Are you an Aspie if you want to be one?

Post Reply New Topic

HECK NO! I didn't feel that way at all. Sometime I overuse them. The capitals were for emphasis. Sorry. I was trying for a friendly exchange.



Yeah, And I fully agree with all of that.



Tics are a possible comorbid. So they could be related. I simply said they didn't have to be.



You're right there. As for me, I have finally started to use the restroom, and try various things to avoid having to explain things when I am least able to. It is almost like my intelligence is a trip on the autobahn, and the meltdown is a flat tire and brakes. I keep trying to remind the people that pay me to do work that I do my WORST work under pressure and when I am being watched. It also happens slower. I guess they like to live dangerously. There is NOTHING more dangerous than a guy that can wipe out your software or data in the blink of an eye with ONE wrong move.



Yeah, I know. But it seems like people can STOP stims. I can. I would rather not, but can. In public, I usually try to keep them subtle.



GREAT!(Emphasis! ) I am also.

I can tell you where is the point: If you cannot do things you would like to. I am glad for you being able to accept it so totally as you obviously do. I spent 4 years in two different universities while feeling like an idiot and being told by authorities that I would have to leave before I found a third one with smaller classes, fixed timetables, room numbers and building layouts easily to remember and many more small things not relevant to others. That is my point: The probability of a ruined dream and a denied life perspective. A future that is denied and a different one forced onto you.



Come on, that is a nice theory. There is a difference when you are treated differently in situations where everybody is supposed to be treated the same way. It is not only you realizing it, others see it too. Do I like having got the private mobile phone number of my university professor. Of course I do, the personal contact is vital. Do I like having to explain that to another student if he has got a look at my phone? No, it makes things more complicated. I am not telling anybody.



Who would have a chance to hide it totally? People will always realize about you being odd. Nobody would expect that hiding autism is possible. I improved a lot when I learnt that being odd can mean being interesting to people and especially those are worth being social with. I made a huge jump forward. But you need a lot of self-confidence and awareness about your own autism to do that. Try to tell a teenager!



I do not hide the fact that I am autistic, that would be way too much and hiding it from myself is a sick idea. I hide the most obvious signs in front of other people to prevent them from not knowing how to behave.

If you think it is unecessary to hide it sometimes then try to apply for a well paid job not hiding traits. Good luck!



So? Ask a ten year old in school who does not have the luxury of understanding what is happening and offer him a pill that changes the world for him. Ask yourself if you would have taken the pill as a kid.



Thanks. I know your words are meant well. I do not have big problems with a disability, I wanted to tell people that they have to accept having one if thinking of having AS.

Like the ruined dreams of the kid who wants to play pro basketball, and practices day in and day out for way longer than 4 years, but ends up being too short?

I was told I didn't belong on a university campus by no less an autism "expert" than Lynn Koegel. Now I've been asked to do work (not for pay, since I can't work often enough to make that work out) at MIT. I'm going to probably mail Dr. Koegel one of my business cards once I get them, and a note.

I was told as a kid I could grow up and do anything I wanted, which is BS when told to any kid, then when I was a teenager I heard people saying around me (because most didn't bother to talk to me) that I'd probably be institutionalized the rest of my life, and the only people who offered any "hope" at all said the "hope" was to make me totally normal.

Bottom line, though, everyone ends up in situations they didn't want or expect in life, for a whole variety of reasons. Some more than others. My mom used to design buildings in her spare time, wanted badly to be an architect, worked really hard at learning what she thought she'd need to learn, and was prevented because when and where she lived women were not allowed to become architects. She ended up becoming a respiratory therapist instead. Do you think it's being a woman she should've hated about all that?

Personally I think education should be accessible to a wider range of people, including higher education to people with low IQs if they think they can learn from it (right now there's some places that do it and some that don't, and many have an IQ cutoff -- I know someone who was in the middle of a grad degree before being told her IQ was too low to continue even though she was doing great), people shouldn't be told they don't belong getting an education, the question should be "How can this person learn what they want to learn?", not "Does this person belong learning?" And that requires changing things, not deciding that it's just awful to be a certain way that's currently discriminated against in those settings.

