Better to be "just weird" or to have something?

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This is my first post, although I've been an occasional lurker here for years now. I've never been officially 'diagnosed' with anything but OCD and ADHD, which I'm alright with since they're perceived as 'mild' disorders--not that I think of them as diseases or anything. I'm thinking about this in terms of perception, since I believe that an awful lot of the pain of "mental illness" comes from how others treat you. Not to say that if I wasn't tormented for being such a weirdo child I'd be a normal person, but I think I'd have a lot of the good parts of normalcy. For example, a functioning social support network.

In my rare moments of social contact, I just tell people that I'm weird, just plain weird. My life story is quite similar to what I hear about people with autism spectrum. When I was younger I saw a lot of mental health professionals, and they all seemed to make things worse for me. So now as an adult I just live with my weirdness, and I guess I know its qualities, and whether or not it's something with a name--perhaps Aspergers, perhaps not--is more a matter of other people's respective weirdnesses. Although I would never diagnose myself with anything over the internet, I can use the available information to try and figure out what other people might assume that I have--or I am.

Which begs the question: "Why am I posting here?" I guess it comes down to how just being weird is really isolating when I succumb to the idea that absolutely no-one else on Earth has a clue what life is like for me--that they can't even understand what I'm talking about. It's like what Wittgenstein said about how if a lion could talk, no-one could understand him, since I suppose we'd have no shared experiences with the lion (I'm not a philosophy major). Neurotic as I am, sometimes I think that I'm like the nonsense talking lion because I have so little in common with the common man. Sometimes I just have to talk, and maybe talk too much and annoy others, but I have to get a sense that I share something with others. Otherwise, I'm just out here, in the universe somewhere, and all countries are foreign countries.

I might be coming off a bit weird now. I'm trying to talk about mental differences in a way that assumes as little as possible and doesn't make unhelpful value judgments. The last thing I want to do is inadvertently insult someone, since I get the sense that many of the people here have been insulted enough (which isn't to imply there's a necessary amount of insult). I see this stuff almost from an evolutionary perspective--these are just traits that are sometimes adaptive, sometimes maladaptive. Whether or not a trait is adaptive or maladaptive is dependent on many different environmental factors.

This is another aspect of the weirdness: constant worrying about imprecise language. It's late, I should be sleeping now. I have this compulsion to write this. I absolutely know that I'm butchering language and talking mostly in nonsense.

One time my mother told me that the doctors thought that I had autism when I was little. However, I was quick to pick up the alphabet, and language, so I wasn't developmentally disabled. I've always thought that I came off as autistic people often do, at least to the lay person. For example, I HATE when people shorten "second" into "sec" as in "I'll be back in a sec." It's almost physically painful when I hear it. If I'm trying to talk to people, I am constantly trying to figure out how to time my speech properly. If more than two people, including me, are talking, I probably can't avoid being rude. So, I either talk to much or too little. I can't do any 'social' things on a subconscious level, so I'm probably very unnatural and stilted in my mannerisms. Sometimes I have difficulty answering simple questions because I'm unsure about logical distinctions such as the difference between "if" and "if and only if" because sometimes people say the former when they mean the latter.

I could be described as a loner, but that's not very precise. Better for me to say that I have to be left alone, but I don't like being alone. I want people who are my side and can talk about things and so on, but I don't need to be around them every day. It's like I'm fighting a war with the universe, and I just want to know I've got allies, even if they're fighting somewhere else. Then again, being with the wrong kind of people is worse than being alone. For me, social interaction is a means to some other end, whereas normal people think of as an end itself. Few things irritate me more than pointless discussion. After people "discuss" politics or religion it seems that everything is exactly the same as before the discussion, no matter how long or in-depth it may be, and in fact I often doubt if people manage to exchange any useful information in most of their discussion. People just want to bicker about old ideas, and the concept of coming up with new ideas seems entirely alien to them.

I love aliens. I love stories about aliens, I love coming up with aliens. Acknowledging that there are different ways of thinking, and trying to put oneself into the mind of another living thing, is a borderline obsession for me. I hate how fictional works use similarity to generate sympathy--it's too easy to feel sympathetic to things like yourself. A good example of my favorite kind of fiction is the original Star Trek episode "The Devil in the Dark."

