Recently Diagnosed

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Hello,

I have been trying to wrap my head about having Aspergers. I recently got diagnosed. Over the years I had trouble being personable with people and it recently showed up in the last five years when I started a business and started networking. I often got comments that I appeared awkward, overwhelming, drunk(even though I don't drink). I feel frustrated that I don't know what I am doing wrong. This has affected my livelihood. There are times I feel hopeless

How does you overcome this. Have anyone overcome the social weakness and how do you do it.

I just got recently diagnosed myself. It is an emotional roller coaster because behaviors that may not have been noticed before, I am very aware of now. I started thinking to myself do I really have it or am I projecting AS traits onto myself. The biggest difficulty I have is I mimic and imitate a lot and that probably hid some of the traits. I have realized just how much I did it and the fact that I am allowing myself to act more naturally has actually made it easier for me to cope. It was me trying to change and fit in that made things very hard for me. I am beginning to come to terms with my social difficulties and other AS traits now that I have stopped trying to change. My special interest is quite solitary one so I haven't come across difficulties yet with regards to people and work or networking yet but no doubt it is ahead of me.
I hope sharing my experience as a fellow newly diagnosed Aspie has helped give you some insight and help you to come to terms with it.

I was recently diagnosed too (March 2012) and am a bit older, 36 yo. I just stopped trying so hard to be liked... I realized that I needed to see somehow when I'm awkward or causing others to feel awkward, so I started looking for that body language. I don't know what place on the spectrum has the most difficulty with body language, but I feel that anyone can watch videos of people (except blind people, obviously) that are portraying a certain emotion and we can learn to read this in our co-workers even if it's purely analytical. I just learn people, their particular moods and emotions, so I can know better how to respond to them. It's not like I can tell their mood by feeling it or by 'picking up on it'... I have to know them for months, put together a lot of raw data trying to correlate for meaning, it's exhausting but once the systems are in place, people are really, really predictable.

Somehow I've just come to a place where I have to accept and embrace not only the challenges of Asperger's but also the strengths it gives me. Study being kind, yet strong; gentle and firm, it's a delicate balance. I think it's all worth any effort we place into it.

Well, no, you don't ever overcome it (in the sense of getting rid of it), but you do learn to deal with it.

That sense of hopelessness is one of the psychological side effects of being diagnosed. I went through that, too, when it sunk into my head that while AS does explain WHY I've had a lot of the difficulties I've had throughout my life, it also meant that it all happened because my brain was permanently wired that way and there's just no raising the hood and replugging the cables - I am what I am and that's that. It was a weird kind of melancholy, even though - and this was the really stupid part - I HAD ALREADY KNOWN THAT ALL MY LIFE.

I've known since I was a kid that I'm not like everybody else and that no matter how much pressure I put on myself, or my parents, teachers and employers put on me, it has never and will never make me a different person. This is who I am. Period. Still, to have it made official, on paper, with a doctor's signature - it was both a thrill, to know these quirks are an actual handicap and not flaws in my personality that were all my fault for not trying hard enough (as I had always been told), and at the same time a sort of bittersweet heartbreak, because it did seem to remove all hope that I'd ever be normal. But I was 49 years old, I already knew I was never going to be normal and even if I could, I've seen more than enough "normal" behavior to know I don't really WANT to be like those "normal" morons.

Don't let that keep you down, if you're already operating your own business, you're coping pretty well. The mind-f**k that hits you right after diagnosis passes after a few months. Its just a process of assimilating this new information into your internal picture of who you are. As the Metatron tells Bethany in DOGMA, you don't have to stop being who you've always been - just be this as well.

Welcome! Working on all that myself, so.. no advice, sorry!