Using Aspergers as a crutch or excuse ??

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I don't think so, because up until just a few years ago I had no idea what asperger's was. And I'm still pretty much the same person with the same behaviors that I've always been. It has, however, made me more aware of my own behaviors. Things that escaped my notice before or things I did but didn't understand why, I now recognize. I think that recognition has actually made me more determined to get better at things I didn't even realize I was bad at before, like eye contact.

It has perhaps minimized some of my guilt that I don't live my life like a typical adult. But I don't talk about asperger's offline, or deliberately alter my behavior based on it, so that's not really the same thing as making excuses.

But I have the diagnosis, and I know the things I find hard and what I find easy, and I can't just put my AS aside and ignore it for the rest of my life, and completely transform myself into a NT just so I can adapt to others because there would be no point in the diganosis. AS is something I am born with, and yes, as I've become a young adult, I have become independent, and have learned lots of communication skills, and coping skills, and behaviour skills, and I've gained so much confidence each year, which is great. I get the buses, I do volunteer work, I'm on job-seekers at the moment but I am finding paid employment. I am struggling with finding paid employment, but I am doing work training courses to help me, and all my family are proud of me. Also I've passed my driving test, but I haven't got a car because I can't afford it yet, but the important thing about that is I've acheived something, and it has improved my confidence too. But there are a few occasions where I have no choice but to say, ''er, I have Dyspraxia, I may need extra help with this,'' or, ''sorry about this, I have OCD,'' or, ''I'm not being unfriendly, I just get a bit shy at times.'' That's not really using it as an excuse, because I am doing things to help myself in life, but there often comes a time where I have to come forward and need to tell certain people about my difficulties, in order for people to understand and give me some extra support. It's called being open about yourself - it isn't always a case of using it as an excuse. It's like with job searching - at first I wanted to do retail work, but when I tried some work experience out in shops, I found it was too much for me, so I had to tell the job centre, ''I might have to change the direction of my job search, because I know I'm not going to be comfortable in dealing with lots of customers when I have a social disorder.'' That's not using it as an excuse, because I still can work (because I do have some social knowledge), but I think working in a shop won't be very ideal for me. You've got to be assertive sometimes. NTs are the same - they'll like nothing more than a job what suits their personalities and needs. You get a woman who has a high sense of fashion and loves beauty, and she'll most probably go for a job at a hair-dressers, or a beauty parlour, or a fashion-style clothes shop - but would turn down a job working in a car garage fixing cars. Or you'll get somebody who is loud and sociable, and they'll probably find themselves more comfortable working at a bar, or in a McDonalds, than in somewhere like a quiet library, or other places like that.

Last edited by Joe90 on 08 Dec 2010, 9:01 am, edited 1 time in total.

I used to think that I used AS as an excuse, but I've come to realize that wasn't the case.

I would think things like "Well that's probably because I have Asperger's" but it didn't mean I stopped trying to do whatever it was I was doing. I just realized what the issue was. I don't think it's bad to see As as having to do with something you mess up because it may very well be due to it.

AS kills the social being in a person. Using AS as an excuse for life's failures is obscenely valid. Anybody to say that Aspies shouldn't use their condition as an excuse are just misguided, ignorant or Neurotypical.

The difference between an explanation and an excuse is whether it's accepted or not. AS is an explanation for many of the difficulties we have, but not everyone accepts that. To some, it is an excuse. My father "doesn't believe in psychology", so you can imagine the awkwardness of my being diagnosed with chronic depression, social anxiety, and OCD (before I knew what Aspergers was). I didn't talk to him about those, and I won't bother talking to him about AS, because to him, it's just an excuse for not living life exactly the way he thinks everyone should.

I find when I am thinking that I use mental illness as an "excuse" for failure, it's really my father's voice I'm hearing. I'm also defining failure by the fact that I don't make enough money to support myself. That's not me talking, it's my father and the consumerist, materialist culture he was born and indoctrinated into. I choose not to accept this definition of success and failure. I choose to believe that a person's worth is not a function of his or her income.

I didn't choose to have AS, depression, or Crohn's disease. I didn't choose to get my Crohn's diagnosis six months after going off my parents insurance while I was unemployed, leading to it being a "pre-existing condition" and preventing me from getting non-governmental health insurance for the rest of my life. Those things happened to me. All I can control is what I do about it. If I gave up on life and stopped trying, or wallowed in self pity begging for people's compassion the rest of my life, that would be a true failure. If I make the most out of my life, and continue to make every effort to do what I can with the hand I've been dealt, I have no reason to be ashamed, and I refuse to be ashamed because someone else thinks I should be.

A penguin cannot fly through the air no matter how hard it tries, or how vehemently the other birds demand that it do so. It is simply not able to do this. That is not an excuse, it is fact. There are some things I cannot do. There are other things I do that most people can't. There are some things that take more effort and some less. I love quotations, and I've always been fond of this quote from Theodore Roosevelt "Do what you can where you are with what you have". It embodies the pragmatism I have come to believe in. The older I get, the more dislike I have for the idealism of people who want everyone to fit into the world the same way.

