Are you always slower than others?

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I just had an extremely stressful day. Had to go to an employee orientation for my new internship appointment. We were directed from one conference room to the next to listen to various HR-related spiels and fill out various job related paperwork (most of it made little sense to me).

Anyways, I was always lagging a few steps behind everyone else and whenever we had to pack up all our papers and move to the next room I was the last out of the room. It brought back bad memories of middle-school where I was always the slowest to pack up my stuff and I always struggled not to be late to the next class. This was despite the fact that I was the only person not socializing (If I attempted to socialize I would be even worse off). I'm also always the slowest person while taking notes. I don't get it. Despite having a high IQ and strong abilities in science and mathematics I always feel slow and inadequate in life.

Are you expectations reasonable? If you set your threshold too high you will always be doomed to disappointment.

ruveyn

What does that have to do with anything? (I'm not trying to sound snippy, I'm just confused )

Perhaps I should clarify.

I was mainly wondering if other people on here can relate to being intellectually gifted in some area yet feeling "slow" in certain ways. I've never been able to move quickly or "think on my feet". I always feel like I'm slower and more disorganized/discombobulated when I'm in a rush. Other people are more "on the ball" than I am.

Maybe that you try to do too much? Like do you take notes slower, or do you have trouble paraphrasing well, so you're trying to write more than everybody else is?

I find that the more I try to hurry, and the more I compare myself, the slower I get. I guess that I end up thinking about how I'm falling behind, rather than thinking about what it is that I'm trying to do.

yep
i'm a total moron in my labs and hate my labs because of it
when i can do physics alone in a room with a piece of paper i'm at my happiest
theory > experimental, for me anyways

I can be like that situationaly Marshal. If I'm in an environment where all the information is new, I'm slower than those around me. I'd say it's related to additional filtering for what's important in all the new information coming in, making sense of it to myself, then executing the task.

But, if I am in a comfortable enough setting, on a topic I know a lot about, it seems that everyone else is having problems keeping up with me. The latter is usually a work discussion about my area of expertise. I have been able to come up with solutions the big brains in our R&D department couldn't figure out, on the fly, when presented with the issue. Special Ed's kid > PHD on quite a few occasions.

I don't know you except for some forum posts I've read, but you seem like a smart guy. I'm sure you'll do fine once you get settled in. The getting settled sucks, but I'm sure it won't be your first grin and bear it situation.

Best of luck with the new internship.

i feel as if i am years behind at times.

oh yes I can relate. I'm quite dense at times, off into la-la land, lose the thread of a discussion... yet I'm apparently quite gifted in other areas and some parts of my brain seem to work much faster than the average person's.

That was me back in school. I was always last. I was last every day, for every occasion.

Nowadays I'm a light year or two ahead of everyone else. Always.

Definitely. I'm a very slow reader for one thing, and I feel like I've got this mental fog in my head most of the time, especially when I'm doing something I've never done before. I don't do well at all in fast moving situations.

Thanks. Yes, settling in is the worst. Luckily I have parents who've been willing to help me tremendously with the move and everything else. This has been one of the hardest times of my life as I'm trying to pull myself up from a severe depression

As a child (7 years old), I was put into an accelerated activity group. I could definitely handle the material, but I couldn't handle the time constraint. I just didn't work that fast. It takes me longer to adjust to transitions and get myself "moving".

When I took the WAIS, even though I had a high overall IQ, I would miss the first performance question. I'm not sure why this is, but it seems like it's either a transitional issue or I don't know how something works unless I try it and fail.

If you put me in a position where I'm "rushed" my brain shuts down. It literally feels/sounds like you take the knob on a radio and just spin it from one end to the other.

I'm not sure if I gave you any insight.

No I'm not always slower than others. I'm usually slower to perform a new task (or one that has been changed by somebody else), but often faster than others when it's something I'm familiar with. I'm rather like a car - start in a slow gear and gradually change up to full speed or you'll stall the engine.

