General Autism Discussion

@doing stuff alone: I don't usually go to restaurants or movie theaters in general. Last time I saw a movie in the theater was going with my dad to see Spectre, and either my noise sensitivity has gotten worse or the sound systems have gotten too [BLEEP!]ing loud (or both), but my ears were literally ringing at points

EDIT: Pagetopper

edited 25th Sep '17 6:13:38 AM by Reflextion

Here's the situation I'm in now:

I live at home with my mom, who's almost 70. My dad died early this month of diabetes complications that we all knew would catch up to him. (I was also the one who made the 911 call when he was unable to wake up - he was brain damaged being recoverability.)

I work a job where I only get $1080 every two weeks in take-home pay. No, that's not much. If my mom dies (she's in good health now), I inherit a house that would cost too much to pay for, so I'd have to sell it (though it should go for a good amount of money as this is a good neighborhood), and we already have plans for me to do just that - sell the house when applicable, and use that money to buy or rent something comfortable for many years.

I have only one real friend - and she's online-only (she visited in person once, and did tell me she'd like to visit again). I've tried the whole "talk to anyone you find interesting" trick that people have claimed is the way to make friends - only worked once in many years. I just don't feel a connection with people, and when I do, they almost never connect back. The emotional connection is far more important to me than the "shared interests" connection. People with whom I share interests, I have noticed I often don't share an emotional/intellectual connection with them.

My investments are slowwwwly paying off, but I'm not making as much money as I'd like to be able to live comfortably or do anything much with them. And I have health problems that I'm paying for out of pocket - they are better than they used to be (I used to have really bad depression and no work ethic, that has since cleared up), but they still exist.

I'm not happy with this. I know there are people who like to do things like go on vacations alone and so on, and go to clubs alone - I see these as things I'd only enjoy with a person I feel close to. My misogynistic bigoted self-righteous alt-right douchebag little brother has invited me to join him on a trip to another country or something, but he is absolutely not who I'd want to go with. I just don't feel close to him at all, even without the whole "he's totally against everything I'm for and vice versa" and "he looks down upon the very types of people I like/relate to the most" aspects.

I don't see a way out of this.

edited 28th Sep '17 4:31:52 PM by BonsaiForest

I don't do vacations on my own, but I have done tours where I didn't know anyone else. I'm planning on doing one to Japan when I get a job and can afford it. At the very least, you can form a superficial connection based on sharing the trip.

I feel 'ya Bonsai. It's a tough situation to be in. The only solution that I know of is to keep asking around for better job opportunities until you find one. If you do sell the house, put as much of the money as you can afford into a retirement account. You'll thank yourself later.

A big fear of mine is that if I get a new, currently higher paying job, I'll eventually end up getting fired for it for the reasons I've seen many autistics get fired from jobs from the life experiences I've seen other autistics talk about. You know, the whole "boss/supervisor decides they don't want the weirdo around, and tosses the person out" thing, which I hear is super common (both anecdotally, and from employment statistics for autistics without low IQs). I can't hide my autism. I do walk and sit awkwardly. It's very noticeable. An ex-high school classmate of mine who has a cousin with Aspergers (a form of it that makes him unable to live on his own) said that it was very obvious I had it when he happened to run into me in a local food mart.

The only way at the moment I'd be likely to get and keep a new job is via an employment agency or employer that explicitly wants to hire people with autism, since otherwise, I am basically a "get rid of the weirdo" employee. (I would love to see actual statistics on how many autistics who got fired from their jobs were fired for reasons such as that, versus reasons such as not having needed "soft skills", or having skills that were too uneven. All I have to go by are the many anecdotes out there, and statistics showing autistics are very underemployment and unemployed compared to people with disabilities such as Downs and intellectual disabilities.) If a higher paying job is out there that I could get and keep, I'd love to do it.

The other problem concerns me a lot more. The whole "inability to form a connection with people". Like I said, for the last, say, decade or so, I've formed one meaningful connection (which has lasted over 6.5 years so far, though it wasn't "meaningful" during those first few). I've seen other adult autistics say they spend many years of their life with zero friends, and other years with one or two.

I did Google searches for "autism" "courtroom" to see what things came up.

Here's a quote from Lighting Up Law Practice in Blue: The Autistic Client:

Both bolded parts are what was most important to me.

The first is that so much autism therapy is based on getting the autistic person to fake normality, with no regard for the toll that doing so takes. The Institute mentioned in my life story that I linked to some time back did a lot of punishing of behaviors such as playing with the ends of my shirt sleeves and other stuff. Now, thankfully, we have a lot of autistic self-advocates saying "No, you don't get that forcing me to stop doing that only causes stress caused by concentrating on stopping the behavior. Letting me do it makes it easier for me to concentrate." And a lot of other people are taking our side.