There's a difference between using a disability as an excuse and using it as an explanation.

I use my Asperger's to explain why I struggle with certain tasks. I remind myself that the people who do better than me don't have my disability and that I shouldn't feel bad about not doing as well as them. I can accomplish the same goals as they can, except that I have to put in more time and effort. I also sometimes have to use different methods to achieve my goals than most people would This way of thinking is helping me to make progress in my life even though I'm starting things a little bit later than my peers. I couldn't handle any more high school, but I did get my GED. I will start attending a technical college in January. Though some people would interpret this route as lazy and below me, I think that it is the one that best suites my emotional needs. Lower stress = higher chance of success. I don't think it's any less valid than graduating from high school and going to a more prestigious college. I'm still getting a college degree and I'm still doing something with my life.

This is exactly what I was saying. All you can do in life is do your best, and what suits you and your personality and needs. This can even apply to NTs, but in all different ways. But having AS isn't something you can ignore - people wit AS are still able enough to acheive desired goals but at a lot of times in life we may consider extra time, money or support to do so. There is nothing wrong with needing extra help with things. Next to all the other good things you have said in this post, I exceptionally like this.

Sometimes I may be slower with acheiving goals than some NTs, like with my job searching. But there is a difference between being lazy on purpose, and naturally taking a little longer to get yourself motivated. My NT cousin is 19, and she's left college and is now going to claim for job-seekers. But she isn't even getting off her arse to do anything - and she's even shown that she is not one bit interested in working. She'll rather lay in bed all day, or sit on facebook, or go out to a party and getting completely drunk, than actually getting up and looking for work. That is just pure laziness, because she's got a lot more confidence than me, and she just doesn't want to use it job-wise. But with me, I am trying anything I can to get further help and support, (on top of searching for employment and volunteering at the charity shop), but I'm still taking longer because of my limited range of choice (due to my AS). There is no point in putting me behind a bar in a noisy pub - I would get eaten alive. That is not pure laziness.

I have noticed over the year that when people say excuse, they are using it as irony or using it as an explanation.

To me an excuse means not even trying, just doing things on purpose just because you have it, not taking responsibility, expecting special treatment. It be like me going to work and thinking I should be allowed to say anything I want to people there and insulting them and expecting to have the special privileges to show up late or come to work whenever I want than following the rules everyone else has to follow. or what about me refusing to work on some things just because I have AS, that is using it as an excuse. It also be like me going online and posting things and I full well know it's wrong to say them but I do it anyway and then say 'I have AS", also using it as an excuse.

This is what using it as an excuse means. I cringe when I hear people say their autism is an excuse for something. Same as when they say other things is an excuse such as their pregnancy. People use tons of things as an excuse, not just AS.


I have always hated hearing teachers or bosses say "That is no excuse" when you had a valid reason for why you were late. To me it implies I did it intentionally to be late and found an excuse for it. But yet when teachers say "Unless you have a very good excuse" I see it as irony because they mean unless there was a good reason why you were late, something that could not have been avoided, if s**t happened and you had no control over it. Same as if a boss said that too.

That's the problem with your way of thinking, You see social skills as set in stone rather than as a learnable skill so you see every social interaction as a showcase of what you already have rather than as a potential for learning.

AS is a reason we're struggling, but it's not an excuse to hermit and do nothing if we want to improve. But yeah on the other hand, to deny that it is something we'll have to deal with for the rest of our lives is foolish and nothing but rationalizing. The thing is that rationalization goes both ways so it's best to not think in extremes.

I think I have yet a third point of view about this.

I heard both of those views growing up, that I was either hopeless and incapable of anything much, or that there was a lot of hope, but hope that I'd learn a lot of things that I'm incapable of learning and become normal or close enough to it to function fairly normally in society and have a job and take care of myself and so forth.

Neither of those things happened. Not even close. And I'm neither "woe is me I'm so miserable because autism took my life away, it's an excuse for everything" nor "I can learn these things if I try hard enough so I should not just sit around and be a hermit".

What I am... well I'm someone who (not just because of autism, it's a whole combination of things) is regarded by society as severely disabled, I need a lot of help to get through the day, going out once a week drains all the energy I have, I don't have a job, I don't have many friends, even when I do have friends I can't initiate enough stuff to keep in touch unless they put forth most of the effort, and yet I don't use autism as an excuse, I'm happy with my life, etc.

So the kind of idea I needed was that yes, actually, it's okay to be a hermit if that's what you have to do in order to function at all. The one time I go out each week I don't really communicate much with anyone while I'm there. Then I go home and recover all week from that. My main problems are not social. It's not that I have no social problems, but that my social problems are rooted in more basic differences between my sensory/cognitive functioning and that of most people's, and so I don't think of social problems as that central to my experience of being autistic. I have had to learn really that I don't have to exert myself in huge degrees in order to prove that I don't use anything as an excuse and deserve to be thought of as an equal who can live outside institutions and all that. I don't have to choose one side or the other of that whole thing. I can live my own life off in some direction entirely different and that can actually be okay regardless of my abilities.