Awhile ago I read the essay "Animals Are Not Things" by Temple Grandin, and I found it eerie because it aligned so well with my own way of looking at things. If you want to know how I view animals, just read that essay and then you'll know. What inspired me to read this essay was sanity questioning. I wondered if that fact that I euthanize dying aquarium fish was insane or not. Some people would say, "It's just a fish!" to which I would reply, "What did fish ever do to you?"

The mental health profession has engendered a great deal of mistrust in me, and as a result I've extremely averse to labels. Then again, you have to describe things, and have a good shorthand for how "certain kind of people" are. I know that I get along better with some kind of people than others, but it seems really egotistical to go ahead and mentally bifurcate humanity based entirely on my experience. Generally speaking, I respect open-minded, rational people who have some decent principles like a sense of justice and empathy for the suffering of other. I hate people who don't respect the truth.

When I was a kid I talked more with adults than with kids my age. Now most adults seem childish to me. Lots of people in their 30's and 40's are still playing out the stupid reality show that is High School. I was home schooled for that period of my life, because High School would have undoubtedly been a soul-crushing nightmare for me. College, I find, is a lot nicer, although that may just be my experience. I'm not an academic snob (not that I'm even qualified), but I like talking to people who have a curiosity about things more complicated than football. It shouldn't be snobbery to expect that from people.

Sports are a mystery to me. My entire life I've hidden the fact that I don't understand baseball. To me it's some guy throwing a ball, and some other guy trying to hit the ball with a bat. Sometimes he hits it, and runs around, and sometimes he doesn't. I know what the umpire does. I haven't a clue what the rest of it means and I don't know what the other people are doing. It doesn't make sense that I can understand multivariable calculus, but not baseball. It's not how people think intelligence works. I don't think I'm really smart or stupid since there isn't a real good pattern to what I can or can't understand. Some complicated things I understand, and some simple things are just beyond me. I've refused to take an IQ test because I'm worried about being accepted or rejected solely on that basis. I would rather my reasoning be judged on its own merit, as if it had nothing to do with me.

Chess is kind of a sport, I guess, and I suppose I understand what's going on there at least in terms of basic rules. I never played it much, since it takes so much time and effort to learn. See, if something takes that long to learn, I'll just choose some academic subject to learn about instead. As a kid, I was obsessed with Sim City and similar managerial games. I still love those them, even though they're usually not as complex as they once were (Sim City 4, with proper mods, is awesome). I also like RPG games to an embarrassing degree.

So here I am, having asked a question and then tried to answer it myself. I've probably been too long, which is another symptom of my weirdness--I spend 95% of my life completely silent, and then somehow talk until I'm hoarse for 5% of the time. Maybe I'm coming off as really bizarre because I don't want to put a label on myself, but want a sense of having something in common. I'm at a point in my life where I'm painfully self aware of just how weird and messed up I am.

I want to know why you would want to be able to say you've 'got' something, because I don't see how that means you know more about yourself than you did before then, since you were always the way you were anyway. It's like those personality tests: either it's wrong, and you know it is, or it just says something and you know it's right--you already know what it's supposed to be telling you or not. I can see other people needing a label to understand you. However, if I had a label then I'd just have to then explain the label to people, which isn't much different than just explaining myself. Also, sometimes something is trending, and you get a lot of teenagers diagnosing themselves over the internet and people think you're doing that. It's even worse when it gets demonized. So, someone with a diagnosis of something runs the risk of even more social hell--the recent fearmongering over the Newtown shooter and Aspergers comes to mind. Without a label, you're insulated from that stuff.

Perhaps the most useful thing a label can do is tell people, "There's a lot of others out there a lot like me. They're not your regular kind of normal but they are kind of normal. So much so, that say if there were a whole planet full of people like that they'd get on just fine." But then again, I'm not sure I can claim that. I envy you guys for having this community. I don't trust my judgement at all about this, since I'm so desperate for some kind of explanation for why I have to live life as a reclusive weirdo. Maybe it's like I come from a another planet, but it isn't the same planet as you guys. But even then that's some shared experience.

