Those ignorant of their AS--and doing fine

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well , being as how i found out i had AS when i was 51! i managed to function ok for 51 years without knowing i had it , just knowing i was different ! ! if i had known earlier in life , i may not have made as many mistakes in my life , but i learned to cope and survive in the world in my own way ! now that i know i have it , i avoid a lot of situations that cause me stress , and know a little more how to deal with anxieity, overloads and meltdowns ! and now , oddly enough , sometimes i get feelings of superiority ! i can glance at a group of nts , and i feel better than them , not needing the social interaction they crave , is it wrong to feel that way ?

Absolutely. It was suggested to me earlier this year in a passing conversation that I may be mildly autistic. I was amazed as until that point I thought the stuff I struggled with was the same for everyone - some people were just better at it than others (like me).

With hindsight I think I'd not have coped as well as I have if I had been diagnosed as a child. Discovering after 40 years that I really am different from the majority of the population was quite a shock. AS hasn't been diagnosable for very long and therefore there must be many people like me who just got on with it.


This is me, although I can ride a bike and drive. Like Merle, I have also recently started noticing that my interests and attitude to life are not those of my contemporaries (I'm 40) but until I found out about AS I assumed it was because most people my age have children (and so have to be 'responsible') and/or are not brave enough to openly indulge their 'inner child'

Same here, discovered at 60. I always thought of my different as better, it is.

I was the most well read,

I was the one who could fix things, machines,

I was the one with skills that got jobs,

The people I knew were the same, the doers in life.

As a group our view of the general population was, raised on the carpet watching TV in a house without books by a couple of drones who never had a thought.

I had a social group of sorts, made up of machinests, mechanics, writers, painters, actors, musicians, those who made their life on their own, humans, in a world of meatballs.

Now some meatball got a Masters Degree in psychobabble is telling me I need to learn to sniff the asses of their dog pack to be cured?

I never wanted to know any who were not their own person, and NT to me means meatball.

Their idea of a perfect human is the opposite of mine.

Office worker drones are gods chosen people, since most are dumb, follow a religion without thinking, or knowing anything about it, a political party, and a sports team, I am suddenly flawed because I do not watch TV?

The most important thing in life is being liked by dumb people who do nothing?

A Professional Meatball is still a meatball.

I will continue to measure myself against the best, not the worst of humans.

95+% of people are a waste of Carbon, and the world would be a better place without them.

My life is not to be voted on by a democracy of idiots!

"Treat them like people,
they act like dogs,
treat them like dogs,
they act like well behaved dogs."

Inventor

AS/NT/HFA/OCD/WTF/OMFG... everyone just needs to get over themselves.

I went 25 years without even knowing Asperger's Syndrome existed. I learned to get along in life. I'm glad I wasn't diagnosed earlier as I would have used it as a crutch and an excuse to give up and feel sorry for myself. Likewise, I'm glad I wasn't diagnosed later in life as I now have a means to understand my strengths and weaknesses on a scientific basis and make the most of my young adult years.

Bottom line: We're all human, we're all mortal. No one is special. Get over it.

I'm more mildly impaired than a lot of people, which is why I wasn't diagnosed as a child. (Everyone thought I had emotional problems instead. ) It would have been nice to know there was a reason for the things that made me different; on the other hand, if I'd gotten diagnosed as a child, I might have just taken it as further proof that there was something wrong with me, instead of being able to see it as something good.

A lot of the reason I'm not very impaired is that I'm in a position where I'm not under a lot of stress or pressure to conform. I was homeschooled for a lot of my childhood, which insulated me from (some of) the worst of school. I don't have a job, or any major adult responsibilities, so I can spend my time doing the things I love to do and can limit the amount of social interaction I get. If I get close to a meltdown, I can usually retreat in time. But I'm pretty sure that if I weren't able to live like this - say, if I had a job and were living on my own, or if I were in college, like a lot of people would say I should be by now - I would get a lot more impaired all of a sudden. It's good to know that I have AS (though technically I don't know, only suspect), instead of just knowing that I can't do the things most people wouldn't think twice about.

I wasn't aware that was what WP was for.

My husband and I were just talking about this yesterday, actually, because I've been reading Pretending to be Normal, and as a very young child Liane Holiday-Willey was just like me (I'm NT, I suppose--I mean, I'm certainly not AS, but I'm also nothing like the NTs that people are always talking like here), and then the older she got the less she was able to cope whereas I think my coping skills are perfectly fine--I had to learn them, and I probably learned them later than most of my peers did, but they were fully developed by my early to mid-20s. And I was saying that I think that part of the reason I made plenty of friends in university while she didn't was that I went to quite a small university and lived in the honors dorm my freshman year and met people more like me that way. And that I don't think I know hardly anyone among my friends (most of whom I met then) that it would surprise me to learn they had very high-functioning PDD-NOS, but most of them would have no need of a diagnosis (apparently this is what Tony Attwood calls "sub-clinical").

In fact, the conclusion I came to was that probably so much of the population is at the very highest-functioning end of the autism spectrum that there's really no point in calling it a disorder at all.

I watched this happen to myself. I'm just lucky that I don't have kids yet and had some flexibility to change my life to handle it, so I'm doing pretty well at recovering. But it was a mess, almost a breakdown, and I'm 100% positive now it was me pushing myself too long and too hard to fit in to the norm, both at home and at work.

