How do you tell people you are Aspie?

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LOL

I don't. If they're not smart enough to figure it out, they have no business associating with me.

I warn people who I may have the desire to interract with...pretty bluntly...or I warn people who seem like they want to interact with me.
I just say I am on the autistic spectrum..and sometimes i get confused or do things that I have little control over....and request that they not take it personally.

I have to tell employees..as it is inevitable that I will have meltdowns over little things...but no matter how often I try to explain, they never really seem to understand...even this one volunteer who takes care of an adult with Kanners...stares at me in bewilderment when I start acting upset and confused....

Telling people is a fairly new experience for me. In addition to Asperger's I have fairly severe social anxiety and selective mutism, and agorphobic tendencies. When I'm out of my comfort zone, I often cannot speak. My primary contact with friends and family is online, where I can speak freely and my words are not warped by my inability to create any sort of eloquent or even coherent verbal structure.

I've begun informing anyone who may need to be aware (such as teachers, my employers, school councilors, doctors) in as professional a manner as I can. I've registered with disabled student's, so they have a simple form I can give my professors. I work from home, but my employer is aware and we discussed why coming in to the office for little nonsense reasons is a big deal for me.

For more casual acquaintances, I've been waiting until they become persistent in trying to talk to or be around me. I don't have the ability to approach others and most people won't try more than once or twice to approach me. Lack of eye contact and limited verbal return scares most people away quickly. Sorry guys, I can't do that bubbly dumbass act - take it or leave it. I've written a simple, one paragraph explanation for anyone I think may be friend potential. The main purpose is to avoid offending them - NTs get upset when you can't speak back, or you're neutral one day and then ignore them completely the next. I find if they understand I have sensory overload days when I can't communicate then it's much easier to get back on track without having the whole "you hurt my feelings and I thought you were mad at me" drama. I have had a few reactions where people assume I'm ret*d or something, but the most common reaction is a reference to some friend or family member they have with something completely unrelated wrong. ("Oh, you have Asperger's? Wow, my sister has schizophrenia and my uncle is an amputee!" Uhh... okay.)

I know the note writing is not ideal, but it's the best solution I can come up with considering my limited ability to communicate well with fast-talking, high emoting NTs. Verbal attempts have ended up not getting the point across and leading to frustration for all involved.

I don't and why should i? NTs don't even know what Aspergers is, so why bother them with it?

People might think your mentally crazy..........bad idea

I'm suppose to be going into the diagnosis process soon and I have started personally discussing it with some of my friends. One of my friends said he knew it and told me but I wouldn't listen. Another is still in denial because I think she thinks it translates to mental retardation because of the word syndrome (our elementary school was next to a school for children with disabilities especially those with down syndrome). Another is accepting because of course she always enjoyed my bluntness, is very accommodating to my antisocial behavior and has taken child development. My mistake was announcing it on my status update on Facebook. I think most people are misinformed (which included myself before my niece's teacher explained to me that Sheldon on Big Bang Theory was on the spectrum because she majored in child development and was able to give me a somewhat professional explanation). One of my other friends who has a B.S. in Psychology at first was surprised but has seemed to now accept it. I think it is important in a professional setting to set the record straight that you just aren't a snotty b***h. I think because I am attractive, people brush it off as if I just don't care because I was treated special due to my appearance (basically a b***h) and got away with things like that. I've gotten yelled at by one of my professors because she thought I didn't care (I forgot to send in an assignment because I space out when she announced it in class, the due date had been moved around and she had expressed doubt about to what stage it had to be completed, misread her email) but in reality I realized it had been late and thought I deserved to get a bad grade for not turning it in when I was suppose to. I think with acquaintances it is not important to tell them. I am considering telling my professor since I am in my 3rd year of my PhD program in Materials Science Engineering and my qualifying and dissertation defenses are both oral presentations with a question session. I hate open ended questions and at least one professor on my preliminary exam refused to rephrase a question because I had asked him to do the same to the last 10 questions he asked and he thought I was trying to kill time.

