Happy, sociable aspie?

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Hi, I was recently diagnosed with Asperger. The psychiatrist who diagnosed me is very experienced in working with kids and adults with autism and ADHD and had suggested that I might be autistic after I told her about some of the problems I've been experiencing my whole life.

Now I've been in the world of mental health care for about 5 years (I'm 23 now) and I was diagnosed several personality disorders before and I believed these explained my problems. Now that my diagnosis had been changed to Asperger I have some difficulty understanding how this 'applies' to me and it seems I'm in denial and looking for reasons why I am NOT asperger

I'm also afraid people will never believe me if I tell them. I think many people (including me) have wrong views on autism. I previously thought a person with ASD doesn't talk and doesn't look at you. How could I have applied this to myself? Now I know better and I have read books on the issue. But it's still difficult to understand.

I seem completely normal on the outside. People generally describe me as being happy, lively, spontaneous, emphatic. How does that co-operative with Asperger? When I talk to people I try to look them in the eyes as much as possible, and I smile... I smile too much actually. And I talk a lot. I usually have things to say.

I know there is a downside, because social interactions exhaust me. Looking at people is very tiring. I don't want to meet people on several days a week (if I meet someone today, I don't want to meet anyone tomorrow). But when I do meet people... I know how to present myself to them. I am polite, friendly, caring, funny, happy, or anything I think another person wants me to be. When I told an acquaintance about my diagnosis she seemed baffled "you? I had never expected that".

I know what is appropriate and what is not. I spent my whole life observing people, how could I not know? I've been imitating socially capable people for so long that I appear very socially capable myself (I wasn't as a child though). Yet I thought one of the criteria for Asperger is 'impaired social skills' or something like that... I do feel like an actress at times (hey I should win an oscar for my acting skills ) and I get so tired after 'acting'. I thought I put up an act because of my social fears before this diagnosis. But I have also read that social fears and Asperger are interlinked somehow.

Are there other people here who come accross as perfectly adapted? Does anyone recognise my story and my doubts about the diagnosis? (though I do not doubt the professionality of my psychiatrist)

I hope someone will reply,

Eve01

my friends didn't believe me when I told them either, because to them I was a unique introvert and nerd. Only when I explained they accepted it and found me quite normal.

Females are better at imitating social norms generally. That is one explanation.

Ironically I'm writing a story about Aspies, and one of them is nearly so NT (though quiet and shy) that no one suspected it.

I do think aspies can be happy, if you accept the limitations that the condition imposes on you. And a lot of aspies like social contact, they just can't do it the same way NTs do. Your description of how you have learned to act and perform for other people seems like a classic coping mechanism. Just because we're autistic doesn't mean we can't learn. There are two features that I know of that can really help you mimic normal behaviour, one is intelligence (which helps any learning process), the other is being female. I'm not sure about the causes behind females aspies on average being better apt at social interaction than male aspies, could be biological, the way girls are raised or both.

When people say your empathic, what do they mean? Do they mean that you're compassionate and caring or that you have good intuition and knowledge of their thoughts and feelings? When people talk about empathy they often confuse it with synpathy. It is true though, that most autistic people have difficulties understanding and predicting the mindset of another person. Personally I go about it through logic rather than intuition, but unfortunately people's feelings follow their own logic, and it's still a bit of a mystery to me.

These all sound like Aspie traits to me:

I think try is the operative word here. Non-Aspies do this naturally.

Some Aspies can talk a lot, especially about their special interests.



A lot of people with AS learn to imitate in order to appear more social, but the fact that it's exhausting is a clue that it isn't something that comes to you, it's work.

Well, social fear is different from AS, because someone who has only fear will be able to function if they can master the fear, while an AS person has to learn to behave more socially through conscious effort.

I'm not sure what personality disorders you are referring to. I was diagnosed with schizotypal personality but I knew it didn't fit because I don't have any strange thoughts or magic thinking at all. I'm super-logical, which is much more AS.

This is an interesting post. No one believes me when I suggest I might have asperger's syndrome. I should talk to my special ed teacher about it.
But it's interesting because I thought I act too "normal" to be an aspie, too. The eye contact can come naturally at times. Usually I regulate it. And consciously tell myself when to look away and stuff.
But I'm different and even a bit reclusive once you get to know me really well.
Are you more aspie-like when you're alone or with family?

