General Autism Discussion

I'm almost unable to handle team work in school projects. I really don't know how to trust others well.

A teacher put us a horribly low note and thus I just leave and choose to do the entire work alone.

Is hard. And my team just got better without me (they started to—surprisingly—put effort).

I'm still at the risk of failing.

Yikes. My inability to handle tension and nervous don't help in the class where the teacher is focused in teach us how to be Control Freaks. Because The Real World Is Like That© (isn't. Peru' jobs are messy and informal. The Real World is way less orderly).

This Is Gonna Suck.

I'm like. Unable to follow continuous sudden orders. Our teacher have a unhealthy tendency to put examps with limit time and then add more questions randomly.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Oct 23rd 2018 at 2:04:01 PM

does your school have a learning disabilities office? They might be able to help some.

Also, while not Autism, I was having a hard time figuring out where to put this, and since it’s relevant to the wider push for inclusivity and universal design, and has implications for the wider disability community, I’ll put it here.

Starbucks is opening their first “Signing Store” in the US, in Washington DC, specifically designed to accommodate Deaf customers. It’s actually pretty cool, since all the employees are fluent in American Sign Language, and many are even Deaf themselves, and special design considerations like matte surfaces to reduce glare, and extra room to allow for space to sign have even been taken into account.

Edited by megaeliz on Oct 23rd 2018 at 7:50:12 AM

With group projects I know that I tried to divide them up when I was at uni, so I’d have a section that was mine and I’d be able to just focus on that.

Though I found uni hard, while I learnt well and knew the subject well I always had a hard time writing essays, I often couldn’t get focused enough to write an essay and submit it. When I could submit essays I got very good marks, but due to not submitting many assignments I don’t actully have a degree.

With romantic partners I’d suggest you not write it off, it is possible, but a big part of it is finding someone who is a good fit for you, then it’s knowing how to enable a relationship to grow in a healthy way. It’s not just about compatibility, but about enabling yourselves to address issues in a productive manner.

Come the end of the year my partner and I will have been together 4 years and we’ve already been living together for 2, it is possible even though it’s not easy.

I stand that in some ways we have an advantage, we learn social skills, others just go on instinct, if we can learn properly we can be better at social international than many neurotypical people, the same way you’ll at times find that someone who speaks a language as a second language speaks more correctly than someone who learned it as their mother tounge and was never formally taught the language.

That reminds me of how in the UK many retailers did Autism Hour recently, where they tried to make their shops more autistic friendly for an least an hour so that autistic people would be able to enjoy a retail experience that might otherwise be difficult for them.

Edited by Silasw on Oct 23rd 2018 at 11:36:24 AM

That reminds me of how in the UK many retailers did Autism Hour recently, where they tried to make their shops more autistic friendly for an least an hour so that autistic people would be able to enjoy a retail experience that might otherwise be difficult for them.

I think Morrisons does it every week, now. At least from what I've seen in there. But I only go in when stuff's reduced.

I'd try and give higher education advice but I drank through my undergrad and barely showed up to the postgrad, but here I am doing a PhD, so practical advice is lacking. I'd say that if you're good at something and can tolerate doing it for hours at a time, that's probably the important part.

Edited by RainehDaze on Oct 23rd 2018 at 1:33:47 PM

That's pretty much my general modus operandi. My family strongly dislike it,but hey, it worked. Sadly the teacher isn't a believer of individual notes and thus you always end up with the same note of all your group.

That's why I decided do it alone and man. Is gonna be hard (thought ironically, I might be team working with some people that i actually get along with).

And for relationships. Yeah, my biggest fear is that I'm afraid of being unable to find a healthy one.

Group projects were horrendous for me. I always either ended up isolating myself and doing all of the group's work by myself, so the group would have two different work sheets (mine and the group's) or I would just walk out of the class. And walking out of class just got me in trouble with security. It would get even worse when they grouped me with kids that would bully me. And then they would suppress my ideas to help finish the project and say I didn't contribute anything. Which got me into fights with them. And then I would get blamed for the fight. Or I would have to do some bullshit like stand still for 15 minutes reciting class rules. It was always just too much to have to deal with those people for so long.

Edited by KeironCioran on Oct 24th 2018 at 10:12:01 AM

I mostly remember people being awful at getting things finished to a standard I deemed acceptable and redoing a lot of code near the end.

I do that constantly. It could be assorting blocks in a grid and I would be a perfectionist at it.

From your experiences, how is awareness and understanding of autism? Does it seem to be improving?

I remember when someone here said that they had a playwriting class in high school and wrote a play about parents learning their child had autism, no-one in the class could tell the child had autism until it was explicitly made clear in the dialog, after all the most obvious and stereotypical symptoms were shown. That's... pretty bad.

Anyway, now we're living in a time in which multiple portrayals of autism exist on TV and on streaming services such as Netflix. We got portrayals ranging from Atypical to The Good Doctor to Community. That of course risks causing its own problems ("You're not autistic! You act nothing like [character from show]!"), but it opens the potential for explaining that Hollywood gets the details wrong all the time but at least the basics can be explained. And hey, Atypical actually explains autism symptoms from the main character's perspective, explaining why he does what he does.

So, from your experiences, are things getting better, worse, no different than they were before?

Definitely better. There's more work to be done, but we're currently on more or less the right track.

I'm Latin American, so, people is only recently noticing that we exist

Which means better. Easily.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Oct 28th 2018 at 7:10:12 AM

I met up with my old college (UK college, not university) friends and they all both knew what I meant when I said I’d been diagnosed autistic and were completely unsurprised, so I’d say signs are good.