I just tell my friends after they know me for awhile.. that way, they know I haven't changed and I'm still me. Once I said.. Knock Knock, "whos there? " Aspergers .. "asperger what? " I have Autism .. *awkward silence * .. "yeah "

Honestly, as an NT, I can tell you that no matter how smart you are, you can't "fake" not having Aspergers anywhere near as well as you probably think you can. I dated an Aspie who never told me about his disorder and lied to my face when I finally confronted him about it several months into the relationship. He was very intellectual and overestimated his social abilities and apparently, underestimated my intelligence. He was convinced that all the lying and cover-ups were somehow invisible to me, I noticed his "different" nature from the very first date. Aspies simply don't communicate like NTs, so no matter how much you try to conceal it, someone in an intimate relationship with you is going to know the truth. He may have been able to fake it around a couple people who didn't spend much time with him, but in a dating circumstance, it's extremely visible. Not to mention, no one, NTs or Aspie alike, likes to be lied to. I can understand why someone with Aspergers wouldn't tell someone about it right off the bat. But certainly, once you are involved with someone, you have a responsibility to tell them what is going on and to be honest with them. Because they are definitely going to know, they are your partner and deserve to know, and they will see it and not know what to attribute the behaviors to and all sorts of misunderstandings will happen. To be honest, Aspergers was not the biggest difficulty of our relationship. It was the dishonesty and lack of openness that was. I was an incredibly open and caring girlfriend, I did everything I could (and definitely far more) to try to be understanding. However, you can't be there for someone who is lying to you and who is not taking responsibility for himself as an adult. It doesn't matter what your problem is, everyone battles and suffers from something. It's how you deal with it, both to yourself and to others, that will ultimately define the quality of the interaction you end up having. Obviously, the relationship ended and I moved on. Again, not because of Aspergers. My best advice is to be honest with yourself and others, I don't think the lying is at all an Aspergers trait, it just happens to be the route this particular individual took and I can tell you firsthand it was the wrong choice. Sometimes I still wonder what that relationship might have looked like if he'd just been an honest person, I really cared for him and had high hopes. Needless to say, I was majorly disappointed. I hope anyone out there in a similar boat can take some inspiration from all of this and open up, even if there are consequences. It's better to be with someone that can see you for all that you are than to either feel you have to lie about yourself to be accepted or that you have to direspect yourself by being unfair to the people that really want to be there for you.

Is it wrong to laugh at that knock knock joke?

But as for talking about it, I don't.
I even have/had a good reason for not getting diagnosed as that would have killed any employment chances in the field I used to specialize in.
Turned out that as an adult I had a knack for working with autistic people which is where I discovered AS. Was doing that work as an extra job alongside my specialization.
I didn't discover what my issue was until that time, but apparently I was tested for autism as a child but didn't score badly enough to be considered autistic (in a podunk town in the middle of nowhere, in the early eighties). I found that out two years after my self-diagnosis which explained too much (and I fill too many of the tick boxes) for it to be less than 99% likely.

Now I don't feel like I need a diagnosis because my understanding of myself has helped me handle the harder aspects better, and my wife is the most understanding person in the world and she makes life so much easier. She knows, my mother knows, my father knows but doesn't understand, and my sisters know. Nobody else has a need, as I see it.
My friends know that I am a bit strange, but that's okay, so are they. Otherwise they wouldn't be my friends. My psychologist friend is closer to knowing the truth, and I'm waiting for my current colleagues to piece it together. Being mostly neuro scientists and cognitive scientists I think it's just a matter of time.

Now, I have my issues, but all in all I don't think that my probable aspieness makes me any worse. It may even be my greatest asset in many ways.