The second is the whole "bad eye contact means the person is a liar" nonsense. I've seen autistic self-advocates on You Tube talk about how they've been mistaken for serial liars just because they have a lot of difficulty with eye contact. This belief needs to go. (Interestingly, I saw an article saying that a person's hands, not eyes, are a more accurate indication of lying)

People don't actually tend to maintain eye contact. It's more that you look at the other person's eyes more often than not, but most people look around, glance at things, look up or down, etc. I look like I maintain eye contact more than normal because I lipread a bit to make up for my hearing loss, but long unbroken eye contact is ridiculously unnerving for most people. I'd bet that for many autistic people, the actual amount of eye contact isn't that much lower, it's just a bit less frequent than the standard so people think it's way lower.

The really awful principal I had at one point who hated me actually assumed I was lying at all times, because, while she never caught me in one, she couldn't figure out what my "tells" were so she assumed I was showing them all the time. She was incredibly bad at telling when anyone is lying, so telling when someone (me) who has a blank facial expression 90% of the time is lying was basically impossible for her.

edited 30th Sep '17 6:26:40 AM by Zendervai

That sounds like a really nasty piece of work of a principal there. Was she nasty in general? Did other people know that she was? Got any stories about her?

edited 30th Sep '17 7:56:13 AM by BonsaiForest

It was a little private school and she was really good at making people think she was responsible for stuff the behind the scenes administrator did. And I was the weird kid who never hung out with anyone else, so none of the other parents knew anything about me.

I found out that the school collapsed in big part because she had the brilliant idea of blaming the behind the scenes administrator for her own inability to keep track of a schedule or grade things in anywhere near a reasonable time frame. The administrator quit and the principal got exposed as being completely useless. The only part of the school that survived was the daycare/kindergarten section because the principal had nothing to do with it and the woman running that part basically spun it off.

I once had a real ass for a professor in college. He was unorganized, got pissed off when he was corrected (according to someone else who had him), and flew off at me once in one of his classes - I dropped out after that, and from what I'd been told, other students lost respect for him.

He once said to us that the reason he was at our college, and the reason he'd be gone next year, was his right-wing views. Uhhhhh... no. He was certainly not the only right-wing professor in our college, and the others had been there for years. This guy, though, let's just quote another student who had him for another class: "I can handle the fact that he's an asshole, but I felt like I wasn't learning anything in his class!"

Once, he said to the class that his behavior was an experiment - that he was acting like an abusive male to see how we'd react. (The class was "The Study of Abusive Behaviors".) Ehhh, that's quite the excuse there...

I was told by someone who had him for another class that he once talked about having an Asian wife who died. I wasn't aware of the stereotype of "ultraconservative white man with woman issues who marries Asian wife" at the time - and besides, my older brother does not have woman issues, and is married to an Asian, so that stereotype is certainly not true for everyone! (In case you're wondering, it's my younger brother who has woman issues, and acts like a teenager a lot of the time. My mom even said to him "How old are you? 16?" when he was refusing to do some simple task.)

Having grown up with an Asian mother who is the toughest and most assertive person I've ever known, I can't help but laugh my ass off at the "submissive Asian wife" stereotype.

My little brother says that Mexican women are "more traditional". He's supposedly dating one now. One who has a PhD, I was told by my older brother.

I speculated to my older brother than my younger brother may have seen my online Aspie friend visiting my house during my birthday last year, saw how charmed the rest of my family was by her personality and intelligence, saw how "high class" she was in a sense (she's traveled to like 25 countries around the world), and was intimidated that his "omega male" (below beta, below alpha) sperg brother could be friends with such a woman who actually traveled to visit him instead of the other way around. (Also, my cousin later indicated that my younger brother thought she was my girlfriend, which she wasn't, but the belief that she was probably intimidated him more.) And that, seeing an exception to his "rules" on how men and women of different statuses relate to each other, he might have thought, "Holy shit, how come a woman like that travels across several states to be with him, and not me?"

My older brother, however, actually doesn't believe that and said, "I think he's just happy for you. I don't think he was intimidated by her at all."

edited 30th Sep '17 8:51:06 AM by BonsaiForest

Your older brother probably just doesn't want to believe that his youngest brother really is that much of a piece of shit.

Reading Variety's article on multiple autism-themed TV shows. Here's some of their thoughts on The A Word.

I understand that "look at old family photos and 'feel' something" aspect. I've gotten to that point, but it used to not be true. I never felt sentimentality over family photos and the like for the longest time throughout my life. Not as a kid, a teen, or my early adult years.

I don't really get anything out of photos. Partly cause I don't like the way I look (not to any sort of dysmorphia level, I just think I look awful in photos) but mostly because I either don't remember when it was taken very well, or the photo isn't of anything I really care about. I look at family photos and go "yep, that's a photo of my family" and move on. I found some of the pictures from my trip to Israel and I didn't recognize half of them.