I'm living a different life than I expected, and in some ways a different one than I should, but I try to work to change things so that the next person maybe won't end up in as bad a situation (where the situation is unnecessarily bad), and for the rest I go, that's life, the world doesn't revolve around me or anyone else and you don't always get what you wanted, might keep trying if it's important enough or not if it isn't. Sometimes cool things happen out of nowhere too, so do bad things, that part is just how things are.



Sorry, it's not a theory. It's only a theory for people who've only ever seen the way their own culture(s) do things and haven't seen anything different. It's a fact for those of us who have seen enough to see the differences. I have close family members who grew up in a time and place where being what would be considered at least moderately disabled in mainstream America, was considered part of their range of normal. They got support that went unquestioned. They grew up and had families and children and the same sorts of jobs as anyone else. In mainstream America today they would have been set apart, put in special education, probably never even allowed to go to university or marry or have a job.



Yeah but there are other ways of doing things where those situations would not be seen as situations where everyone is supposed to be treated the same way. Then you wouldn't expect to be treated the same way and it wouldn't look like a discrepancy. That's what I'm saying. And it's better to work for that sort of thing than to complain about how awful it is that you are different.

Women have often been left out of the safety design of certain situations. Everyone's expected to be treated the same in those situations but there's no reason that they should be expected to be treated the same. It used to be there were no curb cuts or ramps anywhere, now they're not everywhere but still very widespread and very few people think about them. Do you think they got there by wheelchair users sitting around and whining that it was horrible being disabled and their inability to get anywhere was just a result of the way their bodies functioned?



Some people can hide the stimming, and that's what you were talking about, stimming, not the whole of autism. I can't hide it at all.



Telling people how horrible it is to be autistic won't help.



Oh, so you think it's your fault (or responsibility) that they don't know how to behave around you because you look different?

That's their problem. Spend enough time around them and they'll learn how to behave. That's what I do, and it makes it easier for the next weird-looking person they run into. If I sheltered people from the fact that I look weird, believe me I'd look a lot weirder and in a way that's truly disruptive rather than just weird-looking. It's not our job to coddle people who haven't been exposed to a wide enough range of people, it's only our job to keep from actually hurting them.

I know physically disabled people who were kept out of normal classrooms for no other reason than that "they might make people uncomfortable to look at". On the other hand I went to an integrated summer camp where nobody was made uncomfortable by the sight of anyone else because everyone was used to seeing different kinds of people. They never will get used to us if we all hide it. And only some of us have the choice to hide it (I could hide it better when I was younger, but still not enough to not get noticed).

I noticed when I was later sent to special ed (as a teen) that we all had to put up with each other. There was no other option. We were all the rejects from regular school for a wide variety of reasons, including that other people were not supposed to put up with us. But we, despite supposedly having social or emotional or intellectual or psychiatric differences that should've made it harder for us to put up with each other than it would be for all the supposedly more-able people who got in regular classes, somehow all managed to put up with each other. Because we had no other choice. Non-disabled people should have no other choice than at least put up with our existence, but they do have a choice, and that's a problem that ought to be solved rather than acquiesced to.



I know people who've gotten them while not hiding traits including not hiding not being able to speak.

Not that discrimination doesn't also happen. But just saying it is possible.



No problem.

The way I see it, you (general you) don't really have a disability, you are disabled, while other people are enabled by the supports that you claim are irrelevant or just theory or something (even though they vary by time and place). That's more the point I'm trying to make. Entire classes of people are shut out of certain things, but which classes of people and which things varies enough by place, and has certainly varied enough over time, that it seems better to change the disablement so that more and more people are enabled more than they are disabled, rather than to make everyone the same. (And, again, I've seen examples of either change or cultural variance on this stuff.)

I've not been formally diagnosed with AS. Instead, I was stuck with schizotypal personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, major depression, generalized anxiety... because neither my psychologist nor my psychiatrist thought to look at my past. When my best friend's mother first met me when we were in the third grade, she thought I was autistic. We kind of laughed about this, because the only autism we knew of was the nonverbal savantism popularized by the media.

So, I suppose I'm self-diagnosed. Does that make the label any less valid? Of course not. Those two men who saw me once a week for maybe a year of my life, who came into our relationship with *expectations* are no more qualified to diagnose me than any other stranger. The only people who understand how my mind works are ME, and the very select few I had shared with, who had the patience to stay at my side throughout all of my problems.