I actually have a severe problem regarding telling my friends/family I'm an Aspie. Not the actual telling part, because I already told them a while back. The problem lies in the circumstances. You see When I was diagnosed Aspie in my junior year of high-school I had only glanced at the readings and what Aspergers really is... Because it didn't interest me, oh the irony. The good thing is I never did any self damage thanks to my phobia of pain, but I did my fair share (far to much actually) of mental and verbal self hurting. And whoa am I getting off tangent anyway as I met my current friends I kinda nonchalantly said "Oh yeah I have aspergers or something" when they asked about my behavior... God I was stupid. Anyway I only told them that it was a social disorder, as that was practically all I knew at the time. I seriously went through all my life thinking all the little things I did were either normal or because I was weird, as in completely specific to me. Damnit off tangent again >.<. Anyway a week ago I actually decided to learn more about it thanks to a friend who wanted to learn more about it when I told him. He looked up and found some stuff and it shocked me. So many questions were answered and so many things explained. I immediately learned all I could about it which led me he... Wait did I just get off subject AGAIN?! Grr that get's really annoying. Ok finally to the point. Now that I did this and it was so sudden my friends (who are quite used to me) rejected the very notion that I had this or took the side of "There's nothing wrong with you get over yourself!" As I'm sure many of you had to deal with the latter. There are a few that I'm unsure about as they haven't talked much about it since or avoid the subject and me being an Aspie can't read them for anything. I have another friend who was accepting... but quite ignorant of the subject. But I did have one that was very willing to understand and help me as best he could. You can count the number of people I interact with on two hands and every one of them is precious to me, some more than others. I need help dealing with this as I'm terrible at explaining things. Please help.

That's hilarious.

I have only told two people so far, and it was at the same time, and it fit into the context, because we were talking about Max on the show Parenthood (he's an aspie). I just said, "i'm kind of like him", and my cousin said, "but you don't have aspergers." and i said, "well, actually i do." and she was a bit surprized, but that was that, and i told her some of my quirks that it explained and she was fine.

I'm planning to tell some of my friends and here's the basic thing i'm going to say:
"I have Asperger’s- you know, like Einstein, and Newton, and most of the world’s greatest scientists, so in some ways I can be really smart, and in others- not so much."

haha its so funny i have it all planned out, i even made a little chart in microsoft word for who i'm going to tell, when, where, and what i'm going to say, because for my best friends i'll just say my psychiatrist told me, as they know about all this stuff, but a few other people that i want to know, that's pretty much the plan. i think it'll work because it sort of gives a mini synopsis without sounding too technical and medical-like (remember, i'm a teenage girl). And obviously, it will have to be in context, and i have some plans to sort of set the stage, so i'm not just randomly saying it.

I once said it to a friend i had and she answered 'well, so now i understand why you act strange!'
And after nothing is changed.

I have told the people I work with I have AS. I have worked with them for 11 years and I haven't really noticed too much of a change in the way I've been treated. The one drawback I've noticed is that anything I now do is attributed to AS.

I avoid telling people as long as I can. I am more content if folks think I might just be a little odd, or just an idiot than them thinking I am mentally handicapped. That is, I don't tell my folks here in Germany, and for a good reason: I don't know why that is, but people here seem not to be open minded when it comes to mental conditions in general, and quite the opposite seems to be the case with my friends from the US. When I told some of them, most of them even knew what Apsger's syndrome is, knew someone who had it already, and where like, "Wow, I would have never guessed" or stuff like that, and they didn't feel awkward at all that I went to see a psychiatrist every once in a while to talk about it and so on. However, if you admit making some kind of psychological therapy or thelike here in Germany, people start to look down their noses on you, starting talk like "ah, now that explains a lot", basically labeling you as insane. That is my experience with it. I had this "ah, now that explains a lot" talk given to me by two of my friends, and after that, they started attributing everything I did, or didn't do, to Asperger's, allthough knowing little what it is or does in the first place. After that, I only told four more persons: my mother knows it, one of my college professors knows it, and one of my female friends and one of my male friends (who happen to be brother and sister, and only because they have an adopted brother who also got it and tried to find someone who culd give them advice who is not a doctor but has it as an adult). Welll... and of course you guys here, but I guess you cannot count that one.