I'm also very outgoing and sociable. I smile a lot, and have no trouble approaching people. But I don't think about how I come across to people most of the time. I don't have a very good understanding of what is expected of me in order to come across as "normal". I don't tell my peers that I have AS, so I don't know whether they would approve or not. But I've noticed that most of them talk differently to me than to the rest of their peers, I guess at a more objective rather than subjective level. A few of my teachers have suspected it before I told them. My parents constantly criticise me for my social awkwardness. 2 or 3 people have told me, though, that I don't seem like I have it. I guess it's because on the outside, I don't fit that nerdy, introverted, and emotionless stereotype often associated with AS.

I've tried to come across as more socially competent in the past, but I've given up. It's just that the rules are sometimes so absurd, and I become exhausted at faking it so quickly that it's just not worth it. I'd rather be myself and enjoy being with other people, because pretending to be normal is like torture to me. If I were to come across as completely neurotypical, I would have to have to constantly monitor myself in the mirror and compare myself with mental images of other people I've observed over the years. Otherwise, even if I try really hard, I still end up being seen by others as a little bit odd.

I'm very outgoing, when I'm with my friends. I'm quiet, the rest of the time.

This +1, you can be happy, and around people, without "being sociable", I found.

Better to be a likable outcast, than a creepy hanger-on, it seems.

I think you're going to be amazed as you start to realize just how much unconscious effort you've been putting into the mask you've created for yourself. You have been playing a part, but keeping up that role requires a lot of concentration that you've been exerting for so long, you didn't fully realize you were doing it. Faked it for so long you forgot it was just a character you were playing. At least that's they way it was for me, and I hear little tells in your remarks that you're about to have a similar epiphany.

When I began to realize just how hard I'd been pretending all my life to maintain the acceptance of others, it was very liberating to let that mask fall away and stop working so hard to be something I never was. And funny thing, many of the very people who said things like "Oh, I can't believe that about you, you seem so normal", were the same people who'd spent years remarking on how eccentric, strange and peculiar I was. But my family and the people who knew me intimately, didn't seem surprised at all.

One of the other things I realized as I came to understand the condition better and how it applied to me - I had never really been as good an actor as I thought I was. I may have seemed relatively sociable on the surface, but it didn't stop me from being a bully magnet, or enable me to keep a job over the long term. I seemed 'normal' only for the first half-hour of any new encounter. After that, people began to glance at each other behind my back and roll their eyes.

This is probably because under the Asperger's definition in the DSM IV (299.80), it specifically states:

(VI) Criteria are not met for another specific Pervasive Developmental Disorder or Schizophrenia.

This means that even if you hit 100% on all aspie traits, as a schizotypal personality you would be specifically precluded from receiving an Asperger's diagnosis. I'm sure this is just one of many reasons they are considering heavy revisions all the Autistic areas of the DSM. You could fit in very well here (indeed, it might be the only place you feel comfortable), but still not be "officially" considered to have Asperger's Syndrome per se.

So don't let this bother you. This is why I'm glad this site is open to all neurodiverse expressions.

The single most sociable person I have ever met is (non-AS) autistic. She is flagrantly autistic at that. You would never mistake her for anything but. And she has more friends all over the world than anyone I know. She is contagiously bubbling over with happiness and enthusiasm. And really hard to describe. And her mannerisms and constant discussion of her interests scream out autistic, but somehow she manages to be the sort of person who is well-nigh impossible not to like. She makes friends everywhere she goes because of this.

So yes it's completely possible.

To the person who said logical thinking is "more AS" than magical thinking, that's not true. Yes, there's a large number of people with AS (seeming to me to be especially the guys) whose thought processes, if not completely logical, are about as close to that as a person can get. But just because they exist and happen to fit the Spock-like stereotype of the hyper-logical aspie, doesn't mean that everyone with AS shares that thinking style. There are plenty of other sorts. And magical thinking is actually fairly common in general, and people with AS are not necessarily spared it any more than anyone else is.

Can't some aspies actually be extreme magical thinkers?
And also, what precisely is "magical thinking"? Like, the exact definition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_thinking

My bf seems really normal to everyone who doesn't know him very well. The people that do know him and don't know about the AS diagnosis say he has "social issues," but is funny and easy going. It's much more obvious to me, being with him every day.

So, I think its absolutely possible.

Oh, ok. thanks. Magical thinking is annoying.

OP, you sound like me. In fact, you sound like the "classic" adult female aspergian. This is why it's good for women to get a diagnosis from someone familiar with diagnosing women with AS. I had a therapist tell me that since I was able to learn how to interact, I didn't have Asperger's.