If I've written too much, it's because I'm trying to put some of my experiences out there to see if they might make sense to anyone else, or if I'm just babbling in my own language. I've undoubtedly insulted someone, for which I apologize. I've probably posted in the wrong section, and I'm sorry about that too. That's another part of my weirdness--having no idea if people even want to hear from me when I talk to them.

I guess all I know now is that I want to hear from you.

Neither; it's better to be normal. If you can't be normal, have something to hold over people so they have to suck up to you.

And if you weren't handed the right cards for either of those, then sucks to be you.

It helps to have a diagnosis, people who has ASD are similar in the problems they face, so a doctor would know how to treat you. I'm as yet undiagnosed, (going soon) and have had issues with doctors also, and my diagnoses never fit neatly (ocd and add, with tics).

In a theoretical world, a different neurological processing system, which is what (most) AS traits are, would be it's own normal as well. Since we are a minority, we are not "normal" only by social norm.

And to the OP, Welcome to WP! If you go over to the new members thread, TimTex will be waiting with a gift basket for you (or at least it seems like it).

Which is all there really is anyways, so what do counterfactuals matter?

What about people with things like Mental Retardation or Alzheimer's? Most people with those sorts of things can have anti-social behaviour or interact in ways that's out of the norm or aren't considered ''in the social norm'', but they're not AS either.

That's a hard one, there's stigma either way it seems.....If you're just weird people want to know what the hells wrong with you, if there's something wrong than it must be a case of you not trying hard enough to overcome it. So yeah rather difficult, I personally am trying to create more history of disorders I have since I'm applying for SSI but I don't go around telling people the disorders I have. So I guess in a sense it also sort of depends on the situation.

Better to just be eccentric but not too eccentric. Then you can have other eccentric friends. If you say you have Aspergers, then everyone will be afraid you might pick up a gun and start shooting.

Depends on reality. If you're odd enough to have significant difficulties functioning (unemployable and/or unable to sustain R/S) - then a diagnosis may help. Otherwise, it is probably best to just recognize your issues and work on them - possibly with the help of an appropriately trained therapist.

--Argyle

On the subject of normalcy being better:

I don't know whether or not it's better to be normal, since I've never been normal. I guess it would be good if others treated you more normally. To get the "normal treatment" would be nice sometimes. I hate how there's this assumption people have that I don't understand or care about my own problems. Like, if only they told me about my problems then I'd fix them and change. Defining yourself based on a lot of social conventions can get kind of shallow at times, and I have a kind of stubbornness about me that doesn't want to just submit and say that normal is better: I want to affirm the validity of my way of thinking. After all, it's kind of a wish-fulfillment fantasy anyway--wanting to be normal suddenly. Since we're wishing, I'd rather just wish people weren't so sh***y.

However, a lot of normal people I know seem really miserable too, so I guess it's not all bliss. Lots of normal people kill themselves every day, so they're obviously capable of being even more miserable than I am. So my imaginary 'normal' life could, theoretically, be even crappier. I don't think anyone has a monopoly on angst--it's a very renewable resource. I don't even think there is even that much normalcy anyway--there's just a lot people who are better at conforming. Human beings are an almost psychotically conformist species that is paradoxically horrendous at organizing for any kind of greater good. At least a bee hive is relatively productive. People make no goddamn sense.

If someone came along and offered a magic pill that would make me normal, I don't know if I could even make that decision because I wouldn't have the right information. What if I actually am normal, and everything that's messed up about me is just a result of experience? I'm assuming that I'm something aberrant, and need to be rectified. That I'm supposed to be some kind of right. Then again, my preoccupation with this kind of stuff just makes me even more alienated and worried.

Maybe normalization would be incredibly depressing for me, because I would go through the process with the knowledge that I gave in to all the pressure around me. Why should I have to change for everyone else's sake? It's like the scene from Office Space when the character named "Michael Bolton" is asked why he doesn't just change his name, and he says, "Why should I change when he's the one who sucks?" Or something to that effect. And I don't define "better" as closer or farther from normal. "Better" for me is achieving a kind of workable homeostasis. There's a lot of conventional wisdom that just confuses everything. Defining "cured" as "being made like everyone else" caused an awful, awful lot of misery as a child. It's a very traumatic experience to be routinely forced to fit into impossible molds.