(I have met people who habitually use autism as an excuse, though, but those are the sort of people who'd use a fencepost as an excuse if they could figure out how.)

I feel sorry for you.

The only reason I pursued a diagnosis for Aspergers was for my own benefit, so I am more self aware why I act the way I act, so I can recognise it before letting it become a barrier as it had been at times in the past.

Reading these forums I think far too many people use it as an excuse, wanting to blame anyone and everyone for why they are the way they are, society doesn't like me, AS suffers are screwed over by god, Nice guys come last bla bla bla

At the end of the day, we all have to co-exist in the same world, and abide by societies norms, simple fact is you got to go along to get along. Yes I have AS, but I won't advertise it, my wife and a few close friends know, but that's more so they can give me a gentle nudge if I fall into bad habits, or have a particularly rough day.

I don't believe in "Aspergers Pride" as has been suggested in other threads, sorry not the sort of thing I'll be marching in a parade for any time soon.

I could sit back and wallow in self pity, draw a disability pension for being "Autistic" as well as having a heart issue (Wolf Parkinson Syndrome) but I don't think I could be comfortable like that. I don't see much of a difference between an excuse and an explanation (if you are disclosing AS to someone to "explain" your shortcomings in something, then it's really an "excuse") I struggle at times to manage some of my "AS" traits, I'm not particularly empathetic, I can be quite abrasive and short with people, as well as one track minded. I have little to no tolerance for "parties" or social gatherings, or concerts.

I was told all through high school I had no athletic talent by one PE teacher in particular, I couldn't run the 100 metres in under 20 seconds if you fired a rocket up my backside. I did however have an attitude on me, and focused that towards 3-4 hrs a day playing and practicing basketball, biggest reward of that was playing an A grade basketball match against this PE teacher 5 yrs later, holding him scoreless while dropping 47 pts on him.

Am I "misguided, ignorant or Neurotypical"? Maybe, or maybe I have enough self pride not to let this diagnosis dictate my life.

This, actually, is the attitude I'm talking about, thanks for illustrating the point. I just learned about AS in the past few weeks, but I've had depression and anxiety for years. I can't tolerate the stress level in a lot of jobs, so I had to find a job through vocational rehabilitation. Yes, I did disclose that I had a mental illness, and yes, I did ask for help, from counselors and family and yes, the government. I'm not ashamed of that, because I didn't give up and didn't stop trying. A lot of people may be more severely limited than I am. I'm not going to sit in judgment of them. If you don't want to accept that people are different and have different limitations, then that's on you, not me.

Just because you have the strength to "suck it up" and deal with it, don't assume everyone can. I don't agree with Craig's negative attitude either, but I also don't think you just toss people away because they can't "abide by societies norms". Don't assume everyone can do what you do if they just "try harder". Don't assume because some of us are unemployed, on disability, or working minimum wage jobs (as I am), it's because we're "lazy". If you must believe things like that, please try to keep your prejudice to yourself.

If somebody makes fun or criticizes you and you feel hurt and say 'actually I have AS' you should have every right to.
They are just saying you're making excuses because they feel embarrassed for being an ass in the first place.

Would you say these people are making excuses?

"You speak funny."
"I'm deaf in one ear."

"Haha, that's not what colour that is."
"I'm colour blind."

"You walk funny."
"I have dyspraxia."

"Can't you spell properly?"
"I'm dyslexic."

These seem like valid reasons for me. So what makes someone with autism/AS any different?
Being made fun of hurts especially if there's a reason a person is that way.

People ask me mockingly if I'm deaf because I don't always hear them. I have tinnitus. That's not an excuse that's a fact. I've always had processing dysfunctions too.
But I don't say I have autism. I go into much more detail than that. I have very poor motor skills and I don't like being called clumsy. People think the way I talk means I'm stupid but it's actually very common in ADHD.

Now there are some people with AS that use it as a crutch. "I can't do this because I have AS." It depends on the severity and it's important to know just how much you are capable of.

Those are reasons/explanations, not excuses.

Yeah sometimes I would love to say I have AS just to make someone feel guilty if they insult me or be mean to me about me taking something literal or whatever. But I am always afraid of it backfiring. What if they didn't give a s**t? What if they thought I was using it as an excuse?

(Note: If you don't want to read yet another post of mine that's a long-winded discussion of my abilities, feel free to skip this post. I post things like this as often as I do because if I don't, people tend to assume that the people around them are not like me. These posts are my attempt to make us more visible, even if they get repetitive. I am sorry that I am unable to summarize posts easily, or I would put a summary somewhere. I'm just not good at it. Sorry again. The one thing that I can try to do here, is I will bold the most important bits so that you can try skimming to them. But don't blame me if the important bits don't contain every bit of information you need, because otherwise I would have to bold the whole thing. And I can't read my own writing at this point so sorry again if it's repetitive.)

Also note: Only part of this is addressed to Zur-Darkstar, most of it is addressed to fb5b and those with similar views.

Quoted For Truth.

Seriously. (The rest of my post isn't to the poster I'm quoting, it's directed to the poster quoted by the poster I'm quoting, and anyone like them. If anyone can even follow that sentence.)

