Autism Spectrum Disorder
I posted this to my personal blog, but wanted to... I dunno... share it with others? Look for similarities? This is my first post to this community. Sorry about the TL;DR;
I am autistic. Or to be more accurate, I am on the spectrum of autism related disorders. I believe that "Asperger's Syndrome" is a fairly accurate assessment of my symptoms and behaviors. You will probably not realize this if you meet me in person, because I have studied and learned how to mimic neuro-typical human behaviors. And I've done a VERY good job of this.
I have been persecuted for having this autism spectrum disorder for most of my life. I have been harassed, abused, and humiliated over and over again. My second grade teacher continually humiliated me in front of my class mates, leaving me deeply triggered any time I see humiliation taking place on TV. She forced me to go back to my first grade teacher and tell her that I didn't know how to do handwriting. I participated in a "write things about your classmates" exercise, where everyone publicly told me I was annoying and "was so stupid despite being so smart" and things like that. I was beaten up in grade school several times, which I only avoided later by learning to beat myself up in front of them. That really freaked them out.
The continual abuse emboldened my need to appear normal, and I worked hard at it, studying human behaviors, reading about how people communicate with one another, etc. I read books on small talk. On body language. On human communication patterns. On emotions. Etc. I studied to figure out how these human creatures interacted with one another and with me.
I experimented with various methods and styles of interacting with people, trying to find methods that would be functional. I tried holding eye contact for varying amounts of time. I tried out different postures and ways of holding my body. I figured out that there were cues in conversations that allow people to know when to speak and when not to when another friend in college exhibited even worse conversational cue awareness. I worked on learning how to tell when someone else was being literal and when someone was being figurative.
I'd say that I didn't have a "relatively normal" level of ability to interact with other humans until I was about 25 years old. But even then, people would often accuse me of being cold and unable to relate to people empathically a lot of the time. I still am unable to ascertain what to do when most human emotions come up. I still have tons of social anxiety. etc.
I'd say my social anxiety is near-debilitating, to the point where I am terrified of interacting with certain groups of people. I can't handle "cold calling" people, where I just go and begin interacting with someone that I've never interacted with before. This includes phone calls, setting up appointments with doctors, dentists and other services, calling people back that have emailed me, contacting someone new via OKCupid, email, IM, or anything else. I'll avoid making an important phone call at work because of this for weeks, and do my best to avoid calling anyone, ever.
I also can't handle large groups of people. If a party is gathered, I go off to a corner and hide. I don't know how to communicate in IRC chat rooms or online forums. I'm terrified of people not understanding me, as often seems to happen. I don't post a lot to online forums these days because I've been burned or hurt so many times by it.
I have so much trouble communicating with other people. They always seem to perceive things in my communication that I did not intend to place there, such as emotions or implications that I am not aware of. Whenever I write an email to someone that isn't "safe," I rewrite the email about a dozen times, trying out various ways of phrasing it. I feel like, with most people, there's this barrier to communication between us, where they are trying to read communication channels from me that I don't know how to use very well. Most of my body language, phrasing, emotional implications, etc. are deliberate, done to explicitly elicit specific reactions in other people. Sometimes, it feels downright manipulative to use such deliberate nonverbal communication cues with people.
Frankly, I dislike semantic communication a great deal. Although I have trouble with body language and nonverbal communication as a supplement to semantic verbal communication, I actually find purely nonverbal communication to be a lot more comfortable and easy to use than the combined verbal/nonverbal communication. Animal communication patterns, such as cooing, mewing, or simplistic tribal behaviors like touching or caressing other people seems to be a lot safer for me. Which is why I'm a furry, incidentally.
My body needs to constantly be in motion or my muscles tensed. If I'm not moving something, I start to get anxious. I learned how to suppress this in the past, but it makes me anxious, so I've been learning of late how to just let it out. Foot jitters. Hand dances. Shifting in my chair. Pressing my body against things, like putting my feet on the wall. Stuff like that.
I have a lot of trouble dealing with people's emotions. I rarely know what their emotional state is. Since recognizing that I am aspie, I've taken to explicitly asking people about their emotional states. Are you angry? Are you sad? Are you hurt? Not only does this allow me to get more information about where they're at, it helps me to build a table of behaviors for that person, to learn how they express certain emotions. Of course, when they're trying to manipulate their own emotional output, such answers cannot be relied upon. I have always struggled to know whether or not someone I'm talking to actually wants to hear what I'm talking about, and most people are too polite to ask me to stop talking about a particular subject they find boring.
But people don't notice this stuff, because I've learned to mask a lot of it. When people get emotional, I have tended to become emotionless until I learn behaviors that are appropriate to the emotion. I keep my stimming subtle to avoid detection, although I do rock back and forth a lot when sitting on the floor, no matter where I'm at. I gloss over moments where I lose verbal speech because I'm going into non-verbal speech mode/moments. I put on a "confident act" in social situations where I'm terrified, acting aloof or set apart or something like that. I bind myself to someone I know at these things, or find something to latch on to that I know how to handle, such as playing with the children at a party or talking to my friends that came with me. I know how to do the act, but honestly, I feel the most safe, comfortable, and functional when I don't have to do it, and when I can just be socially inept little ol' me, that I've always been.