I don't think I look good in photos either. But photos of others in events can still be nice to look over. I've created a large number of photo albums on Google Photos of family events and vacations.

One thing I've thought about from time to time, is how much independence kids or teenagers should get, and at what age they should learn various things or try various experiences.

Natural maturity level varies by individual, of course. I went to a camp away from home once in 8th grade and hated it, and wanted to go home by the second day. Yet kids in elementary learn to handle this sort of thing just fine.

My parents actually pushed me to try tons of activities and I couldn't stand any of them. That's not their fault of course. And I think they did the right thing.

I remember reading one guy's life story, and one thing in the story he said was that his parents gave him a lot of freedom, and when he was old enough to drive, they totally trusted him. In contrast to other parents, whose kids had their activities more restricted, and once they got their driver's licenses, the parents were terrified.

People who are very restricted often tend to rebel once they do get freedom, from the life stories I'd read and what I've seen others say.

Now to add the other variable. What if the kid or teen is autistic? Maturity levels vary tremendously between autistics, with some who are very immature for their age, rather mature for their age, or even a hybrid of maturity levels can exist in the same person. Heck, I've seen it firsthand in a few people.

And internet usage is a big deal too. I've occasionally seen comments on family-unfriendly You Tube videos that obviously came from kids who were confused as to what they were watching, or clearly missed the point. To say nothing of the many social interactions that occur on there.

What do you think are the best ways and/or times to get an autistic to do things like, say, become more independent on the internet, get into various activities, drive (yes, I got my driver's license late), etc.? Any personal experiences you want to share as well?

edited 1st Oct '17 4:30:54 PM by BonsaiForest

Oh, yeah, figured I'd add this.

I've seen a woman on Deviant Art who has Aspergers who said that her mom told her not to talk to strangers. Another woman on DA says that she puts on a disguise when she goes out of the house to avoid members of her extended family that keep tabs on her, because she wants more independence!

This is the other side of independence - not having it, and wanting it. One man who likes to go on walks went through a wealthy neighborhood and had the police called on him as a suspicious person. No crime, no arrest, but he unsettled people by obviously not being from the area.

Guess I'll just repost my response from Discord with some additions

I was given a lot of independence as a kid. By middle school, I was in charge of handling all my school work and responsibilities by myself. By eighth grade I could wander in and out of my house whenever I wanted as long as I picked up my phone from time to time.

I started working as a babysitter and assistant camp counselor when I was 13. I had no problem assuming that authority. I felt adequately prepared, and I found I was pretty good at it.

Granted, no one knew I was autistic back then. (Nothing has changed now that they do, since it's obvious I can already handle it) But if people had known I was autistic as a kid, I may have had more restrictions. In my opinion, I dodged a bullet there. I wouldn’t have been able to tolerate adults hovering over me all the time.

edited 1st Oct '17 6:16:26 PM by Cailleach

My parents got me a summer job as a counselor to kids in an arts and crafts program during my teen years.

I remember that the kids seemed to gravitate towards me a lot. What's more, during lunch break, I would sit with the kids instead of my fellow counselors. I was the only counselor that did that. I think I was somehow the "cool one".

Yes. Yes, I was.

I can't really remember that far back. Not in enough detail to know what I was like. I got in a lot of fights, though.

I got a question that is probably more relevant to males than females, but anyone can answer.

Is anyone here afraid of kids? By that I mean, like, you're very afraid that if you interact with them in any context outside of one where it's expected (like some kind of special event), it will be misinterpreted and you'll look bad?

There's this really nice woodsy area near my hometown where I love to take walks. It has streams, lots of trees, a large pipe (with lots of graffiti on it) and even multiple fallen trees/logs that can be used to walk across the streams. I've run across some of those logs, and taken pictures and jumped over the streams (when they're short enough, as rainfall influences their width) and across the "islands". Very nice place.

It's also a place where kids and teens sometimes hang out. Once when I was walking through there, some teenagers who looked to range in age from like 13 to 17 or so walked past me. I said nothing. As I was walking out, one of them walked right up behind me and jumped right behind me. I said like "whoa" in surprise, but otherwise ignored her and kept going.

I've interacted with adults just fine. Even kids - in situations such as a coworker bringing a video game-obsessed kid in. But otherwise, I'm afraid of kids and teens.

Anyone else know what I mean, or feel that way?

I don't think that's exclusive to autistics. If you're a grown man hanging out with a child that doesn't related to you, that's just the conclusion people jump to.

edited 3rd Oct '17 8:56:02 PM by PhysicalStamina

In general I don't interact with kids I don't know and who don't know me. Especially if their parents aren't around. But then, this isn't something only guys with autism are worried about. Mistaken for Pedophile and Pædo Hunt are tropes for a reason. There was a discussion about this on the Sexism and Men's issues thread starting at this post.

Yeah that's not an autism thing, that's simple a part of being a guy in the modern world.