If Aspergers is a gift, why do lots of people here moan

Post Reply New Topic

Spoken like the true Ishmeal Charm

...nothing that you know a lot about, are obsessed with, have skills with, etc?



because they bash us.....

that's due to people not fitting in with the society and people being douches......

When I was six I got one of those Big Foot Power Wheels, this was just as those things started coming out. It was awesome. But we had a crappy back yard that was smaller than the turning radius of the truck itself. So I learned how to 3-point (it was more like 5-point) turn at the age of six. And the battery pretty much ran dry after 30 minutes. By the time I turned eight and we got a bigger yard, I was already to big to drive it really, though I still tried. It looked strange seeing me driving it standing up sideways so that my feet could hit the pedal. Yeah my condition is a gift, I wouldn't trade it for anything, not even a 6'6" woman in goggles with stonking great .... ya know..... but it is sort of an awkward unwieldy gift. I try not to complain about it, but it just doesn't accommodate my life well all the time.

What dont you get. It really is quite simple. one of the problems with aspergers is that we dont process social situations well, in my case (and the case of the kids my partner works with at school) I did not get the signals that I was pissing people off, the logical result to this is that the person you are pissing off gets pissed off and lashes out. We do not do this on purpose, in my case I was just trying to socialise, however I no longer blame those that picked on me I see that as a reaction to my behaviour which in turn was a symptom of my aspergers.

I get annoyed at NT bashing and especially annoyed at the belief that those with aspergers are in some way superior/ more evolved than NT's. I believe that I need to work through my disability by regocnising my behaviour and ammending it to suit the situation I am in.

You cannot expect the rest of society to learn to spot those with ASD, for goodness sake I have been with someone who works with intellectually disabled kids for 5 years now and she only spotted my ASD 1 year ago.

If we want to work well in social situations it is up to us to fit in. If you do not want to do this you dont have to but please stop bitching about NT's as if it their fault. I am not forgiving bullies and those that belittle, they nearly made me commit suicide! however now that I understand how I irritated people so much I can understand their motivation. Maybe school bullies should learn about cerebral disabilities, but you cannot expect the general population to fully understand us.

TO me ASD is a curse on my life I am only glad that I now know why I am so different.

dentarthurdent, going on what little this medium provides, it seems as though you hate youself; yet expect others with AS to hold similar feelings towards themselves for being AS?
I don't see why you should envy NT's. Just being NT isn't a good-life ticket.
I also fail to understand your reference to Aspergers as a disability; autistics are disabled, aspergers are equally abled as nt's, but in very different ways.
Why say that because we might offend nt's by trying to socialize, they have the right to attack us? That would be the equivalent of me saying nobody but myself is allowed to even try to be a scientist. You may say you don't understand NT bashing; but by laws of mathematics, NT envy is equally bad - just on the opposite end.

If Aspergers is a gift, why do lots of people here moan?

Because Aspergers is not accepted in our society. Aspergers is a gift, we should be proud of ourselves. But we are bullied and beaten down every day because of it. It's like 60 years ago, if you were black you would be segregated and discriminated against. You'd still be proud of being black, right? But wishing you could be treated like the white people? That's how we feel. I don't want to be NT, I want to be treated with respect.

You just dont get it, no I do not hate myself and I certainly do not wish others with this disorder to hate themselves what I want is for us to recognised that our behaviour can be anti social and take some responsibility for it. Of course those that bully, intimidate and demean are in the wrong, but I feel that we cannot absolve ourselves of all responsibility in a social setting. No-one has the right to attack anyone, later in my life I have found that I have not so much been attacked (school was definite attacks) more avoided, now that I know I have aspergers I understand why people avoided me.

I believe that school bullies should have to learn about AS, also people with AS should learn what it is about their behaviour that provokes people to attack them. Avoiding this issue will not help bring about change

So do most of us, really.

