Autism is sadly described as seen by outsiders, and not how experienced by those who have it.
I think it should be described both ways. That way, people who see autism can know what it looks like, and those who have it but don't know it can realize they have it.
For example, it could be described as appearing to be unemotional to others due to how the emotions are expressed, but for the person who has it, they actually "shut down" due to overload from feeling the emotions too strongly. That explains what it looks like, but also what's actually going on.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
There's actually a short interview with Tom in the book. He mentions getting lonely sometimes, and that his diagnosis gave him "something to pin [his] weirdness on". He was asked what about Asperger's makes social interaction so difficult, to which he replied, "...I suppose it's because of a lack of understanding on the part of the person with Asperger;s we don't understand some aspects of politeness, for example." He went on to say he doesn't always understand why someone would be hurt by something. He was also asked what he would tell college students about Asperger's if he could. He said (I guess facetiously) that "We're not as smart as the shrinks say we are. Be thankful you're normal," which he described as being able to "turn in work that's less than perfect" and make friends.
There's also a section about a test led by the autistic Michelle Dawson on whether or not the most common use of measuring intelligence, the WISC-III, was suitable for autistic children by comparing to the Raven's Progressive Matrices Test. The book describes the latter as "a nonverbal test of logic and higher-level abstract thinking". She had an autistic group and an NT control group. Notably, the autistic group scored 30% higher on the Raven's test (56%) that the WISC-III test (26%). In contrast, the control group only scored about two points higher (70% on the WISC-III, 72% on the Raven's).
There's also quotes about how autistics would rather be accepted than "cured"; that their autism is integral part of their identity, and how autism isn't a disorder, but "both a disability and a difference", and how people should prepare autistics to "survive in a world that was designed for non-autistic people" instead of trying to "cure" autism.
So there's that, I guess.
edited 24th Oct '16 9:31:46 PM by PhysicalStamina
Studious Girl
edited 25th Oct '16 7:57:19 PM by Cailleach
One, the quote is from Tom, not the author, and two, he was addressing a hypothetical crowd of college students everywhere, presumably neurotypical ones.
You could do to give those Jade-Colored Glasses a rest sometimes, because I made both of those points pretty damn clear.
edited 25th Oct '16 5:44:17 AM by PhysicalStamina
Studious Girl
edited 25th Oct '16 7:57:30 PM by Cailleach
...oh, shit, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have been so harsh.
ohhh fuck what have i just done
edited 25th Oct '16 5:54:19 AM by PhysicalStamina
Rock on, Gold Dust Woman
You kickstarted her anxiety, dude.
Don't do that. Please.
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?
I'm sorry, I forgot.
Ugh, maybe it's a good idea if I don't post here again
Why not post here? It's best to learn the social rules; it's something we all have problems with, after all. We need to learn them, period. So why not stay and learn?
Autism Acceptance Doesn't Seem So Radical To Me
I wonder which specific kinds of functional skills are being talked about. It links to a You Tube video, but I'm at work now and can't view it. I do wonder if some of these skills are things like knowing when you're being manipulated, and knowing when and how to say no to someone.
After I got home from the conference, I did the unthinkable. I told my daughter there were times when she could say “No” to me. She liked that a lot. I also began educating her about sex. She wasn’t so interested. She wanted to talk about anime instead. I got creative and simply made places in our daily life to talk about sex, dating and relationships. I pointed out examples of healthy relationships from shows and movies we watched (I remember Gilmore Girls being a big favorite). I brought in examples of dysfunction for contrast. I made the family watch Tila Tequila during dinner hour and we talked about alcohol, consequences and bad decisions. I set boundaries, as much on myself as for her. I didn’t go into her room without asking. She picked what shoes she wanted and learned the hard way that heels hurt. She wore her cat ears to school and got in trouble for it. Must’ve worked – years later, at 22 years old, she’s far more conservative than I was and she makes better choices than I ever did.
Stuff like the LGBTQ autistics thing it almost reminds me how small my world of online place is.
Yeah, I read an autistic gay man saying on a forum that he went to a gay picnic, and the people there seemed creeped out by him. He was hoping to meet people, and he was rejected by them.