I do wish I were healthier, and not so worried about everything all the time. I'd just want to change the bare minimum amount of things to fix some of my problems. I'd want to reduce the chances of unintended effects. Not to mention that changing a little bit is more plausible than changing a lot.

Can be a sign of giftedness, which may be something to look for if you're "different" and don't seem to fit any label. You may have been wrong to refuse IQ tests. Of course it would help if you were saying more about in what you are different, maybe someone could find some kind of "label" that say who you are.

http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/What_is_Gifted/characgt.htm

Well, another reason I liked to talk to adults is that they weren't as cruel as other children were, usually. I mean, most adults aren't that nice, but you average adult is a lot nicer than your average kid. Then again, that might be my memory skewing things. When kids used to play jokes on me, I had no notion of the level of cruelty involved. One time I remember an older kid taking one of my Lego pieces and stuffing it inside of a burrito, and then he went ahead and ate the burrito with the Lego piece inside. Now it seems so stupid, but at the time I remember being traumatized by it, because it messed up the set. And it was so nonsensical, just to eat one of my Lego pieces like that. I'm still mad about that, even though I cried at the time. There was something brutally Kafkaesque about how other children treated me.

One time one of the kids played the "52 pickup" joke on me. I didn't pick up the cards. That's how you win at that game: pretend to go along with it, then when the other kid throws all the cards down, you walk off and leave them with the mess.

I needed a lot of space as a kid. I needed to have control of my space. I'm still the same say. For example, if someone is going through my stuff, it's almost like they're going through my head. Everything is dependent on routine. If I break out of a clear-cut routine, I can hardly do anything. I can't concentrate, I can't do any kind of mathematics. I'm just a mess.

I seem to have major interests on rotation, so if when I'm into something I'm very, very into it. Then I don't care about it. Then I care about it again at some point. I'm one of those people who can watch every single episode of a TV show in two or three days. I have a hard time watching a TV show unless I have the ability to watch every single episode of it in chronological order. One notable exception to this is the Classic Doctor Who series--too many episodes are missing! When I was a kid I was addicted to old sitcoms. If I'm getting in to a TV show, then that's practically the only show I'll watch until I've gotten through it.

My 'interests' are just like when you go on Wikipedia and read about something, and then you see links to all the things you have to understand in order to completely understand the thing you're reading about, so then you click on those things, which all themselves have bunch of things you need to understand in order to understand them. Sometimes I can go on for hours on end just non-stop clicking around on the internet, ending up reading about some totally random thing I never had an interest in before. I don't really talk about the stuff I know because I don't have any confidence in knowing something unless I know everything about it.

Most of the time if I have to 'greet' someone, I'll do it by spouting off some fact I got off the internet that is tangentially related to whatever task I think is at hand. Or maybe I'll start with some kind of observation, like how it seems that the really 'hip' white kids wear their pants really tight, and the really 'hip' black kids wear their pants really loose.

I have an absolutely brutal obsession with a concept I can only describe as 'rightness'. If I buy some electronic thing, or just any expensive thing, I'll worry about whether or not I bought it 'rightly'--did I research the product enough? Did I make an educated decision or was I just stupid? Even my sense of morality can be described in these terms. For example, the concept of fairness is 'right' because when things are unfair your get a situation where people have no sense of the consequences of their own actions, so you end up training people to act ever more insane until they self destruct. Of course, I spend most of my time in pursuit of 'rightness' in my own life. In those brief periods of time when I do get everything just right I can really learn quickly and get a lot done. In the in-between periods, I'm just a mess. I'm in-between right now.

School is really difficult for me because I hate, hate getting problems wrong on tests. If I get less than a perfect score on anything, it's basically failure. One time I had a math class involving discrete mathematics and statistics. It was really easy, so I made it my goal to get everything perfect. I ended up getting one single problem wrong for the entire class. Since I fell short of my goal of perfection, I got no sense of achievement from that.

I'm really bad at keeping track of "social threads." I can't keep track of people on Facebook, or anything like that, and I quickly lose interest in what they're posting. It's not that I don't care about them, I just don't care about they're putting on Facebook. Before Facebook you could keep track of people however you wanted. Now everyone just uses Facebook, which I don't. So things have gotten a lot lonelier for me since Facebook got big. People get hooked on to Facebook, and they just drop off my map forever. Additionally, in forums like these, I have trouble doing more than one conversation/thread at a time. I figure that this thread will expire at some point, and I'll move on to either start or join another one.