The only way that complaining about bullying/abuse/etc. is "NT-bashing," though, is if we were to assume that bullies were representative of NTs in general. Since they're not (and also not all are NT), it's not NT-bashing to complain about bullying.

How right you are anbuend!

I attended several different schools before high school, was bullied at most of them, and discovered a few things about bullies and bullying:

1. The bullying was often the result of how I responded to the other kids. In the 9th grade, when I realized (completely on my own) that I was partly culpable for how I was treated, I worked very hard to change how I responded. That was how I dealt with bullying, but I realize that it won't necessarily work for everyone else.

2. In hindsight, some of the bullies were NT and others had ASD. Since I was a magnet for bad treatment, once it started, all were free to join in, no matter their neurological profile.

3. Once I began to change my behavior, how I responded, and my appearance (btw, pocket protectors are way not cool), the bullying stopped. I was still traumatized from the former treatment, but once it stopped, I had to force myself to give up the anger I felt towards the former bullies. Unreconciled anger can be terribly self-destructive.

4. Bullies and their targets do grow up, and many essentially grow out of that bully-victim behavior. Often the bullies don't even remember how they treated "the weird kid" or realize how much trauma they caused their targets.

5. Those with ASD who have terrific long-term memory will have a hard time forgiving their former tormentors, but I believe it is worth the effort.

Z

dentarthurdent, I can't seem to get over the apparent idea that you believe AS should be held responsible for being AS.
So what if we can be anti social? By contrast; NT's are highly sociable!
Must they in turn apologize to us for that? I will NEVER feel shame for being something I've no control over! Why do you seek to pretend?
You say you do not hate yourself, well, why not be a proud, belligerant w*ker about being a perceived belligerant w*ker to begin with! I will never apologize for being AS, and if you're keen to, I feel sorry for you.
The problem most of us have with NT's is not only the bullying, the misery, but the expectation that we must try harder to be "normal".
We might as well expect them all to behave like us!
But, instead, I expect them - all of them - to acknowledge my existence as being very different to theirs, as I acknowledge their differences to myself.
To say one should not expect general public to acknowledge this is simply not good enough. Ignorance is no excuse, and pretending poor substitute for awareness.

Noone's noticed this post?
Obvious trolling.

If there are so many, you won't have any trouble in choosing a few and asking directly to them why they moan.

Asking it generally seems... inefficient, to say the least.

I completely agree with you Ishmael it is the NT lack of tollerance that makes Aspies lives isolated and hard.

my pediatrician said to me at diagnosis that the problem is not you it is the way people react to you.

Thing is, how much control does anyone have over the way they react to other people? Irritation and associated feelings of fear, contempt etc. are real and are provoked by specific causes, whether this be an aspie interacting without insight, or anything else. As people mature, they learn that they can't make the world become what they want it to be, and find it easier to control their physical and verbal reactions to irritation. Because of this, they beome more tolerant, but to ask someone to tolerate everything conceivable sounds a bit like dropping the world on their shoulders! They didn't sign up to tolerating autism or anything else outside of their ken, and (more to the point) neither did you:



This sounds like someone pretending to themselves that they signed up to autism before taking it on. Everyone does this; we feel disempowered when we remember the simple truth that Nature, not ourselves, put us together to begin with, but it also reminds us that no-one, NTs included, can be held responsible for what they are. All they can do is make an effort to channel themselves into less destructive patterns, beginning with their behaviour.



My alternative would be to plead with them -Why should they acknowledge anything unless you appeal to their innate empathy, by pointing out what you have in common with them (the emotional need to be acknowledged etc.) to begin with?- We also need to acknowledge the situation we are in. -If we annoy people, they will avoid us unless a) our behaviour changes and/or b) we spread some understanding about AS that makes sense to them, as this makes us less 'unknown' and therefore less threatening-.

And by the way, I have never identified 'myself' with the way I behave when I'm not thinking; anyone else feel the same??