I was actully talking about how quickly things have improved with my half-sister today, she works with children and younge adults who have mental disabilities, and we were talking about how her mother never picked up on my father being autistic or that my other half-sister is probably on the spectrum.

Things have moved a lot in just the last 5 years, nevermind the last 20 something years.

My sister also suggested that I should try and do talks one day, simply because I’m very good at both self-advocacy and meta-analysis of my Autism.

Edited by Silasw on Oct 28th 2018 at 12:29:10 PM

I have no awareness of whether there's awareness, unhelpful as that sounds.

Autism, at this point, is like techno: almost everyone's heard of the term, but next to no one actually knows what it is.

I guess that's an improvement from, like, the 50s, but...

Quit complaining: try having CFS for six months and trying to explain that to other people.

Autism-awareness has improved immeasurably across the world in the last 30 years. Frankly, being at school in the '80s would astound you as to how badly basic things like dyslexia were treated, forget trying "Asperger's" on for size. -_-' (Heck, there's still a vast amount of improvement still needed for the social acceptance of dyslexia, forget dyspraxia or dyscalculia — and, heaven help you if you're aphasic.)

And, I had CFS back then: there's a reason I wasn't diagnosed for 10 years, and then basically left alone with no plan at all for another 20 after that. Nobody has a clue, and I don't expect them to for another 70 or so years — maybe 20 if somebody in a lab gets lucky. But... I'll most likely be long dead before CFS gets anything like real acknowledgement in things like welfare benefits, let alone somebody knowing about the condition if chatting at random.

Any time you want to think about how strange it is that it takes so long for things to improve, look at schizophrenia or Down's to compare relative speeds of acceptance. Or, you know, polio.

Things are getting quicker, but they still take time.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Oct 28th 2018 at 1:19:04 PM

So. It turns out that my Sadist Teacher is less For the Evulz and more of a Sink-Or-Swim type of guy. He's actually quite likeable when you know him as a person.

Thought I still sucks in his area. Because personal likeability=/=he's gonna help you.

And that's good.

He's actively trying to generate as much stress as possible without making it Unwinnable For Design.

And we all know the effects that stress cause in autists...

I'm doing it decently.

Yeah. I actually could manage it. I still have the horrid note of my first months with my former team, so my current decent notes aren't going to save it.

We're halfway through his area and I hope to excelling in it.

If I wasn't trying to survive. I could actually enjoy this

I'm not saying we haven't made progress.

I'm saying the progress is made is infinitesimal and until shit like the "autistic screeching" meme becomes discredited, I'm not going to be satisfied.

I’m not sure where you live, but Does your school have a learning disabilities office? You should be able to get notetakers through that.

You might have to officially disclose your dignosis, if you haven’t already, but if you feel comfortable with that, I’d say it’s worth looking into.

Edited by megaeliz on Oct 30th 2018 at 6:53:02 AM

Yes, Autistic People Do Have Sex Just Like Everyone Else. I'd heard about people treating those with disabilities as if they are "pure", as if they can't be "whole", like the adults that they actually are.

Uh oh, what if (horror!) two autistic adults have sex?! What does that make that then, huh?!

I have never heard that stereotype and I have no idea how it even gained traction.

A good fucking time, that's what.

Well, sex usually takes at least two people to interact with each other...

Yeah, it does. I was saying that if people react with horror to an autistic and an allistic screwing, under the assumption that the autistic is mentally years behind their age, then what would they consider two autistic adults doing the deed?

The concept of one being mentally a certain age is really an oversimplification about how mental/learning disabilities work. It's more like certain things being slower, for the most part.

Nah. Is a Third World Country

Mmmm...I don't know how to answer to this. I never have being in a relationship. I usually end up having crushes in, to be honest, unhealthy people that I end up ignoring for the sake of my mental health.

Expecting autistic people to fit in is cruel and unproductive; value us for our strengths says an editorial.

I remember a few years ago arguing with someone, where I said that it's impossible for autistics to fake total "normalcy," and the other person said "society won't change to accept you, so you have no choice but to change to fit in." I argued that there's a limit to how much, and how long, autistics can fake being the same as everyone else by mimicking "normal" facial expressions and body language, and memorizing the right things to say at the right time. And my response was that we still had to do our best anyway.

Well, an increasing number of editorials, both written by autistics (like this one) and not written by autistics, are taking the side that society must learn to accept autism, because forcing autistics to act "normal" is... impossible. Sooner or later, the one odd behavior sticks out and boom - instant rejection.

While on a related subject, I suspect that many of the strengths of autism are its symptoms in a mild form. This is just my personal speculation, but take a look at it.

Skills such as:

• excellent pattern recognition - comes from an obsession with details and patterns
• "hyperfocus" - in severe autism, autistics can get totally absorbed in some random thing to the point where they are unaware of the outside world, but in milder autism, this same characteristic is more controllable and turns into a skill
• visual thinking - possibly connected to autistic tendency to daydream?
• detail-oriented - autistics tend to notice and focus on (and obsess over) details

See what I mean? Hans Asperger wasn't kidding when he called autism "a combination of intelligence and disability that cannot be separated." (He also said the disability usually overshadowed the intelligence.) He may not have been aware that the symptoms are the strengths provided they're not super debilitating, but he did at least notice some of the strengths as well as the symptoms.

While I do agree that there are waaaaaay too many focus groups out to teach autistics how to change to make everyone else comfortable and not enough (read: none) of the reverse, I have to ponder the effectiveness if these articles. 99% of the population is not going to see them, and the last 1% most likely consists largely of those who are autistic already, with maybe the odd parent of someone with autism.