I don't even know where to begin with responding to this kind of idea, even though I've responded to it often before. I seem to have to think it up every time even though what I'm typing ends up the same. A few facts to keep in mind when I write this, though: I'm diagnosed with autism, therefore I don't put autism in quotation marks when I refer to myself. (Although personally I think people currently categorized as AS or PDD-NOS have just as much right to call themselves autistic, minus quotes, as any other autistic person.) I don't have the negative attitude about myself that some people on this thread do, so when I describe my limitations, I'm doing it for educational purposes, not because I enjoy wallowing or something like that. I describe them because a lot of people aren't aware of the fact that not everyone who comes to boards like this has identical strengths or limitations. And I think a lot of misunderstandings come from assuming that we're all the same, so I purposefully describe myself a lot because otherwise a lot of people are prone to figure that everyone here is essentially similar in certain ways that we're really not. I don't need validation from anyone but I don't take kindly to watching people be picked on for not being supercrips. I understand why people try to become supercrips, but I don't appreciate when people who choose that as their path in life try to claim everyone can or should be just like them or else they're just whiners who could overcome their disability if they just wanted to enough. (Here is a link to a definition of supercrip for those unaware of the meaning.)

Do I think it's bad for people who are able to lead more or less typical lives? No, not unless by doing so they're doing harm to themselves. Do I think it's bad for such people to turn around and tell the rest of us we can or should do the same thing? Absolutely. We're not all the same. We don't all have the same abilities. It's not a good idea to judge someone else for being unable to do something you can do. Is it possible they could do it if they tried? Depends on the person. And what are the consequences for them if they absolutely cannot do it, and yet try? It varies, but the worst that can happen is extremely bad, involving overworking themselves to the point of collapse (while still not reaching that elusive goal of "functioning normally in society") at which point the things they need to do in order to survive can vanish as well. Which is why I'm not generally willing to sit by without responding while people promote these attitudes. I co-run a mailing list for autistic people with daily living difficulties, which means I get to see (and sometimes help clean up, if possible) the mess that results from thinking that everyone can "function in society" if they want to enough. I'm talking starvation, homelessness, all sorts of fun things that result from anything but laziness.

So now to describe why it's not possible for me to simply try really hard and function in society. Remember again, I don't attach any particular emotion to being unable to do something, so if you feel emotions or "negativity" about having limitations (hint: every human being has limitations, some are just different than others), that's your problem not mine. Personally I am fine with how I am, although that didn't come without years of effort getting past disability-shame. And what I'm going to talk about here is mostly just the autism-related stuff.

So first what some of my strengths are, just so nobody confuses me with the sort of person who can't see past their own weaknesses:

* I'm good at perceiving the world in terms of sensory information and the (concrete) patterns between it.
* I'm good at telling a lot about what's going on by the sounds, sights, and textures associated with movement patterns
* I have a good memory as long as it's precisely triggered by some outside event
* I'm a fairly good writer despite a tendency to go into too much detail and repeat myself (again as long as it's triggered by something)
* I can cope emotionally with nearly anything
* I have a high tolerance for many types of pain (can go through a steroid nerve block without moving or making noise, which my doctor says is very unusual)
* I don't need much in order to keep myself entertained.
* I can 'read' most cats fairly easily
* I am good at reading people with certain cognitive similarities to me (most would currently be classified as autistic, but sometimes as intellectually disabled or certain kinds of epileptic or something else)
* I am good at a form of communication that is not about words but more about the placement of certain objects and experiences around in various locations

It's harder to describe my autism-related weaknesses in some ways. It's easiest to describe them in terms of the "root", not the "branches". ("Root" would be, say, a certain perceptual experience. "Branch" would be, say, a certain social difficulty.)

Roots of various difficulties

So one aspect of this is a large divide between "deliberate" and "triggered, automatic, or involuntary". Triggered means something outside of me somehow triggers an action. Automatic means the action starts without my consent, but I can hold it back at least some of the time. Involuntary means it's going to happen whether I intend it to or not. So basically, my biggest difficulties are in the realm of the deliberate. I may have difficulty (and more or less depends on the day) with triggered, automatic, or involuntary as well, but quite often those things are perfectly good even if I have no deliberate use of the action at all. I started with a wide gap between these things, and that gap has only widened with time. (To the point that I have a separate diagnosis of an autism-related movement disorder.)

So what things are affected by that? Movement. Thought. Memory. Writing. Speech. Other things like that. Any action either inside or outside of my head is affected, some of them extremely enough that they become useless (like speech, all my automatic speech is not about my thoughts at all, and I can't wrest control away from the automatic words enough to have any useful voluntary words, so I can't use speech for communication at all). Follow this link if you want a more in-depth look at all this. Among other things, the link gets into how the area affected can involve difficulty starting, stopping, switching, combining, executing, and continuing whatever action is involved. In terms of deliberate movement, I range from doing stuff with great difficulty, to being unable to do it, and this all varies moment to moment, day to day, with no way to voluntarily override it. In fact the more effort I put in, the harder it gets. The best strategy I have is to string together good triggers for the actions I need to take, but that only goes so far and even triggered actions can be affected to some degree.