Review of "The Accountant", the action movie with the autistic protagonist.
Upon noticing a homemade necklace around the wife’s neck, he asks her if she sells any. She replies that she does, and asks him if he likes the design; he callously says he does not, but then inquires about her office space, the space she uses for making these necklaces.
Although she is not quite following him, the husband gets in on the play at hand, and says that the biggest room in the house is where she makes the necklaces. Wolff then suggests, rather than merely stating, that when she drives the couple’s pickup to purchase crafts materials, she instead labels it as a, “Work vehicle.”
The couple leaves the office ecstatic at all of its newfound tax deductions, inviting Wolff to the farm to fish. Wolff, still having trouble looking the couple in the eyes, says that he prefers to shoot.
Some of the more well-known autism/Aspergers symptoms there. A good start.
Ben Affleck does a fantastic job as Christian Wolff, perfectly encapsulating several symptoms of autism. Wolff is shown to have a repetitive routine, a lack of social capabilities, difficulty expressing emotions and trouble understanding non-verbal cues.
Yet, even with these limitations, Wolff is still able to be portrayed as heroic (when he needs to be), funny and incredibly intelligent; the filmmakers have gone to impressive lengths to illustrate the fact that people can and do rise above their mental disabilities.
It is a truly progressive look at a disorder that not many people fully understand.
Good. We need more portrayals of autism that show the "combination of intelligence and disability that can't be separated from each other", per Hans Asperger. Too many people think of it as only bad, or as bad but with some perk.
Granted, we still need other nuanced portrayals as well, of average autistics, but this is a good move.
Rock on, Gold Dust Woman
You would't mind crossing that over to the Film Representation and Diversity thread, would you? We had a discussion of the film recently, and I feel that this might make for a good examination of autistic representation.
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?
Studious Girl
So I was on the Na No Wri Mo forums and someone asked me if I thought being autistic helped or hurt my writing. I feel pretty good about my answer, so I thought I'd post it here:
I personally think it helps. A lot. Writing revels in trying to "make the familiar strange." When everything for you is already strange (at least compared to how everyone else sees things), you're already a step ahead! I've had my "unique writing voice" complimented all throughout my school career, starting when I was in first grade! I've met adult writers who are still having trouble figuring out a unique writing voice. The fact I had one naturally at the age of six makes me pretty lucky, I think! Being autistic, I also have a lot of experience looking at things from the outside and analyzing social constructs so that I could get inside. Therefore, I'm able to analyze my character's actions and the constructs present in my story very deeply.
And my imagination is constant. Being inside my imagination inventing stories and characters is my default state of being. I have to consciously work to turn it off. I live in my imaginary world more often than I live in the real one. I'm constantly imagining stories and characters, 24 hours a day. To the point where real people are barely in my thoughts at all. While I'm talking to you, I'll be thinking about you. But once I stop talking to you, you are completely out of my thoughts. Not to say I don't like you, it's just that I instantly switch back to my imaginary world and characters. The two worlds are separate, and I'm only in the "real" world when I have to be. I have a very long list of characters that I've developed inside my imagination, and they live in a very developed world. Very few of my characters actually end up in writing, though, because if they all did I'd be writing non-stop 24 hours a day.
Where the trouble lies is when it comes to the more "nuts and bolts" things of writing. My grammar gets away from me easily and my run-on sentences are stuff of legend. It's hard to organize what's happening in my head. My executive function isn't too great, so I'm not very good at focusing well enough to do the actual act of writing. I tried all summer to edit a previous Na No but I never focused well enough to do more than a chapter or two.
I posted it there just now.
Looking back a few pages, it looks like a lot of people are upset, seeing it as fulfilling the common stereotype, and being an example of Inspirationally Disadvantaged.
Rock on, Gold Dust Woman
They are. I figured you'd be able to offer a good perspective of things. I'm pretty much the only person in there who is on the spectrum to my knowledge.
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?
"Write what you know."
When what you know is different from what other people know, it creates something unique right there.
I had thought a few times about the book version of Harriet the Spy. You want to see a unique writing voice in the 1960s? That book was written in first-person, and it shows what strongly looks to me like Asperger Syndrome portrayed internally.
