Fafhrd on 14/2/2014 at 02:57

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32 on that test thing. Not that that constitutes a genuine diagnosis, but I've been pretty sure I've been somewhere on the spectrum for a while now. When I was little I would cry all the time, and this continued for years. Things that would provoke me could be as small as having lost a crayon that I needed for a picture I was drawing, and it would send me in to full-blown shutdown freakout. Initially my parents decided that I had ADD because that's what my older brother had (though he never had any of the issues that I did), and they found a psychologist to back that up and put me on ritalin. And it didn't work. So after a year of that they took me to a psychiatrist and I had a battery of tests done and they settled on 'depression' as a diagnosis and started me on pamelor. Which appeared to work for about six months and then it didn't, so they switched me to zoloft, which again 'worked' for about six months, and then they upped my dosage, and then they upped it again, and then they switched me to prozac, which they kept me on from seventh grade through high school (with periodic dosage increases) even though it, too, didn't actually work (and brought with it the side effect of reducing my ability to engage academically, leading to me barely graduating). The drugs didn't work because 'depression' was clearly the wrong diagnosis. I freaked out and shut down when routines were interrupted or changed (which was another problem with high school. Changing a class schedule every semester, right when I'd finally gotten the routine down for the first one? How the hell was I supposed to cope with that shit?), or when I did something certain that the outcome would be X and instead got Y, or had made a plan and then something unexpected prevented me from doing (i.e. missing crayon). I still go through periods of borderline panic when I start a new job, or a different project, or my environment changes. I fixate on things. I have a freakish memory. I'm terrible at reading people, and people aren't great at reading me, because I rarely know the best way to express any emotions I'm feeling, so I opt not to. I'm prone to panic attacks, and I do have severe bouts of genuine depression that set those panic attacks off.

There are also a couple of perceptual components: sensitivity to and awareness of noise is a big one. I once told a friend that the best way to play Thief was with surround sound headphones because that way you don't hear the computer, and he insisted that people don't consciously hear ongoing white noise like fans because their brain tunes it out eventually 'that's why you only hear the refrigerator when the compressor turns on,' and I had to insist that I hear that shit all the time, and he thought I was lying. The other one is that I can't draw for shit, because I'm incapable of breaking down three dimensional objects into two dimensional forms (like if I'm looking at a box at an angle, my brain can't make the leap to 'that is a hexagon with some lines through it'), and it always frustrated me as a child that I couldn't draw into and out of the paper because the line goes in that direction. Side effect of this seems to be that I'm actually pretty good at 3D modelling.

So anyway. That's my 'probably an Aspie or more' story.

Mr.Duck on 14/2/2014 at 09:35

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I don't need no stinking test to tell me I'm going to shag everyone through their underwear.

Assume position y'all.

Queue too, you don't get a free pass just 'cuz you're a perv too.






And yes, this would explain a LOOOOT of members here....

Anyhow...


*Unzips fly*

scumble on 14/2/2014 at 10:46

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It seems to get worse as I get older. The last time I was in a noisy environment at one of the company gatherings the intensity of the noise was close to reducing me to a state of panic. I just had to get out of the room.



Having sensitive hearing isn't enough on its own. I think you're right in that there's a difference between momentary annoyance and chronic mental exhaustion. I work at home most of the time now, and the last time I was in the office I was taken aback at how much noise was being thrown at me. It's not an annoying environment, it's actually hostile and I have to shut it out while I'm there with noise cancelling headphones.

And then there's the visual distraction - it amazes me that people can walk right past you without being aware of your presence. The minute I walk into the office I know who is there, so I take it personally when people seem to ignore me, or I did before I realised that it was possible to have a different perceptual bias.



A diagnosis might help to stop you wondering if you are or not. After two years of wondering if I was or not it was a bit of a relief to have some external confirmation that I wasn't going mad.

But where other people have been fortunate with friends and finding a partner, I feel more like my life has been chewed up. I ended up with the wrong person and her alcoholism destroyed everything. I have to look after my two children without a partner and relying on my family for support.

I wonder if I am particularly badly afflicted on the social side, so while I have high intelligence I wonder if I am "low functioning" in my perception of non-verbal cues. I can rationally understand them but I don't intuitively grasp them. I've actually only made one long term friend in my entire life, and I mostly communicate with him over IM. I seem to be indifferent about whether I actually meet with him. A physical presence can often be a bit unnerving for me, possibly the pressure of having to produce an immediate response in conversation.

There are people I like and respect at work, but I don't think they count as friends. I've had so little experience of friendship that I can't honestly say that I understand what it is.

The down side of being diagnosed relatively late is a sort of unravelling of one's entire life because it's been based on trying to fit into something that is foreign to me. Based on the wrong assumptions. In a way it's like I was just passing through, and where most people have memories of old friends and experiences that make them smile, I seem to have a bland sequence of occurrences that I mostly can't make sense of.

What has been most help to me is reading Donna Williams - an Australian autistic woman. A lot of what she writes about makes a lot of sense to me, and she managed to have very perceptive introspection. Like she says, it can be like one is almost dissociated from ones own body, or possibly sense of self. I realised it wasn't bad self-esteem, more that it isn't actually present, as if there is no self to esteem.

It's so difficult to explain what it's like to normal people, because there is a sort of conceptual disconnect which makes it sound like I've got the same issues that everyone has. I don't know if people just have a lack of patience and have trouble going through the mental exercise of really trying to understand.

It would help if more people were prepared to meet me half way rather than expect me to do all the work by mimicking normality. It might sound like moaning, but no-one expects someone paralysed from the waist down to climb the stairs. A non-physical disability isn't any less a disability.

henke on 14/2/2014 at 11:05

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You're doing a good job of it in this thread, actually. After your (and Fafhrd's) posts I have a much clearer view of what Asperger's is actually like. Thanks for sharing. :)

scumble on 14/2/2014 at 13:29

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It's a shame you didn't have more exposure to a dictionary. Or is that just lazy typing? If you were an aspie you probably couldn't bear to write out something with a spelling mistake.