- Dana
I am autistic. Or to be more accurate, I am on the spectrum of autism related disorders. I believe that "Asperger's Syndrome" is a fairly accurate assessment of my symptoms and behaviors. You will probably not realize this if you meet me in person, because I have studied and learned how to mimic neuro-typical human behaviors. And I've done a VERY good job of this.
I have been persecuted for having this autism spectrum disorder for most of my life. I have been harassed, abused, and humiliated over and over again. My second grade teacher continually humiliated me in front of my class mates, leaving me deeply triggered any time I see humiliation taking place on TV. She forced me to go back to my first grade teacher and tell her that I didn't know how to do handwriting. I participated in a "write things about your classmates" exercise, where everyone publicly told me I was annoying and "was so stupid despite being so smart" and things like that. I was beaten up in grade school several times, which I only avoided later by learning to beat myself up in front of them. That really freaked them out.
The continual abuse emboldened my need to appear normal, and I worked hard at it, studying human behaviors, reading about how people communicate with one another, etc. I read books on small talk. On body language. On human communication patterns. On emotions. Etc. I studied to figure out how these human creatures interacted with one another and with me.
I experimented with various methods and styles of interacting with people, trying to find methods that would be functional. I tried holding eye contact for varying amounts of time. I tried out different postures and ways of holding my body. I figured out that there were cues in conversations that allow people to know when to speak and when not to when another friend in college exhibited even worse conversational cue awareness. I worked on learning how to tell when someone else was being literal and when someone was being figurative.
I'd say that I didn't have a "relatively normal" level of ability to interact with other humans until I was about 25 years old. But even then, people would often accuse me of being cold and unable to relate to people empathically a lot of the time. I still am unable to ascertain what to do when most human emotions come up. I still have tons of social anxiety. etc.
I'd say my social anxiety is near-debilitating, to the point where I am terrified of interacting with certain groups of people. I can't handle "cold calling" people, where I just go and begin interacting with someone that I've never interacted with before. This includes phone calls, setting up appointments with doctors, dentists and other services, calling people back that have emailed me, contacting someone new via OKCupid, email, IM, or anything else. I'll avoid making an important phone call at work because of this for weeks, and do my best to avoid calling anyone, ever.
I also can't handle large groups of people. If a party is gathered, I go off to a corner and hide. I don't know how to communicate in IRC chat rooms or online forums. I'm terrified of people not understanding me, as often seems to happen. I don't post a lot to online forums these days because I've been burned or hurt so many times by it.
I have so much trouble communicating with other people. They always seem to perceive things in my communication that I did not intend to place there, such as emotions or implications that I am not aware of. Whenever I write an email to someone that isn't "safe," I rewrite the email about a dozen times, trying out various ways of phrasing it. I feel like, with most people, there's this barrier to communication between us, where they are trying to read communication channels from me that I don't know how to use very well. Most of my body language, phrasing, emotional implications, etc. are deliberate, done to explicitly elicit specific reactions in other people. Sometimes, it feels downright manipulative to use such deliberate nonverbal communication cues with people.
Frankly, I dislike semantic communication a great deal. Although I have trouble with body language and nonverbal communication as a supplement to semantic verbal communication, I actually find purely nonverbal communication to be a lot more comfortable and easy to use than the combined verbal/nonverbal communication. Animal communication patterns, such as cooing, mewing, or simplistic tribal behaviors like touching or caressing other people seems to be a lot safer for me. Which is why I'm a furry, incidentally.
My body needs to constantly be in motion or my muscles tensed. If I'm not moving something, I start to get anxious. I learned how to suppress this in the past, but it makes me anxious, so I've been learning of late how to just let it out. Foot jitters. Hand dances. Shifting in my chair. Pressing my body against things, like putting my feet on the wall. Stuff like that.
I have a lot of trouble dealing with people's emotions. I rarely know what their emotional state is. Since recognizing that I am aspie, I've taken to explicitly asking people about their emotional states. Are you angry? Are you sad? Are you hurt? Not only does this allow me to get more information about where they're at, it helps me to build a table of behaviors for that person, to learn how they express certain emotions. Of course, when they're trying to manipulate their own emotional output, such answers cannot be relied upon. I have always struggled to know whether or not someone I'm talking to actually wants to hear what I'm talking about, and most people are too polite to ask me to stop talking about a particular subject they find boring.
But people don't notice this stuff, because I've learned to mask a lot of it. When people get emotional, I have tended to become emotionless until I learn behaviors that are appropriate to the emotion. I keep my stimming subtle to avoid detection, although I do rock back and forth a lot when sitting on the floor, no matter where I'm at. I gloss over moments where I lose verbal speech because I'm going into non-verbal speech mode/moments. I put on a "confident act" in social situations where I'm terrified, acting aloof or set apart or something like that. I bind myself to someone I know at these things, or find something to latch on to that I know how to handle, such as playing with the children at a party or talking to my friends that came with me. I know how to do the act, but honestly, I feel the most safe, comfortable, and functional when I don't have to do it, and when I can just be socially inept little ol' me, that I've always been.
- Dana