Harriet doesn't understand people, so she studies them and writes about them, frequently misunderstanding why they do what they do. She's 11 years old, but her misunderstandings, to me, seem strange even by the standards of that age group.
She's bossy and wants to do things her way, creating her own little games and making up elaborate rules. Her best friends are a boy and an eccentric girl. She has very odd tastes. She follows a strict routine. She dresses entirely practical - which some have attributed to the author being a butch lesbian. She interprets things said literally.
She's bluntly honest and genuinely doesn't get why blunt honesty isn't accepted by others; when she sees her caretaker try a food that she hates and refuse to admit that she hates it, Harriet doesn't get why. Harriet doesn't understand the concept of telling "little while lies".
If someone is to portray a form of autism that accurately and from an internal perspective, especially before anyone knew what it was, then the only reason I can see them doing that is having the condition themself. Sadly, it's impossible to find good information about the author, Louise Fitzhugh. She was a butch lesbian who grew up with wealthy parents. That's... about all I could find.
Again, I'm talking about the book, not the movie.
Hello, everyone! I have Asperger's syndrome and am excited to learn about the experiences of other people on the spectrum, so I thought it would be good to check this thread out. It's great to have a place to talk with people who experience similar issues as you, I think.
I'm generally uncomfortable with telling other people that I am autistic until I know them very well, when it's gotten past the point where telling them would make much of a difference in the relationship. Most people can see I'm not neurotypical from my behaviour, though. I seem to act more "stereotypically autistic" (that might not be a good phrase to use) if I'm unfamiliar with the environment, the behaviour of the people in it, and their norms or expectations. When I'm in a social context that I'm used to, though, I'm a lot more engaged with other people and am more "fluent" in the rhythm of conversation than I am in other contexts. In university, thoough, it's been much harder to find a consistent social context to adapt to outside of the classroom.
I really like coming up with ideas for stories and plays, as well as thinking about art and aesthetics in general! I definitely agree that autism gives some wonderful advantages to writing—since we have to look at the mechanisms that guide how people behave from the outside in, it allows us to give an invaluable perspective on how they work or how they can be changed. Personally, I find I have to deal with abstract concepts on a much higher frequency than the allistic people I know—for them, things like social skills and conversation are intuitive, whiile for me the rules that govern them are largely arbitrary except in the sense that they're the result of centuries of gradual development and the fusion of numerous historical processes.
Oh, geez, this post went on too long, didn't it? I'm a bit loquacious, but I'll try to tone things down next time I contribute to the discussion.
Grr... <3
Welcome to the thread!
Ugh I know, socializing is so hard. I never know if I've made a faux pas until after the fact. Sometimes when I think a person likes me, it turns out they didn't. I had no way of figuring that out beforehand. It's so frustrating!
Same here. As has been said about, and by, others, I may learn the social norms for a specific situation and handle that situation just fine, then I enter a new one and I find some way to make a screwup.
At the restaurant when celebrating a milestone birthday for my dad, I told the waiter that I enjoyed the dinner so much I'd like seconds. She laughed and said, "Are you serious?" As in, it would take too long to cook another one. Oops.
It's been said many autistics tend to replay conversations in their head, trying to pinpoint where they screwed up, and figure out what they could have done differently. I know I sure do that.
Sometimes I go on a date and I never hear back from the guy again, so I never know if I even screwed up at all. And replaying the convos isn't adequate enough- there's all these body language cues that I never see!
The onus should not be 100% on us to understand the other person. They need to meet us at least 25% of the way.
Are you able at all to get anyone to understand autism/Aspergers? If they don't believe you have the condition, you could at least instead say, "I have a hard time reading body language and understanding social subtleties. I've always been like this" and not use the "A" words, and that might work better. Some autistics have found that describing their symptoms works better than naming their condition, as people will often not believe them if they name their condition.
I don't know how or when I'd try to explain it to that person. Would it be tactful to explain it to them beforehand? I mean if it would be useless if I didn't because I could screw up without knowing and they'd never tell me. But I can't imagine a graceful way to broach the subject
I've become very concerned about my friend Tom
edited 24th Oct '16 7:49:51 PM by Cailleach