How has autism/asperger's positivly effected your life

Post Reply New Topic

Hi guys. I'm in the process of putting together an article highlighting the positive sides of disability. I'm looking for disabled people who are happy with there life to answer a simple question:

How has your disability positively effected your life?

All replies will be compiled into an article on my blog, name/ your photograph (if applicable) and a link to your blog/website will be included.

The more replies, the more valuable the article will be, both to the people involved and the disability community as a whole. This will bring exposure to the positive sides of disability and everyone who replies.

Hard question to answer, as my life and any effect autism has upon it are inseparable.

I think the main effect of autism on my life has been to impel me to lead an examined life, rather than being able to unconsciously coast my way from one end of it to the other. I have had to question my existence and the meaning of it. I have a perspective on life that is markedly different from those around me. Different, but maybe no worse or better.

I'm sure there are NTs who could and would say similar things, so I'm not sure whether this is a valid statement.

My blog can be found under the www under this post, cheers!

Sounds like fun

But if anybody says, "It has made me grateful that I'm not mentally ret*d," I will reach across the Internet and smack them. Hard.

Anyways, yeah--autism.

Well, probably the thing about autism that gives me the most pleasure is my special interests. When I was a little kid, I was fascinated with cats, and spent hours and hours every day reading about them. It made me happy. Think of an extremely strong hobby--only stronger, and more fascinating. It's like that. When I was a teen, I got interested in astronomy, and I knew the night sky like the back of my hand. I remember literally squealing in joy to find new facts, and filing away information in my head, carefully, like jewels in velvet. I learned relativity theory and quantum physics before I learned algebra--just the theory, of course, not the math--and it made me so happy. Like falling in love.

Unlike some autistics, I switch special interests periodically. They can last weeks or years, but they eventually switch. Special interests allow me to become an expert on the most random subjects, whether it's D&D rules or genetic engineering.

But beyond just the pleasures of life that I wouldn't have if I didn't have autism, the experience of being disabled has taught me a lot about human rights and about equality. Being considered less important than non-disabled people, living at the fringes of society, has made me think very hard about the value of human beings and the value of life, whatever kind of life it is. It's made me re-examine the idea that disability is automatically a bad thing and the idea that not being able to do something makes your life worse than if you can do it. It's made me a fierce advocate of human rights--for everybody, not just the disabled; for people who are gay or eccentric or have mental illnesses or are old or young or have different skin colors or come from different places. I'm not perfect yet and I'm still learning, but if there's one thing that autism has done for me that it would have done even if there were no fringe benefits, it's been that lesson about human beings and their value, whoever they are, whatever they can do, and however other people look at them.

Probably not what your looking for, but it is what likely prevented suicide. This is rather perverse, but my mental state requires consistency before action. The more important the action, the more consistency is required before acting on a thought. I have a very precise way of processing things and when such deeply important issues cannot conform to this level of precision, the overload induces shutdown and subsequently inaction. The idea of suicide creates numerous moral and ethical dilemmas that I was never able to resolve, hence any emotional impulse for self termination was always overridden by a lack of cognitive clarity. Ironically, clarity seems to disallow suicide. So my internal drive towards clarity moves me away from self destruction.

How is this related to autism? It is difficult to explain, but it is because the way I perceive, process and integrate information is compartmentalized in ways that I believe are decidedly autistic. To invoke a cliche, in Rain Man, watching Judge Wapner was REQUIRED to avoid extreme agitation. For me, it isn't Judge Wapner, but rather I need resolution of these abstract building blocks that define my reality. Without that resolution, I become agitated and shut down. Shutting down means inaction.

Another autistic trait that applies is the tendency towards concrete thinking. There is little that is more concrete than the finality of suicide. That level of concreteness pushes that finality to an extreme, forcing a confrontation with the fact that no one knows what follows such an act. The possibility that things could be worse is just as likely as any other possibility (atheism has no more proof of "nothing comes after" than any theistic conceptualization). Faced with the very concrete possibility that worse could happen, and feeling worse was DEFINITELY not a desired outcome, any desire for self destruction was reduced to a secondary impulse.

Probably doesn't make much sense to anybody but me. You would have to crawl inside my head to make it clear.

What if I am Autistic but not disabled?

Not a problem. You are still seeing a so called "disability" from a positive point of view.

I don't consider myself to be disabled ether.

