Adults with Aspergers Seem 'Normal' to Me

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If your on medication, when I was trying they SSRIS. One of them no matter how much you did not eat. You did not get any signals.

I cannot tell well hunger or thirst. I can tell when I am hungry bester than when I am thirsty. I have gotten cracked lips from not drinking water for a day at a time. It also never comes into my mind to drink water during these days. I deal with this issue by drinking water according to a routine. When I am home during the day, I drink a cup of coffee in the morning, then a cup of water, then a cup of water or milk with lunch, then a cup of coffee after lunch, then a cup of water or milk with snack in late afternoon, then a cup of water with dinner, then a cup or two of water with fruit at night. When I am away from home, my drinking and eating routine gets messed up, so I often forget to drink water or eat food from the bottle of water and cookies that I carry around in my bag.

If I am overloaded and shutdown, I sometimes cannot move to go to the kitchen to get the water and food, so I should keep a small supply under my desk, methinks.

I have the same with drinking too and often dehydrate.
When I go to my psychologist, sometimes my stomach does rumble, because it could be in the afternoon and then she asks, if I do not feel or interprete the sign my stomach is giving as being hungry, but my brain does not do it.
I hear noise coming from my stomach.
When my sugar gets too low I get dizzy and my sensory issues get worse.
Then it reminds me I do have to eat, but if it is too strong - the dizzyness and sensory issues - I cannot prepare anything anymore or still cannot "connect" to food, then it is like shapes and colours, like everything is shape and colour.

Yes, my lips are alway cracked too.

http://www.findingbalance.com/articles/ ... ness-cues/

Headaches are normal, migraines are not. Simply having a headache is different than having a full migraine.



Yeah, if that works, that works well, because headaches are a big enough trigger to work, but it doesn't always work, because of my migraines. Those aren't me being autistic, but a big enough comorbid that I need to take them into account.



I don't think you understand that what I'm talking about isn't "can't be bothered", its not being lazy, its having no clue how to do these things. It's being overwhelmed by all the options and freezing and the only way to break out of that (if its possible) is to stop trying.



Yeah, that seems to work. It seems like you're not quite understanding how much actually goes into getting food for some of us, but if you don't need to, that shouldn't affect your view for yourself. Food is actually not a simple task though.

On the cracked lips topic, I find thirst a lot easier to deal with than hunger because of the fact that if my mouth is getting dry or my lips are getting cracked, that's an easy sign that I need to drink something. The inability to drink straight water without it tasting horrid is a problem though.

I don't get headaches just hunger pains that tell me I'm hungry, but there are times I have not appetite for food due to depression, anxiety and ptsd issues and sometimes there is even nausea...so I sometimes either have to force myself to eat or just not. but its not because I would prefer not to eat it's because symptoms are interfering with my ability to do so.

Some people do really have symptoms that interfere with their ability to function...you seem to be questioning that?

I can't comprehend it

In my mind, if a person can turn a computer on and post on a discussion forum, they easily have the intelligence necessary to be able to feed themselves, as operating a computer is a far more complex task than eating

I'm not doubting that people are having these problems; it just doesn't make logical sense to me when one task is a lot harder than the other

I have problems in terms of not wanting to do stuff hence I avoid doing it but if I really need to do it I can

So necessity often enables me to act and I'm wondering what triggers these other people to act

If their house caught fire would they be able to evacute the house or would their sensory issues still prevent them from acting?

I suppose I'm curious to know at what point self-preservation kicks in, if at all

So if the house you were in caught fire you wouldn't be able to leave?

And you're right, I don't understand

Presumably you're able to overcome this inability to act to the extent that you can turn your computer on and post on this forum?

Not really.
1. Press on button.
2. Read.
3. Type.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3.

As compared to a simple tuna sandwich without butter:

1. Locate bread.
2. Get 2 slices.
3. Walk to cupboard.
4. Find tuna.
5. Walk back to kitchen.
6. Locate tin opener.
7. Open tuna.
8. Find sieve.
9. Drain tuna.
10. Find knife.
11. Place one slice of bread flat.
12. Spread tuna.
13. Place other slice of bread on top.
14. Cut sandwich.
15. Locate plate.
16. Place sandwich on plate.
17. Eat.

The number of steps makes a huge difference to a task that might seem simple at first glance.