The other component of my difficulties is one that has to do with how I think and perceive the world. It actually has more than one side to it, each disadvantage goes with an advantage. When I describe above how I have a way of relating to the world that all has to do with sensory patterns, there's a difficulty on the other side of it. I have great difficulty using ideas to understand the world. The words I use sound like there are ideas behind them, but most of the time it's more that I've learned over time which patterns of words go with which sensory patterns, and use them accordingly. I do have to also use ideas, but I have to use them as minimally as possible. The vast majority of the time, I'm not able to use idea-based thought, I'm not able to use or understand language, and I'm not able to understand my environment in terms of categories. Meaning that I can't look around and identify all the objects I see, I just see a bunch of colors and shapes and stuff. It takes a good deal of effort (when it's even possible), to climb up to the level where I can use these categories, idea-thoughts, etc. And the moment I let go, I fall to the ground (and "the ground" for me is somewhere without conventional thought, category, idea, or language). But inside those realms without idea/category/language/etc. there is a very rich and beautiful landscape that's nearly invisible from up above where most people (including many if not most autistic people I've met) spend most of their time. (Here is a link to an article I wrote about the good aspects of this.) It should also be noted that I had a severe receptive language delay as a child, and this completely shaped the way I relate to both written and spoken language, both expressive and receptive. The majority of the time, I go around completely unable to understand language or even that language could exist.

I also have a difference in how I learn things that I've just touched on a little here. That is, most people when they learn things that are based in idea or language or category, they have done something like walked up to the top of a hill. The ground is firm beneath their feet, and from there they can climb to higher and higher hills. On the other hand, what I do is the equivalent of scaling a steep cliff. And my starting point is much lower than most people who climb hills can imagine easily by the time they're children let alone adults. So I scale the cliff up to the point where I need to function at. And I function at that level in that area. And then the moment I let go, I fall back down to the ground, much further down than most people even start at. This means that even if I climb much higher than someone standing on top of a hill, I also usually fall down much lower. Which confuses people whose abilities are more or less stable and always incrementally increasing.

"Branches" of those roots, how this plays out in daily life

What that looks like in real life, is that I learn how to do something, seem to be doing well at it, and the moment I stop learning it, I fall back down to the bottom and have to learn it all over again. Sometimes learning it repetitively does give me some advantage over the first time I learned it: I now know where all the handholds and footholds are on the cliff so I can climb more efficiently than before. But it's not the same as keeping the entire skill. It just means that I can access it with more ease in some ways, but it still takes almost the same amount of sheer brute force. (Here is a link to a longer post I made about this general idea once.) So basically, even if I seem to master something once, then I usually the moment I stop doing it I forget about it and have to go all the way back to the beginning and start over. My skill may improve, but not in the same way that a skill improves if you're doing it while standing on solid ground instead of hanging by your fingernails.

Additionally, my skills fluctuate constantly. That's partly because of the cliff-climbing thing. And it's partly because my abilities kind of do this dance. One of them will go up and the rest of them will go down, and then another one will go up and the rest will go down. I have no control over this. I have to take each ability as it happens. Effort does not increase the probability that I will have a certain ability at a certain time when I really need it. I just have to hope that it either gets triggered by something, or else it happens to be the skill that soars up to the top while all the rest plummet down to the bottom at a particular point in time. (I've sometimes compared this to being a stork. Storks have to ride thermals rather than fly entirely under their wingpower. This means they're at the mercy of air currents a lot of the time, rather than just being able to flap their wings and go wherever they want to.)

So I basically have four different areas that I always end up having to explain. There's the divide between deliberate and triggered/automatic/involuntary actions. There's the fact that my brain strongly favors sensory pattern-based relation to the world rather than words, idea-thoughts, and categories. There's the fact that in most areas, rather than walking up a set of progressively higher hills with my feet on the ground, I have to scale cliffs and then fall back to the ground. And there's the fact that my abilities are like an ever-shifting bunch of thermals. These are the best I can do to describe the "underlying" aspects of what cause both my difficulties and my strengths. They aren't everything by a long shot, but they're the fastest way I have. (Which is pretty slow isn't it? I'm well aware how long it takes to say any of this, which is why it's always a little embarrassing to trot it out like this in front of people who've mostly probably seen it before. Hence the warning at the beginning.)

So now that we've done the roots, how about some of the branches.

I have virtually no daily living skills. People have tried to teach me many times, and I have tried to learn. But my deliberate learning is just as bad as any other deliberate action. It seems that whatever someone (including me) tries to directly teach me, falls right off my brain (sometimes it stays long enough to demonstrate some kind of "understanding", and then vanishes forever), and I end up learning something totally different. Like in school, they tried to teach me about academic subjects, but in the end all I took away from it in the long run was the movement patterns of the way the students and teachers interacted and stuff like that. So people have tried many times to teach me daily living skills, and it has never stuck even if lots of other unintended things have stuck. It's easiest to describe what I can do. At my best, I can, some of the time, feed myself, dress myself (partially), use the toilet, and move around my apartment. But even these things that I can do, are things that I usually need someone to start me off with or I will manage them only extremely rarely.

