Auties, Aspies, and other CloudCuckooLanders!

You can say that again. Worst of all, they put people in leading and advisory positions who have no clue of anything beyond their peripheral vision. My girlfriend has to deal with a lot of unnecessary grief because most of her welfare workers are entirely inept at handling an autistic person. Her and I have been working out a method to facilitate communication with third parties, but one would like to think that a smidgen of psychological education should be mandatory for social workers.

edited 27th Mar '15 12:58:35 PM by TAPETRVE

I don't have a condition, but I may have internalized calling myself "weird" because I realized that nobody's actually called me that, but "spacy," "roundabout," and "you don't think very straightforwardly" are often similar in meaning.

I don't think on the same wavelength as most people, that's what. Good for creativity, bad for social interaction.

Especially since said different-wavelength means I tend to space out a lot and lose track of a crapton of things, like what I'm talking about mid-sentence. Occasionally I forget my friend's names in that horrible "I KNOW YOUR NAME BECAUSE IT'S BEEN TWO YEARS OH MY GOD WHY ISN'T IT COMING OUT OF MY MOUTH" feeling. That's only happened a couple times, but it still sucks.

edited 27th Mar '15 11:40:33 PM by Sharysa

Welp. Wrongplanet.net won't load. I haven't been on for months and just recently discovered that as things are right now, I'll never get to use that chat room again. Woe is me.

Asperger's is even worse when you have an NT sibling. Seriously, every single time I try to talk to my sister, she just pauses and says, "interesting" like she's trying to be polite and not just say, "I don't care."

You want to see Aspergers with an NT sibling?

Try my dumbass Know-Nothing Know-It-All brother. He is utterly insistent that his NT life experiences should be mine. He thinks I should drink alcohol. He thinks I should have sex. He thinks I'd enjoy these things. This is despite the fact that I hate rowdy parties, have no attraction to sex, and really don't want to lose control with alcohol.

To say nothing about how much of an obnoxious, insufferable alpha male he is. His rigid views on gender roles and relations sound to me like an attempt to make his personal beliefs proscriptions that everyone should live by. Well, basically, if you go to "We Hunted the Mammoth", you'll see a website that mocks the views that he and other people like him have, so I should stop there.

My online female Aspie friend says I'm the only person who "gets it", and I feel the same way about her. She says people at her college can't understand her lack of desire for those very same things that I also don't want.

There are people who just don't get it. And by that, I mean most people. They don't understand Aspergers at all. They don't seem to recognize that it's almost like a totally different culture.

Hey. I got diagnosed with Aspergers a while back.

...Sorry if I interrupted anything.

There's nothing to interrupt, so don't worry about that. I wish this thread had more conversation, actually.

Being diagnosed with Asperger's at age seventeen was a very frustrating experience. It's something I would've liked to have known slightly earlier, considering I couldn't understand why I didn't understand nearly all social interaction, but at least now I know.

And knowing is half the battle.

G. I. JOEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

My significant other had been diagnosed at a young age, and then put on all sorts of medical shite for years. I love her to hell and back, and wouldn't ever trade her in for any other version of herself, but we both sure wish she didn't have to deal with the whole pharmaceutical ordeal. It has only caused her disproportionately more harm than good.

edited 3rd May '15 8:38:28 AM by TAPETRVE

Ugh, I hate hate hate hate hate it when people think that it takes medication to "treat" or "cure" people with Asperger's, Autism, or even just ADHD (though from my own experience, medication actually does help with ADHD...).

Yo. Got properly diagnosed with Aspergers and ADHD at age 13(i.e. two years ago), but I'm fairly sure I've had it for a loooong time before that.

And... yes. I have plenty of the problems others have. I especially feel that, when I'm talking with someone, they just want to either change the subject, or wish for me to just shut up, but don't want to say that because they don't want to be rude. Makes me feel tense.

My ADHD actually endangered me more in scholar life, as I just can't stay focused on class too much, and I eventually succumb to distraction. This made me lose track a lot in the years earlier. Now it's not as big an issue, but still, gawd.

I also tend to behave a little offish... and due to such Cuckoolander-ish behaviour, other students in my previous school just treated me like I was an alien. Fortunately those in my new school are much more accepting.

"I especially feel that, when I'm talking with someone, they just want to either change the subject, or wish for me to just shut up, but don't want to say that because they don't want to be rude. Makes me feel tense."