It's not necessarily about either task being hard at all, it is about peoples symptoms getting in the way of them completing the tasks regardless of how hard they are. Not wanting to do something and then not doing it, and not being able to do something because you have symptoms interfering with your functioning abilities are two different things.

what I am describing would be like not being able to do something regardless of how nessisary it is. Also with the house catching fire it really depends on that individual and their sensory issues. I personally could evacuate, but I can only speak for myself.....it certainly is possible one could have impairments that would interfere with their ability to evacuate. Also maybe you should look into executive dysfunction....that can interfere with self-preservation drives and motivation.

I knew that was coming Lol

The mental effort involved in thinking about what to say and then type it all out is, to me more than that involved in making a sandwich

I haven't got the patience to do all the separate quotations for example - that would be far more brain taxing to me than making a sandwich

I think a lot of this is connected to how badly a person wants to do something

I like food a lot hence it's far less trouble for me to make myself something to eat than to clean the house for example

Yes there are days when I hardly have the energy to get out of bed even but hunger will usually be the main thing to spur me on

Whereas even if someone said 'I'll pay you £10 if you do the cleaning' I might still not bother doing it as the extra mental exertion involved in doing something I dislike often means I won't bother

I need to actually be inside these other peoples' brains to see exactly what it's like to be them as I just can't envisage it for myself

It sounds like you don't suffer at all from executive dysfunction, and you probably have very mild sensory issues. Congrats.

Executive dysfunction is when the signals get lost between thinking about doing something to sending the signals to the right body parts needed to get said task done, it also happens when you somehow skip a step between thinking about a task, picturing it in your mind, and then carrying out that task. Those are very basic explanations and the best way I can think to explain it. It's not "Not feeling like it" or feeling lazy and it's not that people don't think it's necessary. A really good place to look for a better explanation for executive dysfunction is a book called "Living well on the spectrum" by Valerie Gaus.

I don't expect you to understand it, I do expect you to be a little less ignorant and stop acting like just because you can do something, everyone else should. I can speak French so by your logic, if I can speak French easily, it should be easy for you, too. Instead of saying "Well, I do this when this happens, why can't you?" Try thinking of something that seem to come easily to others that you find almost impossible- Not because you can't be bothered, but because you just don't know how to do it or where to start or something.


Btw, cooking is much more complicated than typing a post on a forum if you actually break it down step by step.


As for the OP- Say you learned Swedish and became very well spoken in it. When you go to Sweden, they speak it like you speak your mother language, but when you speak it you have to really put effort into it, you have to think before you can put your sentence together. They may not notice that, but you do. It requires A LOT more work on your part to "seem normal" to a Swedish community than to an English speaking one (if that's your main language) so should they decide it's not hard for you for fit in based on the fact that you, with much more effort than them, can speak their language? No, it means you work harder and are probably more emotionally drained at the end of the day. That's just an example of the social issues most of us deal with, let alone everything else. Seeming normal and being normal are two VERY different things, don't mistake them, and don't fall in with the ignorant. It affects us greatly, the "lucky" ones have just learned how to hide it until we're alone because of ignorance not allowing us to be ourselves.

I encourage you guys to look at this journal and really think before you say something to someone who "seems normal/ fine/ healthy"

On invisible disability and "passing".

I know all about executive dysfunction - I have problems with it myself in terms of impulse control and multi-tasking.

We weren't talking specifically about cooking though; just finding something to eat so that you don't starve to death

I have executive dysfunction myself and I can see the extent to which it affects people varies a lot

It's impossibe for me to fully understand what goes on in other peoples' brains without experiencing it myself - reading a book about it will just be another person's experiences or interpretation of their experiences.

My ability to post online, my ability to feed myself (assuming no need to do grocery shopping), my ability to get a college degree, my ability to do grocery shopping, and my ability to clean are all different. Of those I'd say the only pair of those which one is simplier than the other is that posting online is simplier than getting a bachelor's degree - but that's because of the double major I'd taken. Grocery shopping, however, is not actually easier or harder than getting a bachelor's degree innately. I personally found getting a bachelor's degree far more time consuming but actually in some ways much easier than shopping and making myself food.

Completely advanced math classes is just math, that's far easier than figuring out how much water is supposed to be used for cooking different types of foods.



Necessity triggers me to act too, but sometimes acting is asking others to do what I need because I can't.



I never said I can't act at all. I said certain types of things I just don't know how to do and figuring them out doesn't work for me.

Posting is easy, taking care of my cat, feeding her and cleaning her litter box and making sure she always has water, is easy. Feeding myself is much more difficult than feeding my cat.