What was your first proactive actions.

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Real simple what were your first proactive actions upon finding out you had AS.

Like something that took more than a few hours to implement.

I've come to the realization that so much of my real troubles with my personal life are AS related.

I.E. I avoid people because of the work and money that is involved it. And the fact that I need to work my way into the mood to wanna be around people. With being overly focused on work and school it feels impossible.

I tend to avoid my more social obsessions, because they require so much time for me to actually fixate on them. I.E. I need to play guitar for me to be interested in it, I need to work out to wanna talk and watch sports etc. If I actually make the effort, I find going out for sports and music alot better. Or with just simple conversation I find when I tend to read alot and fiddle with foreign languages, conversation for me are actually stimulating and requires far less effort.


Simple things like planning to goto the gym before going out, plan out my drinking so I'm not over doing it, having what I'm gonna wear worked out in advance, playing guitar on the same night I go out so it's part of my fixation at the time and hence in the mood, and only going to events I know I can enjoy while avoiding nights that may make me feel like I wasted my time and money.

Another side conclusion I've made is if, I actually make it to those critical places such as volunteering without feeling like I have to go out of my way, I'll greatly increase the probability that I'll actually meet the right kind of people. As the pain of failure won't be near as severe if I don't feel like I'm sacrificing my time.


Anyhow whats yours.

This is really simple, but it's actually been the biggest help of all my attempts at fixing my stupid worthless brain.

I have a timer I keep on all the time, except while sleeping. It simply beeps for a second every fifteen minutes. It makes me perceive the passing of time. I know how long I've been doing something and can prevent getting lost in things.

Every time I hear it, I know to take half a second and think about what I'm doing and if I'm distracted from what I am supposed to be doing. Does that make sense?

I sort of love the ratio of simplicity:effectiveness.

Can you tell me about more of your problems/tactics? I like the ones you posted, I think some would work for me. I'd appreciate every idea I hear.

1. I read everything I could find on autism and Aspergers. and spent about 60 hours studying all the current research.

2. I looked up forums on Aspergers and Autism and read posts of others with my condition and began to write posts and to interact with other posters to get a sense for what we with are like. How am I different from these other Aspies and how am I the same? What is the population of Aspies like? How diverse are they? In what ways do Aspies see the world differently than NTs? What are the unique traits we share? This is stuff you cannot get from research but only from other Aspies.

3. I looked back on my life and reorganized all my preconceptions using my new understanding of ASD to make sense of it.

4. I began to closely observe the behavior of NTs and contrasted it with my behavior. I asked NTs questions and focused on my internal reactions during these NT interactions.

5. I began my new life as Aspie and rejected any pretending to be NT. Three months later this is where I am: I continue to work on establishing and understanding my new identity. I feel a real freedom from the burden, trying to be NT, that I never even knew I was carrying.

I haven't been diagnosed yet, but when I came to the realisation I might have autism, I read a lot. My partner and I had been referring to all my autistic traits as my "weirdness" - all these little things that were wrong with me, things I found difficult, the problems I had talking about/being aware of my emotions. I started to write them down and work out what could tie in with autism. Kind of like doing a puzzle.

I mentioned it to my partner and he said "Well get on the NAS website and find out how you get a diagnosis."

I searched for communities like this and read about the condition and diagnosis process as much as I could.

I identified strategies I use at work with autistic children and looked at where those could help me.

I bought a book in which I started to note down the places I go, travel times, what I need to take, information which I find difficult to access in my mind when I'm anxious. I also turned my kitchen wall into a timetable so I can plan my life more easily and started implementing other strategies such as using my headphones to avoid people talking to me, making memo's to remind me to do things like write lists before going shopping etc.

Once I get my diagnosis, which I'm pretty sure I will get, I think I'll just continue to identify these strategies for managing the problems AS throws at me.

Unfortunately, I am still in self-diagnosed limbo, but I have changed a few things. The most important one is a decision to simplify my life and eliminate sources of stress. I don't balance having a lot of things that need doing well, so I decided to start readying some of my vehicles for sale. This way, I will limit my obligations and (hopefully) can lower my stress and anxiety levels. My plan is to have gotten rid of my two biggest projects by year's end and see where that puts me. I also talked to others around me to see if it made sense to them, but also to explain a little more about how I think and see the world and how it differs from them. In some cases it has helped because those close to me now understand how not to feed my negative moods.

After the dx? I guess CBT with a therapist. More for my OCD than for Aspergers though. AS is an ever present difficulty due to living in an NT world, but it's not dangerous. OCD and depression, those are dangerous. My outlook on life did not change after the dx. I see it merely as a label that provides some explanation on why things are the way that they are for me. Prior to dx, I would just think of myself as eccentric. 'Aspergers' replaced 'eccentric'. That's about it.

Meds also but I started on those a while before going through the neuropsych testing hoops.

That's a pretty interesting Idea.

I think I'm gonna start making graphs of the day. As obviously I love graphs but more importantly, having a visiual view of what I do in a day may be better than arbitrary numbers.