Examples:

SLOW: It took me longer than expected to do a job at work yesterday. It was a job I've done before, but only once a year, so the repetitions have been too far apart for me to retain the learning. The start time and place were unusual (cf my normal routine), so I forgot some key documents and had to go to another building to print new ones - and because it was somebody else's printer under somebody else's control, it wouldn't work and I couldn't determine the problem....didn't want to go around asking for help (Aspie shyness and a feeling that whenever I involve others in my work the whole thing gets slowed down to a crawl). So I ended up hand-writing the important parts of the document. Went back to the job, some of the required equipment was missing so I went and found what I needed in a store room that's organised according to somebody else's idea of order......they'd put 2 slightly different kinds of equipment in the same place and I picked up some of the wrong type, so yet another journey... Not enough space to work properly, tight deadline causing stress, slowing me down.....the work has to be done meticulously and I know how I can make mistakes when I'm stressed, which added to the stress, made me want to slow down more so I could get it right, but there wasn't time During all this time I didn't feel able to reveal my plight to my co-workers, as I feared they'd just slow me down even further by interfering in ways I can't understand. I made the deadline, but spent the rest of the day half expecting to find I'd made a mistake and wrecked the whole venture.....but as it happened, I'd done everything right. Stress levels were moderate as far as I know, because I've declared my autism to the employer so any problems can be readily explained in terms of that, which makes me feel in less danger of disciplinary action than would be the case if they didn't know about AS.

FAST: I know of nobody who can keep up with me when I'm walking around the town. I've been doing that for years and have all kinds of tricks to get across roads without having to wait quite as long as the average Joe......it's amazing how a bit of applied opportunism can save time, accelerating towards crossings before the lights change......I seem to have a "look ahead" radar system that gets me in the right place at the right time to get through the crowds and traffic with the minimum of delay. I see others hanging about at crossings and getting left behind, and I wonder how they can stand to waste so much of their lives immersed in petrol fumes, noise and ugly city traffic.

The local manager says that he's been told I'm very good at completing my work properly and in a timely manner. That's because I have more autonomy in my regular work, and having had regular practice, I can zip along and get it all done almost effortlessly....I hate to take hours to do a thing that could be done in minutes, so it comes naturally for me to find quicker, easier ways of ding things, to avoid the massive frustration of being involved in an inefficient venture. Give me control, clarity of remit, and regular practice, and I'll deliver your results nice and quick. Take any of those things away, and you'll wonder how a seemingly intelligent guy can screw up a seemingly trivial task.

I know the feeling painfully well.

When we did experiments in the lab, I always ended up the last in queue for any chemical we were to collect, and always were the last to finish and always the last to clean the equipment, sometimes I didn’t even get enough time to eat during the break.

In tests or tasks I was almost always the last to finish, even in subjects I was good at. I used a lot of time just formulating sentences. Sometimes I felt like I had to translate from ”me’ish” to Norwegian. It can be real sluggish.

And in hard things (for me) like chemistry and physics, I read a little and I then need time to ingest what I’ve read or heard, while others seem able to just plough on. Like I have to break it up in tiny bits and take it step by step, with time in between.
I don’t know if it’s related, but when I had to read these things by myself, I found the books to be so dry I couldn’t remember the beginning of the sentence by the time I finished it. I’m not talking about dyslexia, I didn’t have this problem in general when reading.

I have a hard time trying to read some books. I passed physics and chemistry but they were borderline passes and I'm sure there must have been tons of stuff I hadn't learned or understood. Physics and chemistry are often full of long lists of reactions and formulae, and I don't understand how anybody manages to memorise it all, it all looks so arbitrary and the purpose of learning it all isn't clear (apart from passing an exam). I can't easily do a thing just to satisfy strangers.

But if I'm avidly pursuing some personal goal, I can pick up the books and drink in any information that's relevent to my purpose. It's the fascination and the narrowing down of the target that seems to make the difference. Sometimes I think that Aspies shouldn't be expected to study a subject if they have no innate passion for it. I used to think that nobody at all should have to do that, but perhaps neurotypicals don't have such a hard time with the ennui of it.

Al Stewart once said that if it don't come naturally, leave it. It's quite a glib, lazy philosophy, but it must save a lot of unnecessary head-banging.