While I was seeing these men, they doped me to the gills with Zoloft and antipsychotics such as Risperdal and Geodon. The result? ...better social interaction. And a complete loss of personality, self, and thought. I lost some of my faults, but I also lost all the things that made life worth living for me.

Eventually, I went off of those medicines. Now I'm as weird, inappropriate, and handicapped as I used to be. But I'm ME. I can think. I can remember. I can create. Yeah, I get overwhelmed when more than one person is talking. Fluorescent lights make me spacey and sick to my stomach. I can smell things that other people can't, make connections that their minds don't initially make, and often drift through metaphor and speculation. If someone talks to me for longer than a few minutes, I become stressed and irritable, to the point where I'll lose my temper for no reason. I overheat in an air-conditioned room. If someone addresses me in a raised voice or moves with a sense of urgency, I begin to break down if they refuse to calm themselves.

Sometimes, it takes up to 15 seconds for my brain to translate the sounds of someone's speech into language. This delay has caused many misunderstandings with NT individuals who think that it represents uncertainty or hesitation. I can't open-mouth kiss and if my husband or friend or mother wishes to hug or touch me, they have to be clean, because I can smell even mild body odor. I can feel my own body processes.

I prefer the company of animals and can spend hours just looking at them.

But ultimately, despite the fact that I'm dependent on my mom and husband in many ways, I would not change who I am. I would not give up the good to get rid of the bad. It's not a curse - it's just who I am. Not a disability but a difference.

What makes it crippling is not the condition itself - it's the REST OF THE WORLD.

Best way to put it? I feel like a person in a wheelchair trapped in Escher's maze of stairs. But I like who I am and would not want to change that just because the rest of the world doesn't accomodate me.

I see how much my postings contradict with your experiences and your life but I (sorry for the rude words but I do not know how to say it better) did not post for people like you or anybody who is REALLY living with autism or any other disability. The least I intented to tell those people how horrible everything would be. Again this is not even my personal view those days, my life is as vivid and colourful as never before. I posted the way I did because reading the text should be unattractive.

I posted for those who got used to think about themselves as being autistic because of wrong reasons. Those people manage to live unsuccessfuly and keep telling themselves being autistic for an excuse. They have got reasons stronger than just sticking to a bad idea but it is wrong anyway.

There are such people and they need to be told to stop for their own good. This is not achieved by telling them about the chances and the support they can expect from other people. This makes autism even more attractive for those who already are on the wrong way in their life.

How would one convince those people getting along with their lives a better way? I think they should go to get a life the best way possible because the right way is to succeed in spite of autism and not to stick to failing because of it. I did not think you disagree here.

I might not have done it right, okay, that is possible. I edited my initial posting because it did not cover those seeking a diagnosis but failed to be diagnosed because of the circumstances. That would not be fair. I was diagnosed with social phobia first and know it is often hard to get a correct diagnosis for autism as an adult.

Last edited by byrlawson on 12 Sep 2007, 12:50 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I'm sorry- I am new to this forum and don't know how to properly quote yet. But I'm not sure I see the validity in your indignation at being judged. Your posts have all been full of generalizations and assumptions - saying that "A is always B" as opposed to, "A can be B" or "A is often B." I'm not jumping on you - your opinion and experiences are as valid as anyone else's. But please understand that when speaking in generalizations, you are going to get more personalized and contradicting replies. I don't think that anyone intended to offend anyone else.

I had to quit college my senior year, the only job I've managed is in-home one-on-one child care with a little girl who is also on the spectrum, I have exactly *two* friends and have been bullied and tormented and alienated. I'm like, a prime example of NOT becoming successful, and I STILL would not trade my identity for a "normal" life. I don't want to be NT, and I never have, not even when I was young and thought that I was just crazy and had no concept of AS, HFA, or NT.

My life has been hard because of my mind. My hands, wrists, and forearms are covered with scars from when I cut myself, because the visual image of the dark red blood seemingly emerging from nowhere calmed me. I once stuck a needle an inch and a half into my thigh simply to see what it would feel like. One night when I was depressed, and probably about 9 or 10 years old, I tried to saw off my head with a shoestring.

So please do not generalize that those who have autism and do not wish to change it, or those who are happy and proud of their condition, are only those who are not negatively affected by it. Even those of us for whom daily life has been a struggle and social interactions a torment may still CHOOSE to be the way we are. That is - our choice is irrelevant, we either are or we aren't, but if given the option (like a time-travel Matrix pill-choice hypothetical) we would CHOOSE to be as we are now.

