Kinda need comfort; not sure if AS

Post Reply New Topic

I'll start out with saying I don't know if I have AS or not. I only recently started looking into it. What I do know is that AS explains my life up until this point, even if only in a mild and personal way. This group is the first that I've found where I don't feel like an outcast in some way.

That being said, I'm just looking for help, advice, someone to connect with... anything really. I've really been struggling lately and no one seems to understand. I casually brought up the possibility of AS to my boyfriend the other day and he literally laughed in my face and refused to talk about it.

All my life, I've been considered "normal" but my key attributes were always shy, quiet and sensitive. I have a hard time making friends and it never mattered too much until I got to college. The social interaction here is just unbearably overwhelming and all anyone ever wants to do is hang out and have small talk, which makes me want to crawl in a hole. I don't share in their sense of humor and have a hard time differentiating if someone is joking or being serious. I get really overwhelmed very easily especially in social settings.

I think if I do have AS, over the years I've become really good at pretending and learning different things that help me to appear more normal. There are a lot of things that were more prominent as a child than they are now.

Whether you are on the spectrum or not, you can take whatever time you need away from people in order to stay centered. There's always studying, right? Taking a little time here and there makes more sense than getting totally overloaded and having to abruptly withdraw for a longer time.

I bristle a little at the thought of someone I care about laughing in my face and refusing to talk if I were to bring up a concern about my well-being. However, I only have one sentence to go on, so I don't know what really went down, or what your boyfriend's expectations are regarding your tendencies.

I think that not having a diagnosis for a long time held me back in some ways, in that I came up with all kinds of bizarre theories to explain my difficulties. It also didn't give me an easy excuse not to try to overcome my difficulties, so there's a positive side of it as well. I'm glad that I found a psychiatrist who has a lot of experience with autism, though.

I'm an introvert. I need my alone time. I take it. I don't apologize for it.

They're called 'Coping mechanisms.'

You can't very well survive in the adult world without developing them. IMO, that's kind of the definition of 'High Functioning' - it means one is better capable of disguising their autism, not that their autism is less handicapping. Internally, the difficulties are the same, they just aren't as visible on the surface.

Unfortunately, that's a curse of it's own, because when your disability is invisible, it's much more difficult to get others to cut you any slack for the problems you're having. They will continually accuse you of just whining and making excuses, because it isn't happening to them and they can't see it happening to you.

Welcome! I'm new here too.



It's fortunate in a way that you're coming to these investigations relatively early in life. The BF thing sucks. My wife of 9 years is neurotypical and, while she regularly throws "you don't understand, you have Asperger's" in my face when I question why she has (from my perspective) manufactured another emotional crisis out of whole cloth, she has never accepted that AS is something one can't just be convinced, cajoled, medicated, or therapized out of having and that it is actually a disability which requires some accommodation from one's loved ones.



Yup. I went that direction but also the other: overcompensating, being basically a dick socially trying to emulate those around me who were, from my perspective, basically all being dicks all the time as a matter of course. That of course went poorly -- like trying to speak Spanish by putting an "o" at the end of your words -- and the conclusion I would draw from my attempts is not to try particularly hard to fit in, except in those rare cases where your academic advancement depends on social performance (e.g. presentations, student/faculty mixers, inverviews, etc.) but rather to find your niche, and when you find where you are comfortable, what you are comfortable doing, you may well find your people. They're probably sitting by themselves somewhere so it might take a while. : )





Yep. I'd say it goes even beyond coping mechanisms. Those of us who are high-functioning often have significantly above average intelligence, which allows us to essentially emulate the processor architecture of the neurotypical brain when we have the clock cycles to spare. On a good day, I can go to a social event and appear like just another guy, if you don't look too closely and realize all the motions, nuances, and timings are a conscious effort. But carry it on too long, or add too many other processes that the AS brain has to do at the same time, and there are no longer sufficient system resources to maintain that flawless emulation.

Many of us break down first in college, maybe because for the first time we are encountering some intellectual challenge we can't just brush off, while at the same time being thrown into a much less protected, less mediated social environment. We just run out of system resources trying to be both intellectually functional and socially functional, and something has to give. For some it's the social side, for others it's the academic side, and for those less fortunate and without a support structure, the whole architecture can collapse. I experienced this last outcome. It was ugly.

The strides the AS community has made in recent years have been remarkable, from pushing through accommodation at all levels of education, to creating social safe spaces (welcome, again!) where we can let the facades drop for a while and be ourselves with all our idiosyncrasies. I would strongly encourage you to make some liaison with your school's disability resource center, whether or not you have a formal diagnosis, just to place on the record that you believe you may be on the spectrum -- that way, if something were to give, and you needed some time off, or some accommodation, you would have recourse to those resources.