I'm not sure I'd be better off if I had known early on, but I'm thinking it really could have helped me out to find out when I was right out of college and getting ready to make career and life choices that would ultimately prove to be at odds with how I'm wired.

However, if you have been blind from birth and have never been told there is such a thing as sight, you'd not know you were blind - you'd just assume everyone was the same as you. If you've never experienced something, it's easy to assume it just doesn't exist. That's certainly how my Asperger's has been - an interesting part of reading about it hasn't so much been reading those things I already knew about myself, rather it's been reading that they're abnormal, and thinking "you mean it isn't like this for everyone?" I'd just assumed others experienced certain things the same way I do.

People both NT and AS have different levels of functioning, coping, depression, hardships, annoyances, etc. I agree with Danielsmyname.

I think most of what people achieve or don’t achieve has to do with their natural abilities and limitations. Then you throw in upbringing and other environmental factors. Regardless of which way our brains are wired, I believe success is such a combination of so many things that it really is up to the individual person’s personality and nature.

Before I found AS, by bf used to refer to himself as autistic from time to time. I snuck him the AQ test after two months of research on AS. He scored 49 out of 50. He is super high functioning for such a score. He does not want to hear about AS, period. He is aware there is something wrong with him and he is different.

Work is one of his almost obsessions. He does well in spite of his abrasiveness to customers and employees because his company provides impeccable service. He has learned to tolerate a woman in his life (which used to be such a stress as he worried constantly about if I liked him, if I would leave him, was he doing all the right things, does he need to entertain me, so many worries) since she (aka me) gives him space, space and space.

He was raised with strict parents who made him learn manners and politeness. He had a prep school education and was forced to go to college by his parents in spite of not wanting to. I think this played a huge part in his success. Since he met me, he has finally become satisfied with who he is (he tells me this). As much as I want him to know about AS so he understands himself better and realizes he is not alone in this, I think he wants to view himself as unique and as not having something “wrong” with him.

I keep seeing people refer to AS as something “wrong” like an impairment. The only thing wrong is trying to fit into an NT world that makes no sense to an AS brain. NT’s don’t know AS exists unless they have been touched by it. Hopefully some day AS will be viewed no differently than left handedness.

All the issues discussed here are issues NTs have. Depression, stress, work, relationships, dealing with rude people, etc. We just have different coping skills. Who is to say what is better? Suppose AS was the majority and NT was unheard of? There would still be successful AS and unsuccessful AS people. There would also be successful NT and unsuccessful NT people.

I don’t know, just my thoughts.

"feel impaired" probably not the best phrase, meaning people that feel a need for community just for AS or autism. Meaning those of us here often are curious for advice, community, and trying to piece together what is AS and what isn't.
I was trying to differentiate between us and those "out there" that don't see the need to question their neurology.

Oh, sorry, that makes more sense then.

I think mmaestro answered this well, but my statement is merely that you can be disabled or affected by a disorder without realizing it. I never thought I had a PDD, etc... HECK, just yesterday I met a woman that seemed overly curious, a little shy, swayed from side to side, etc... I wonder if SHE wasn't autistic! I NEVER would have suspected that earlier.

I disagree. I found out I have high-functioning autism a year ago. Before then, I had all kinds of problems. I didn't fit in, I had trouble making friends, and I had no idea why. I didn't understand myself or other people very well. Now that I know about autism and NT, it is alot easier for me to understand other people because I now know why people act the way they do. I didn't understand alot about other people until I found out I had autism and read about neurotypicality and how it's different from autism. I wish I knew about autism a long time ago.

I didn't know about Aspergers until a month ago, and I coped decently for 15 years... well, recently I was coping well.

I just thought I was an odd kid who was smart, creative, and yet unable to control her own emotions and had trouble keeping friends. I just considered that I was different and moved on... though, acting always did play a big part during my day, no one never really knew the true me, even myself! But now that I know why I'm different, I find it easier to connect with myself.

Though, there are people out there who can cope with aspergers without knowing it, there are also people with lower coping levels who need to know. I think if I hadn't figured out that I had it, eventually, I probably would've crashed.

I think it's worth bearing in mind that many who think they're coping OK, really aren't doing as well as they believe. For instance, my wife tells me that I'm more aspergian than I often realise I am. The social faux-pas that I make aren't obvious to me, and so without her there telling me I've screwed up, I don't know I've made a mistake. I've been fired from jobs I've had, and thought I understood why. But understanding my AS has now opened my proverbial eyes and allowed me to see why I really was fired - social mistakes, again. I undestand now why I was bullied in school... reading about AS has really started to help me understand my life in ways which were not obvious before.

Still, I had thought I potentially had Asperger's for 5 years before I actually started reading about the condition. Why? I thought I was doing OK. I thought I didn't need to know. I thought I was coping fine. I wasn't. While I've done a lot better than many here, in certain key areas, I've failed, and I've failed because of a lack of understanding. Had I never found out about Asperger's, would I have been OK? Yes, I believe so. I have friends, I have a job (a dead-end job, but a job nontheless), a wife, dog, house, etc. I hope that understanding my Asperger's will, however, allow me to do better than I had done before. It may not, I don't know, but I suspect that there are many who think they're doing alright who, with a bit more knowledge would really be able to improve their lives.