I don't define myself by my relationships and interactions with the NT world. To me, the idea that everyone should want to be NT is like insisting that everyone should want to speak one language.

Again - none of this is meant offensively, or even defensively. I'm simply asking you to consider that there might be those like myself, even if you can't personally understand or relate to them.

I am really sorry. When I cause replies like that I must do terribly posting here and should keep my mouth shut. Really. It more and more apears I am the one judging people by concluding from myself on others. I will stop that. Promised. I feel like a kid who said something stupid.

Well, I hope you stop judging people, but I don't hope you stop posting. I wasn't offended or anything by your post - more like I saw it as a point around which conflict and arguments could evolve. As you were upset by someone's response to your post, someone else might be upset by yours, etc... I don't know. I am naturally inclined to be a bit of a mediator, and I didn't find your post to be prejudiced, more like I wasn't sure if you had heard a personal account from someone else who is more handicapped and not exactly successful, and whose opinion still differed from your own.

I'm sorry. I've been thinking and posting and reading and my brain is starting to get "fuzzy" - I'm going to go lay down for a bit. If this post is not very clear please disregard it. I'm having trouble assigning words to what I'm trying to say. Ugh.

Heh... this is why I do better in 30-minute classes of subjects I'm apathetic to rather than 3-hour classes of subjects I enjoy. BRAIN FRAZZLE!! ! >.<

And yeah, I was responding to the gross generalizations in your posts. And no, I don't think you ought to just keep your mouth shut.

I know the posts weren't directed at me, but I know that I am autistic, I do have an official diagnosis, and you wrote many things as if all of us experienced our life a certain way, and that people who did not were not autistic. I experience things differently from those generalizations. If I do, then it's possible that self-identified autistic people do too. And it would be grossly misleading to tell them that life is always a certain way if you are autistic.

It seems like you know it's not always that way, and you are telling them it is anyway, in order to somehow put them off trying to get a diagnosis. I don't think that the goal of putting people off trying to get a diagnosis is a particularly great one, but I also don't think that it's best accomplished by misleading them if you do want to accomplish it.

Genuine reasons not to get an official diagnosis include:

1. If you're not autistic, it's a bad idea to get diagnosed as autistic, just in general, because that's not accurate.

2. There are situations in which people will actively discriminate against you (particularly if you pass as normal, because if you don't, chances are they'll discriminate regardless of what your label is), and you have to weigh the risks against the benefits in that case.

Those situations can include:

* Medical situations (because medical records will be seen)
* Custody situations (because there is, among other things, a pressure group actively seeking to make it harder for autistic people to retain custody of our children if we have them, and for preference in divorces to go automatically to the non-autistic partner)
* Certain kinds of security clearances and other things where they'll check into your medical background, rightly or wrongly, to determine fitness for various kinds of work
* Anything else where people can get into your medical history (because otherwise you can just choose whether or not to tell people) -- I know several people who lost jobs after their employers discovered some part of their medical history for instance, even though they were performing just fine (often due to stereotypes about autistic people being violent and dangerous).

That has to be weighed against what you hope to gain by an official diagnosis. I know people who are definitely autistic who have avoided official diagnoses for some of those reasons. (Some of them were officially diagnosed in childhood but the records are destroyed.)

So basically it's bad to get diagnosed if you aren't autistic. If you are autistic and it's obvious that you're different, the level of discrimination might not change much. If you are autistic and it's not obvious that you're different, the level of discrimination may well increase, particularly in certain situations.

Another problem there is that I have met autistic people who are sure that they are very obviously different, who actually pass in most situations. And I have met autistic people who are sure that they are passing for normal, when they are definitely not. So you also have to figure out whether you pass (not to mention whether you're likely to pass in the future, which is even trickier to determine) in order to determine how the diagnosis will affect you.

All of which are closer to the facts than running around trying to scare people and telling them absolutes that don't actually exist. Such as that no real autistic person would ever want to be autistic, or that all real autistic people have certain particular experiences that are far from universal (and not always possible to simply blame on autism when they do happen).

In fact, in the case of a non-autistic person getting an official diagnosis, it's not like some of that would even affect them, because many of those things don't happen to people who aren't autistic or in some other way obviously different. Having an official diagnosis wouldn't make it happen to them unless they went around taping the diagnosis to their shirt or something.