So, for instance, I can eat food if someone hands it to me. I can only rarely get the food in order to eat it. I have literally starved within feet of food. I did not have a death wish. I did not just give up on myself. What happened was complex and had to do with several interacting factors. One, I couldn't always conceptualize that there was food behind the solid opaque refrigerator or cupboard door. Two, opening these things and taking food out of them requires boundary lines to be crossed on purpose, which is something heavily affected by my movement disorder (the same reason I would get stuck in doorways back when I could walk better). Three, doing all that requires finding my body in the first place, which requires a lot of perceptual skill that I often lack. Four, doing that requires noticing that I'm hungry, another perceptual skill I often lack. Five, doing all that requires sequencing all the right moves in order, which is another area I have difficulty with (sometimes I will automatically open things, but it doesn't mean I will automatically take anything out). So keeping in mind that different abilities come into usability only at certain particular times, and given that this requires all or nearly all of these abilities to be available at once, you can see why even a "simple" task like that is difficult. It was in fact difficult even when I had someone who was on the telephone and able to try to talk me through all the steps. I got very thin and bony that way, and the less food I ate the more difficult all these things were because using your brain requires fuel for that brain.

Understand that when I was living entirely on my own with only a friend on the telephone (and a cat who was astonishingly attuned to my body language and more helpful than many humans could be) for help, I didn't just have to do one particular task like that. I had to eat. I had to sleep. I had to use the bathroom. I had to bathe. I had to clean the house. I had to go shopping. Then understand that at maximum I could do one and a half of these things, generally, and at minimum, well, none of them. The way I experienced the world at the time, was as though (without much sense of connection to a body) I was dancing around through a number of sensory patterns. I couldn't see things, feel my body, or hear things, without them falling apart into incomprehensible fragments. I couldn't hold a train of idea-based thought in my head. In order to get anything done, my friend would (when I could understand language) walk me through it. She didn't walk me through it by saying "pick up the cup of water". She walked me through it by saying "can you find your neck? if you can find your neck, you can find your shoulder. can you find your shoulder? if you can find your shoulder you can find your elbow. can you find your elbow? " etc. Then she would direct me to various things, say, in the kitchen, based on physical descriptions (often more about color and shape than about the identity of the object). Then she would direct me to find all the body parts and then move them so that they picked up whatever this thing was. Etc. This was painstaking, this took hours, this often fell apart and had to start at the beginning again if my body either froze up, or started running around the apartment on the strength of automatic movements. (And often falling over, which I didn't process as falling over, I processed it as gravity turning sideways, or else the various visual fragments blurring by me in a weird way, with odd physical sensations that I couldn't place until I figured it out later.)

If I tried harder, things got even more interesting. Things would crash to the ground because some body part (like "hand") that I wasn't even aware of the existence of, bashed into it because I was pouring so much effort into moving that movements just started going haywire and happening in all sorts of places and directions that I didn't intend. Rather than becoming clearer, my senses would fragment even further. So would thinking, until I no longer had enough thought to even conceive of what I was "trying" to do. I'd write signs and post them places. Except, except, they didn't look like signs. They didn't look like anything. They looked like scattered pieces of white rectangles with incomprehensible grey shapes on them, that didn't even catch my eye as anything important, they blended into everything else. You can't make use of a sign (or a phone call) if you can't comprehend that language could possibly exist, and that's where my brain was a lot of the time. I'd somehow end up outside stacking stones in patterns on my knee, stuff like that. My body would run around on its own and do all kinds of odd movements that I was barely aware of except when I'd suddenly catch myself doing them. My memory of that time is a time of utter chaos. I didn't even use the toilet in the right place a lot of the time, and it sure as heck wasn't intentional. (Try sequencing that set of movements in that state of cognition without screwing something up nearly every time.)

I got barely enough food to live on by the time someone finally steered me towards government services. And by live on, I mean not die, I don't mean anything like proper nutrition. When the person from the services place first walked into my apartment, she apparently said that she had to leave because she was not authorized to do the level of cleaning necessary to make my apartment livable again. She had to call someone within her agency who was authorized for more intensive cleaning in order to get it cleaned. And they did get it cleaned, and that was just part of my path to a life that actually worked for me.

And there's this really specific pattern that crops up for a lot of people who really badly need services: The more services I received the more I was capable of doing. That's not a pattern of someone lazy who simply doesn't want to function in society and wants an easy way out. That's a pattern that means I had been working past my limit and needed someone to pick up the slack so that I could function at all. This doesn't mean that I'm suddenly able to do that stuff around the house. I'll probably never be capable of that, especially as some of my impairments are progressive. It does mean that if someone helps me do the things that I cannot do, then I have the energy to do the things I can do at least some of the time.

