun of and mess with my head (and I heard people calling me names at the time, but didn't care because I felt that I "fit in" for the first time), but I didn't know that until after I got away from it, and when I began consciously distancing myself again, some people became vicious. (Others apologized to me for their behavior, though, so I know it wasn't my imagination.)

With that experience, I'm more wary of social groups than I would be if I were someone who fit into them easily and was not usually near the bottom of the pecking order. When I have made friends since then, I was surprised that they did not do anything mean to me. I was surprised that when I was vulnerable they did not try to hurt me. Nobody else calling themselves a friend before that had been like that. If I had not had this experience of having real friends (people who actually like me and that I like, and nobody's harming each other for fun), I would be wary of the entire 'friend' concept, because most people who had previously called themselves 'friends' were bullies and I didn't even know it because the bullying was more social than physical (there were a couple exceptions, but not many).

So I do have a group of real friends now, but they are mostly autistic people or autistic-friendly weird people. Most of them I only see sometimes because we live too far apart. I do suspect that if autistic people had the opportunities for real autistic-friendly friendship without bullying from an early age, you'd see a very normal range of introversion to extroversion among us.

And as a final note, one of the most friendly and gregarious people I know is autistic. She is very obviously autistic (nobody even watching her for a few minutes would think anything else), and at the same time charming and nearly impossible not to like. Her main thing in conversation is to interrogate people about where they come from and then exclaim all the place-names excitedly and recite everything she knows about them. She comes across very strange but very friendly at the same time, and I've never heard of someone who doesn't like her. She has pen-pals all over the world and meets new friends at conferences and on the way to them. I've in fact never met someone more friendly and generally likable and liked than her, and she's at the same time more obviously autistic than a lot of other autistic people (both in what she talks about and in general mannerisms).

Last evening I replied to a thread on General Discussion about "AS and Bipolar" Disorder . Which had a link to an article which seemed to suggest the existence of two kinds of AS , one which is likely to experience/exhibit mood disorders, mania, narcissism, remarkable language and social skills etc etc , in phases alternating with,or before or after previous more obviously AS periods. This apparently will run in families. And the other more straightforward "type" of AS with standard evolution, associated with what I'm now thinking may be the "genuinely desiring social contact" aspect, just frustrated by difficulties!!
I totally id'd with the mood-disordered one because it explained my own weird transformations ( from retiring to outgoing to retiring etc etc in amongst other changes.)over the years. And now I'm wondering whether it doesn't also explain this somehow.
It's all so complex. But I know that for me introversion describes very well the aspergers I have now. They might aswell be the same thing.

The article in case other thread gets lost ! !

http://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/c ... l/16/2/199