I know that feeling all too well.

What makes your new school different from your old one?

So, um... I was always somewhat of the Cloud Cuckoo Lander type, as far as I can remember; some people even thought I was hyperactive. I briefly attended psychological counseling around '04-'05 and proved to be a very tough nut to crack for the shrink, as I spent most of the sessions in complete silence, only answering in monosyllables. After a few months, the shrink just gave up and released me as healthy.

Fast-forward to the present day. In a conversation I had with my elder sister today, she mentioned that she took my nephew to the same shrink, who recognized my family name and asked about me. Upon hearing my sister's description of me, the shrink admitted that she misdiagnosed me back then because it's blatantly obvious to her now that I have Asperger's.

I always sucked at interpersonal stuff, though that might not necessarily be a consequence of Asperger's: I took a Mensa entrance exam last December and passed with a score of 135+, much to my surprise. There's a nearly fifty point IQ difference between myself and my sister (to say nothing of my mother's attitude of assuming that there's nothing wrong with me, I'm just pretending), so you can probably imagine how suffocating it felt to grow up in my family.

I'm currently 24 and studying in a university (though my grades are rather bad, as I'm too lazy to study). Aside from those silent sessions sixteen years ago, I never received any professional help but got to this point on my own. So, if anyone else is in a similar situation... don't give up.

edited 27th Jun '15 5:46:08 PM by amitakartok

So if you're smart, there must be nothing "wrong" with you, you're just pretending. I wish people would realize that high intelligence and learning disorders can both co-exist in the same person. They have a very hard time with that supposedly complicated concept that people can be good at one thing and bad at another.

Well, I don't want to sound like I'm looking for excuses, but I know my mother pretty well. She's the eternally stressed, concerned-with-day-to-day-stuff salarywoman type (and also widowed; I was eight when my father died and the shrink suspected my weird behavior might've been caused by that trauma); it's entirely plausible for me that she'd be in denial in order to avoid stressing out over the issue, a la "I have a million things to fret about already and I REALLY don't need this one too!".

But then again, she's in denial about me having asthma too, apparently believing that the diagnosis of "bronchospasm caused by allergy" also covers bronchospasm caused by physical exertion... never mind that I've never had allergic bronchospasm for the last eight years or so, yet running a hundred meters always caused, and still causes, me severe breathing problems for the next forty minutes.

I've been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome for as long as I can remember. In school, I had an Educational Assistant from Grade 1 to Grade 8, and my mother actually had to fight the system to keep it that way for that long. I'm glad she did, because I believe that I owe everything I am now to that same EA.

I have also given lectures on Asperger's at my local college, particularly at the Ab Psych courses my cousin teaches, and occasionally accompanied by my stepfather, who is a social worker who deals with adults with Asperger's.

Nice to meet you all.

I just discovered that this topic is only 11 pages long right now. That surprised me.

Given lectures? What did you teach/explain there?

I mostly spoke of my own experience of living with Asperger's. My co-speaker, conversely (my stepdad or cousin, usually) would talk about the history of Asperger's diagnosis and the psychological/neurological details of the disorder, etc.

Hello. I'm an aspie. I don't like to refer to myself as being autistic, even though I know the term is technically correct. This is purely a personal hangup.

Um.

I probably won't post here much.

I've done something like that maybe three times, but only sort of "What it was like growing up as an aspie" sort of thing. Nothing big or fancy

I don't have a disorder diagnosed but I know for a fact that I can be very spacey and very off the wall a lot. I usually function at a different wavelength then others and most people who meet me have a hit or miss reaction to me. Either they are cool with me or they find me creepy/weird/unnerving. Does not help that I always have been Not Good With People and very forgetful at times.

So I will count myself under Cloud Cuckoo Lander....

edited 16th Aug '15 1:05:37 AM by Bleddyn

Hi

Just noticed this existed too

School starts next week, hope I can do a little better socially as I did at my old school.

Hey. Thought I'd slide in. I'm Kiaran, an Australian with ADHD and Asperger's syndrome. I'm 99% sure I interrupted something important.

Oh yeah, I have Asperger's and OCD. forgot to specify.

You interrupted nothing.

edited 24th Aug '15 9:04:34 PM by LinkToTheFuture