Without services, I can't actually get any daily living tasks done, but nearly all my energy is poured into trying to do them and failing spectacularly. With services, I still can't actually get any daily living tasks done, but I have the energy to do some other things. That's what shows that your advice makes no practical sense for someone like me, and could actually do a great deal of harm. If I were to follow your advice and go it on my own I would be unable to function in society at all (in fact if I hadn't had SSI at the time when I am describing above, then far from having my own house to try to function in, I would have been homeless). If I don't follow your advice -- if I get disability income from the government, subsidized housing, Medicaid/Medicare, and government funded services, as in all those things you think make a person lazy? -- then I can actually function in society to some degree. If I wanted to wallow in my incapacities, I can see no better way to do it than to refuse government money, try to get a job, and try to function on my own without any extra support from disability-based services of all kinds.

Then there's the social stuff. Which is usually the least of my concerns despite being something I have difficulty with (at least when it's socializing with most nonautistic people).

...language. Despite my writing skills, I grew up with a severe receptive language delay. And frankly language is one of those cliffs that I climb and then I fall off of and then I climb again and fall of of. In order to understand language, I give up all of the skills I am better at. Even Temple Grandin has said that she understands either tone of voice or language but not both. I'm the same. Except most people in my position seem to make a permanent sacrifice of nonverbal understanding of other people, in order to understand and use language. For me it's only a temporary sacrifice. Then I go back to my natural state: Understanding based on tonality, rhythm, patterns of movement, and all the things autistic people supposedly aren't good at. Although the nonverbal things I understand don't seem to be the same ones nonautistic people understand, it's a completely different set of skills than they have. (Except there's some evidence coming in to support what I've long said, which is that those of us with receptive delays can often process things like tone and movement better than people who understand language well.) My expressive vocabulary will probably always be better than my receptive, which is a deceptive impression I give (looks like I understand more than I do, at least when I'm writing like this), although not on purpose.

As far as stuff outside my house goes? Yikes. The thing is, my house and other very familiar places are the only places where my senses are not reeling from the amount of new information they are taking in. If I go somewhere unfamiliar, I often get nauseated from the seasickness that my visual system creates with all the bouncing fragmented images in a new place. In familiar places, I have an internal map that helps me navigate but in unfamiliar places, let's say I'm on nausea meds for a reason. ]b]Generally if I go out, even to a relatively familiar place, and even if I'm on my nausea meds, basically everything goes incomprehensible for much of the time.[/b] I find it difficult to do anything meaningful in circumstances like that. Sometimes I can scrape by, but the combination of cognitive and physical overload means that once I get home... it's like I have this entire backlog of unprocessed information. And the moment I'm alone and lying down, I get a full-color (and sound, etc.) playback in random fragments of everything that happened but was unprocessed when I was out of the house. While this is happening, I'm not capable of thinking or moving much, and when it is over my mind clicks and then goes blank for awhile. Once I come out of that, I usually find that I've drooled all over the place. All I can think of is that it's my brain's way of dealing with an information buffer that was seriously overtaxed.

The reality is that for most of the interactions that I have with people, I don't understand what they're saying at all. Most of my interactions are with support staff who help me get through the day with food and everything else I need help with. But most of what I understand of them comes from what they are doing, not what they are saying. The sound just sounds like Charlie Brown's teachers in Peanuts, kind of. I don't even really notice it's there, or rather I hear it as noise but without any meaning other than the tone and rhythm. I take objects from them, and by mostly the feel of them I know what to do with them. I give objects back to them as well. This back and forth continues all day. I get help (either starting it off for me or doing it entirely for me or something in between) with eating, cooking, shopping, cleaning, drinking, bathing, medications, toilet stuff, and basically every single household thing. People have tried to make me ashamed of this but I would not survive without it and I refuse to be ashamed or to think that it makes me lesser or somehow like I'm giving up. I use a communication device in order to talk to people.

I also (because of physical limitations, some of which have to do with autism--related movement issues and some of which don't) use a motorized wheelchair that tilts back, and spend most of my time in a hospital bed. None of these things make me lazy, they are what enable me to function as much as I do. I waited to get the motorized chair too long technically, by waiting until I literally physically collapsed from the effort of using a manual chair. The reason I often wait until the point of collapse is because I've internalized the messages that if I don't put all my effort into functioning as much as I possibly can in as typical a way as possible, then I am lazy and just using things as an excuse and all that. You can see why I don't appreciate this viewpoint. That kind of viewpoint has encouraged me to completely trash my health trying to be as "normal" as possible. And I know too many other people who do the same thing for the same reasons.

The other thing is, that when I hit my limits, I really hit limits. Something will completely disappear, something that's important for doing the thing that I was trying to do, possibly for trying to do anything. If I hit physical limits, I will either completely freeze up, or else collapse (as in become so limp that I can't move). Or both. If I hit language limits, language vanishes and won't come back for anything. If I hit cognitive limits, then I can't think. If I hit perceptual limits, then everything goes fragmented, then blank. If I hit these limits intensely enough, then something happens I have trouble describing. I go completely blank. I don't think of anything, I don't notice anything of my surroundings, I either don't move or move in a repetitive way (as described to me later), and for all practical purposes (from my perspective) I disappear, except perhaps for a dim awareness of... something, I don't even know what. This is not the kind of thing that you can reason your way out of, because reason is gone. You can't brute-force your way through it because your ability to either have the force to use, or else to know what you're trying to force yourself to do, is gone. You can't get through it with movement because you can't move. It's an actual wall you hit, not just an imaginary limit in your head.