You are right. I cannot tell more than being sorry. I jumped on that thread because of the title included the words "... want to be one?". This was incomprehensible for me and I was driven by the imagination that there would be people who have no reasons thinking to be autistic but live as if they would be. That impulse should not have been enough for me writing posts here and my personal experiences do not make me in any way qualified to talk about that subject in a general way. There are other people whose words should have much more weight.

I should have been more reluctant with telling my opinion. It seems I am closer to being NT tthan many most of the time and could not comprehend why anybody would not want ot make that tiny step over but stay like he his. But I have learnt something from discussing that subject here. Thank you. I hope I did not offend anybodyhere more than already obvious. I will do better in the future.

i have been following this thread and i just want to add a word of caution about relying so heavily on the absolute authority of the knowledge of the clinical (medical/psychiatric) community.

ASD represent a lived reality that this clinical community is trying to investigate, understand, diagnose and treat through the use of the scientific method. by it's very nature, the scientific method creates an environment where prior knowledge is being amended, falsified and over written on a continual basis - that is, all scientific, 'expert' knowledge if fluid and changing, not absolute. this is what makes science great, but, at the same time, it is also what makes it so tricky when investigating questions of what it means to be a human in this world. this means that the clinical community's knowledge is often incomplete and unclear despite how it might be presented to the lay community. so to say that members of this clinical community are the end-all and be-all with respect to ASD and its diagnosis is misleading - new information is being learned every day that will change how ASD will be understood and diagnosed in the future. someone that doesn't not meet today's criteria, may meet next year's criteria for all we know. and besides, there is a lot of validity to the knowledge gained from years of living in your own skin and inside your own head that these 'experts' will never fully grasp.

This is totally off-topic and once again it is only babbling about myself. Today I have seen something very important to me.

I am reading squeezle's post which makes perfect sense, it is straightforward and logical. I cannot disagree at all. But I still feel like having to object against it, because there is a quote from me in there. I feel like having to object against that because my point was "true diagnosis (did not say medical diagnosis)" versus reading a website.

However, my objection would be absolutely pointless. If there would be 15 more postings quoting me I would likely feel attacked by all of them and write a reply. I often was accused of this behaviour in discussions but I could never agree to that or see it myself. This is the first time today. I think I should appreciate this experience. It is, wow, mind-boggling. I do not know if that makes sense to anybody.

This forum is great and so are the people here.

Can I quote you on that somewhere?

sure, just don't call me an 'expert'

on another thread, a couple of posters said I sounded upset in the way that i communicated.
still relatively new to this whole mess, but i think it might be those fake Aspies - people i see here - that make me angry because they seem to have some notion that dx'd with AS is something 'kewl!' i was told i sounded upset because i commented that i could find no logic or sensibility in the idea of a camaraderie of the hellcast, felicity in knowing that a wasted, lonely, miserable life like mine is something other wretched souls have had to endure - and we can now rejoice cuz we found each other...bullocks!
Sorry - can't find anything particularly 'kewl' in that concept of commonality...oh yeah, and then there is all the "just be yourself crap." I suspect only an Aspie on the low functioning end of the spectrum or some bored suburban psycho could say such a thing if they really understood how utterly painful an option that is to some of us.
I read it before here and in other forums, comments about fake aspies - i mean damn people what the hell already?? why dont those fakers just go and pretend to have cancer or something....like gangrene brain!! !???

I think snake has got this right on the head! And i for one am glad that this fraudulent indulgence in "i'm Okay, You're Okay" crap was called for what it is....
the kids are NOT okay --okay?! !! and this is not fun.

I came here to learn more about the disorder etc. Ive read as much as I could find on it and now I've come To The People of Asperger's Kingdom. Because there are so many variables so much to consider. How do you know that you are really all that different? sometimes I think it's just because I'm pretty smart but then I say no, no, it's a way different kind of smart. Everyone thinks that you are really different & unique and the smart ones really like you (usually not too much the dumb ones) and so what's going on? And then I find asperger's disorder and I say okay okay sounds a lot like me..
But this forum can sometimes be really loose and you wonder what are people talking about just sounds like complaining a lot bickering and I think whoever started this forum has a good point. Maybe not perfect but it is something to consider..