Did I mention that sometimes I go off on a tangent?

From Tony Attwood's site:

http://www.tonyattwood.com.au/index.php ... Itemid=719

The advantages of a diagnosis can be:

Being recognized as having genuine difficulties coping with experiences that others find easy and enjoyable.
A positive change in other people’s expectations, acceptance and support.
Compliments rather than criticism with regard to social competence.
Acknowledgement of confusion and exhaustion in social situations.
Schools can access resources to help the child and class teacher.
An adult can access specialized support services for employment and further education.
Greater self-understanding, self-advocacy and better decision making with regard to careers, friendships and relationships.
A sense of identification with a valued ‘culture’.
The person no longer feels stupid, defective or insane.

I can only see positive things in a diagnosis.
Some may say "Prejudices!", but honestly, there are about just as many prejudices with autists as aspies and with "nerds, geeks and freaks", so this one single possible negative element of the diagnosis might be the case without a diagnosis anyway (as in being a "weirdo").

Better to just be weird.

l'm sort of like you. If you really want to know where you fit in an do want some kind of label l think BAP fits. But who really cares about that? lt applies to a lot of NTs, it's not an actual diagnosis but l do think it describes me too. lt's totally fine to only have some autistic traits.

Clearly if a person does have AS and there are no two ways around it they don't have the options we're talking about. So in our case, l wouldn't view not fitting the AS label as just not fitting in anywhere, in either group (NT vs AS).

lt's more like having freedom with the way you're viewed. Even if l did have an AS diagnosis l would be reserved with it, somewhat. Not due to shame, but because l don't like NT games.

This is how they peg you, once you do fit into a box people can accurately assess where they stand with you, do you know what l mean?

They can decide how they're going to behave toward you because they've made the decision based on judgment about how they view you as someone with Asperger's in relation to them as someone who is 'normal'. As it is with MANY other labels.

NTs as a whole are social one-uppers,to varying degrees but very often to INTENSE degrees for NO reason. And they decide that they have the upper hand, especially when your behavior is consistent.

As l am just a "weird NT'' in daily life l have the freedom of being unpredictable, l may seem a bit like an Aspie to some. People DO think l'm weird and l can sense when a person is treating me like l'm "special".

Fortunately l'm witty enough and can get by in these situations, the bully types don't go far with me. And then what are they going to say? Make remarks about people with Asperger's? Point out specific "weird" defecs that l have and troll me about them?

No. Generally they don't because my weirdness isn't specific enough. and l don't have Asperger's. And many times when people do this they will you accuse of having behaviors that are consistent with your diagnosis even if you don't have them, if they're aware of your diagnosis.

Another reason to just be weird

I'm so obtuse that when you said "BAP" I thought you meant Best Absolute Perfect, a Korean boy band, and then I got what you meant, even though Best Absolute Perfect is a--pun intended--perfectly good description of my perfectionist attitude.

I think your freedom really depends on how much handicap you've had. I tend to have debilitating obsessiveness, and I have nothing even close to a regular life with things like jobs, friends and whatnot. I need to have the planets align in order to get any real work done.

I get a sense that pretty much everyone thinks I'm a total freak, so even if I had any social talents I'm not even sure if I want people to get to know me. My favorite explanation for my weirdness is that I've grown up in a small town, and small towns just make for weird people. Even then, that's kind of creepy. All I know is that I'll end up coming off even creepier if I pretend that I'm normal than if I let the freak flag fly. I have no idea what it's like to not be the weirdest person in the room. Thankfully, I'm rarely the most deranged person in the room.

I am right now, because this room is empty.

There's an awful lot of people out there, so I'm not worried too much about "fitting in" since I think I could do it if I really tried. Even with my non-label attitude, I can't ignore how much my life story has in common with what I read about here and in other places. It's sort of human nature to try to put it a name to a set of things with common features.

Sorry if this post repeats: I'm trying to post again because I made the mistake of trying to post with a link. Damn it.