Over the course of thirty years, I have done my best to work within my limitations using my strengths to guide me through life. Instead of using pure force, I have learned to use objects or situations to trigger the abilities that I need to happen, and I learn to maneuver my way through the triggers so that I can hit the right ones to do what I want to do as much as possible. I have learned to rely on senses and pattern rather than idea-thought to get through the day. I have learned to make the idea-thought that I do have subordinate to my sensory-understanding of the world, rather than the other way around. I have learned to understand the patterns of which of my abilities is likely to be there at any given time, and ride the 'thermals' into the abilities that I want to use when I want to use them. I have learned to rely on tone and rhythm and movement rather than language wherever possible, and to minimize the situations where I have to understand language. I have learned that my body often knows what it's doing better than I do, and that when I find myself moving in strange ways that are considered socially inappropriate by a lot of people ("stimming"), then this is actually my body's way of understanding and interacting with its environment. And that rather than suppressing it, I ought to use it to its fullest capacity. I have learned that if I try to force myself to come up with the right language to write with, then it will not happen, but that if I continually sort of "steer" my brain in a certain direction and point to it long enough, then the writing will eventually follow even if it takes years. I have learned that when my body starts writing posts like this one, then no matter how inconvenient it is for me, it's probably the right time for my brain to write something like this (even if it wears me out to the point where, like right now, I can't even read what I'm writing and have to just hope it all comes out right even though I know it's so long that nobody will probably read it). I have learned that pushing myself to succeed at all costs only leads to things taking longer and doing more harm to my mind and body and emotions. And so much more.

In other words, I have learned how to function within the particular set of abilities and limitations that are mine. It's quite probable that if some of the people who gripe about people like me using government resources were to instantly be put into my body, they would not be able to do a quarter as much as I can do. Not because I'm better than them, but because I'm better adapted to my body than they are, and the methods I have used to compensate for my difficulties are not the same methods they would use to compensate for theirs. Using their methods would simply lead to my collapse in most instances, because they tend to rely on heavy use of logical idea-thinking (which causes my mind to crash fairly fast) and brute-force (which would result in shutdown of several kinds at once probably) as well as deliberate memory (which would just lead to spinning my wheels cognitively and getting nowhere) and deliberate application of what was remembered (more spinning of wheels). Their methods work in their heads and that is a good thing usually. But their methods do not work in my head any more than mine would work in theirs.

I've also known autistic people who can't do some things I can do. Or at least, who can't ever do some things I can sometimes do, is more like it. People who can't ever connect to their bodies enough to do things like the typing I'm doing right now. Would you blame them for that, or is it that you think any of us who are capable of using language (even if the way we think behind the language and access language is totally different from how you do it) are also capable of doing everything you can do, because you assume (erroneously) that the main reason autistic people who have trouble with the sorts of things I have trouble with, are like this, is because they have global cognitive issues that have to also make language impossible? Because that's not actually how it works for many of us.

There are a lot of autistic people (whether officially labeled autistic, AS, PDDNOS, HFA, MFA, LFA, whatever) who don't fit the pattern of someone who is capable of just pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and pretending that they can function without extra help in whatever societies they live in. People like me are only one among many different types of people who can't manage it. We're not inferior. We're not worse than you. We don't need or want anyone's pity including our own (okay some of us are into self-pity but not as many as some people imagine ). We're just people who happen to have a different set of abilities and difficulties than you do. Is that really that hard to understand? What on earth makes some of you think that you know what our lives are like and why?

Personally I'm very happy with my life. It's not the life anyone planned for for me. They were too busy either planning for me to be either permanently institutionalized or completely or almost-completely able to function in "normal" society. (The second one was called "hope" but it seemed like despair to me at the time because I already knew that I was losing abilities rather than gaining them.) One of the reasons that people like me often grow up thinking that we have no chance for a good life, is because we are taught that in order to have a good life we have to be able to function so-called "independently" (hint: it's not really independent for anyone) in society. And we know better than to think we can do that. And really one of the reasons I come here is so that younger people who might be like me, could see that it's possible to have a life like mine and be genuinely happy with it. Or even that it's simply possible to have a life like mine, something I was never told when younger. I know that some people don't think much of lives like mine. But most people I know who are actually [i]living[[i] lives like mine beg to differ.

Sorry again for the length, I hope that turning parts of it it bold will help for some people.

If opportunities come up, I always give them a go, and if my AS is interferring beyong my control, then I have to use it as a reason as to why I can't do this. If I try something what is at my tolerence level, I won't start concocting excuses. Using AS as an excuse is when you're delibrately being lazy and you're just saying, ''no, I can't do that because of AS'' to every opportunity what comes along - that is making up excuses. I don't do that.

It is actually mature and grown-up to use your AS as a reason, because you are being assertive and independent. I am old enough to know what I do want and what I don't want out of life, but I still give things a chance.