It has driven me to think "outside the box" and to ask questions while assuming little or nothing. But most of all, and at the very lowest-ever point in my life, my AS/HFA both drove me and helped to make it possible for me to rediscover the original A.A. experience of permanent recovery from chronic alcoholism even while amidst today's AA, a deadly impostor.

I like this.

Thanks!

I think my having AS was why I read so, so many books throughout all school (elementary too), gained a large memory bank of words/wide vocabulary & I get to use words I havent heard in a decade, naturally when it fits. Also, all my life I have been laughing by myself at words I think funny, have my own private humor to myself, & can even remember waking up laughing hysterically for no reason, like last week when I went hiking & I felt too good out in nature. stronger emotion responses, not lasting moods.

Thanks for the replies. If you don't mind, can you add the URL you would like me to use(assuming you have one) and your real name if possible.

Up in the Clouds and Down in the Valley: My Richness and Yours (that's a link) is an article I wrote for Disability Studies Quarterly that gets into what aspects of being autistic I find important to me. A note, though -- I later learned that when a lot of people hear the word "pattern" they think of something like complex abstract mathematics. When I talk about perceiving patterns, I'm talking about highly concrete patterns of which concrete sensory experience goes with which other concrete sensory experiences.

Put much more briefly:

The thing that I like best about being autistic is being able to perceive a rich sensory world beneath all the idea-baed filtering that most people apply to the world.

I have often had trouble describing this. Here's a blog post I fumbled around in trying to describe it (that was a link).

But I have had an easier time painting it since I began painting last year, this sums it all up to me:



That is very much like the rich, deep sensory realm that I experience when not pushing myself really hard into the realm of words/ideas/etc.

As for things besides autism?

One of the things that surprises people is what I've gained through being what most people would call "bedridden", through a combination of physical impairments. (This has happened several times in my life for different reasons, but this time is the longest.) The way I see it, there are obvious advantages to being able to move around. But one positive thing about being in one place all the time is the depth of experience I can have of one single place. Most people miss that kind of thing because they are constantly moving from one place to another. They don't get to see a single place under many many circumstances over a period of years while staying in that place 99% of the time. That's a vast amount of sensory information that lends a sense of depth to that location that simply cannot be found when you're moving around all the time.

I'm not trying to imply that I wouldn't move around more if I could. I'm just saying that even situations most people think are horrible have upsides to them that they wouldn't normally imagine. And that you can even lose those upsides from being in the situations that most people would agree were better.

I hope some of that was coherent enough. For the autism part, the painting is more important to me than a lot of the lengthy words (as long as it's put with enough words from either the article, blog post, or my answer here, to make sense to people who won't get the idea from the painting alone). For the part about having to live in my bed, the couple paragraphs I wrote on that are enough. Picture of me here (that's a link). Real name is in the first article I linked. Blog is in the second article I linked (or at least, the second one is a post from that blog so remove all the gobbledygook at the end and you get my blog address). Or if you'd rather use the DSQ article then you could link to that instead. I don't care which. Or rather I have a slight preference for the DSQ article but will leave it up to you whether you link to that or my blog.

I am who I am because of ASD not despite ASD....

http://autismwomensnetwork.org/category ... rla-fisher
http://stories.makingmylife.com/2011/01 ... ll-player/


* Extreme ability to focus
* No social pressure to do things like the other kids (how I arrived at my first patent)
* Inability to socialize for great lengths of time == time to do more productive things
* Details, details and more details....

Last edited by kfisherx on 07 Feb 2011, 4:05 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Probably the ability to hyper-focus and seek out every last atom of detail for a special interest. It's what enabled me to have successful careers in electronics and computing.

[Edited to remove some awful trumpet-blowing. <sigh> Sometimes it's easy to see why people call me arrogant. Shame it's always retrospective. ]

Even now, that both careers have ended as money-making employment (an active decision on my part), I'm contented only while hyper-focusing on a special interest.
It's still the most intense, enjoyable and satisfying experience I have.

Last edited by Cornflake on 09 Feb 2011, 11:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

Regarding links, I would prefer to remain Wavefreak58 at Wrong Planet if you use my post. I haven't quite come to grips with a lot of things regarding autism and I'd prefer to control my "coming out". It's not a matter of shame, I just don't want to run into things that would be overwhelming at this time. I fully expect at some point to be quite open about it. Just not today.

Probably just the fact that it makes people lower their expectations and cut you more slack than most people. It also frees you from the pressure of keeping up with the Joneses, so to speak. I feel as though conventional litmus tests don't apply to me, and I shouldn't compare my life to other people's in assessing my own worthiness and success.