Do any of you mimic so called 'normal' people?

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Now this one is one that mostly girls with AS will have done when they were back at school, but there will have been men who'd have done this as well so feel free to coment if you have.

Anyway mimicing, now sometimes it is done in order to 'fit in' and sometimes it can be (let's face it) fun at the same time, as you can see it as a kind of game or what not (I know that I did anyway....)

It has had a lot of bad press (for understandable reasons) but I'm now going to tell you about a little girl with AS that I knew at when I was at school.

I have already menched her in the past (she's the one who not only looked like Zia from MCoG but acted just like her as well) so forgive me if I go over some old ground as I've not written about her for a while.

Anyway she (and we'll call her 'Jane') was a girl who had got mimicing so called 'normal' girls (read very out going, open, and happy) of to a tee. To be fair on her she was already a very femaime and happy girl anyway, but she would often mimic girls from movies, TV and books!

Needless to say that one of her fave books wasPollyanna as I seem to remember her reading it a lot and very often played 'Gald Game' as she would often act like the heroine and took to her code of etics (I've since read the book as an adult as I'm a bit of a Haley Mills fan...)

'Jane' was a very girly girl becouse she liked girly things, however I do sometimes wonder if she was also pandering to the so called sterypes that she was fed on....

Anyway (as I've said before in other posts) she had a boyfriend, who like her was a very happy go lucky child, who's differed only in the fact that as he was a boy he took to more boysterus hobbies and intersts, 'Jane' did not share any of those, although they did both share a passion for the Disney movie Aladden and would even act out senes from the film, as they both knew the whole script off by heart!

As for her boyfriend he would put on an American acsent as he watched a lot of American kids shows at home!! !!

Anyway I hope that you found this intersting,

Goodbye, Till Next Time

I'm male and I do my share of imitating, though I don't like it when I notice what I'm doing.

No, I have a mind, of my own.

i mimic my boyfriend some times. to show him how dumb he sounds

I never have. I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam. I mind my manners but I've never put on an entirely different personality. I guess I never cared about fitting in to that degree.

In social situations I do mimic other people. Especially laughs, I don't laugh out loud myself. I either smile or get silent chuckles. I realized that people expect you to make a laughing sound when something funny happens or they get upset. (Kind of weird that people can go from laughing to being upset because you don't laugh too...) So I started listening for laughs that I like and copying them. Every few months I pick up a new and different laugh.

As a kind I use to repeat jokes and funny things people would say, almost immediately after they had said it. Which made me a bit unpopular.

I tried to mimic other people when I was 11, it didn't work very well. I'm trying to learn some basis but I actually am less rejected when I don't try to go against my nature it seems.

I am an accumulation of all that I have been exposed to. This means rednecks, goths, metalheads, rivetheads, nerds, etc etc. To say I mimic any one person is preposterous.

"We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own."

I used to do this a hell of a lot as a kid. I still do, and it's.. Ugh, I don't know. Disappointing, I guess. I seem to assimilate traits from people I come across.

Not too long ago, I had NO idea how to talk to people. None. By imitating my first real friend, I'm now able to hold a 'normal' conversation. Also, when I come to a situation where I don't know what to say, I'll pull something from the internet ("lol", "awesome", and such. Although, sometimes I get looked at strangely for saying pwned out loud, ha ha.)

Pretty much every word I've ever said without having people think I'm crazy for saying it has come from imitating my mom, my friend, or the internet. Surprisingly, it works!

I [kind of] did this when I was a kid.

I suppose I have. I have adapted over a very long time to living in a predominantly NT culture. My wife and most of my children are NTs.

ruveyn

I've always seemed to absorb people around me, and it's never been useful, just awkward and silly. People act the way they do because of a reason and a context and that's the part I always seem to miss.

I involuntarily mimic people's voices. Not the exact timbre of the voice - I don't sound exactly like whoever I'm imitating - but the tone, rhythm, inflection, etc. My mom says that even when I was a toddler I mimicked people's manners of speaking. I don't choose to do this, and sometimes I'm not even aware of it right away. After I've been talking to someone for a while, I gradually start mimicking their speech, especially if their way of speaking is somehow distinctive. This can last for hours after I've stopped talking to the person. Occasionally this is embarrassing - like when I start talking in an obnoxiously perky valley girl voice, or when I temporarily start saying certain words with a Southern accent.

When the word "mimic" is used I assume conscious choice. I don't but I can remember once I was walking with a friend who had a hurt leg and found myself limping too. I've been known to speak in someone else's voice too, but it's not intentional. Awkward actually.

Yes and no.

In the past, I used to do something that could be said to be 'mimicking normal people' except that I didn't think that I was mimicking anything, I just thought that I was meeting various odd and inexplicable requirements that the rest of the world put on me.

These days, in many respects very few people would regard me as mimicking normal people. My ability to meet all those requirements fell apart in my adolescence. I am unable to do the things most people would call mimicking normal people. I can't move like them, act like them, etc.

But in one respect, one respect that I hate a good deal and wish I could stop without serious consequences, I absolutely do mimic normal people. And I think this respect makes me different than a lot of autistic people where when they do this it's not mimicking normal people at all.

That's language. Language does not come naturally for me. All the language I have, I have learned through echolalia, pattern recognition, and imitation. I only later (very much later than most autistic people who speak/write) learned to consistently use language to express my inner thoughts and feelings to the extent that it's possible.

But even when I am expressing my inner thoughts and feelings to the extent that it's possible, it still feels incredibly fake. The reason being that my inner life is not just hard to translate into language, but impossible. It's almost the opposite of language -- few to no symbols, ideas, conventional (or many unconventional) thoughts. Those things just aren't there, or not much anyway. My use of language creates the illusion that they are there. As much as learning to use language for my own uses rather than to imitate others has created a great deal of freedom and indeed saved my life, language still feels like death to me. Sometimes it's almost intolerable to run around making people think that all these things exist in my head that are not really there. But I have no alternative -- unlike most autistic people I know, I don't have certain things inside my head at all, so it's not a matter of "translating from my form of thought into language", but rather that using language at all creates a false impression of certain forms of thought that don't exist in me. It's maddening sometimes but I see absolutely no alternative.

And at some point I realized that even though I don't suppress stimming, try to move like most people, or that kind of thing, my use of language is in fact mimicking certain kinds of "normal" thought or even most kinds of "abnormal" thought, either way, mimicking something that isn't me. And as far as I know that can never be changed. As long as I use language, it will create massive illusions in people's heads, and they will relate to those illusions as if they are relating to a person, and believe they are relating to me. Additionally, using language is at least as stressful to me as the constant "pretending to be normal" on a more physical level is to other autistic people, even though I don't "pretend to be normal" in any way other than the use of language. I find it exhausting and need frequent breaks from it. Only when I use no language, and use not even the mental structures that allow language to be used, do I feel like I am expressing myself as I really am. But only when I use language can I hope to communicate a lot of things. It's an unpleasant paradox.