Hi - Introduction and questioning

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Hi all,

First of all thank you and congrats for all the effort of the community to help and support people with autism / asperger.

I am a 31-year-old man living in a country where asperger is poorly known and way to address professionnal as an adult even poorer.

I have some doubts about having Asperger. I am not looking for a "disease", a "category", nor an "identity" or an "excuse" since I can mostly handle myself, just to know better who I am / I am not.

Those doubts come from a few years ago, while looking for information about "social disability" and finding some documents and online quiz, which give some chance that I might be aspie. I could relate to a lot of what was written.

I was then discouraged to go further. Behind theory, most examples were around kids having strong difficulties and quite a high probability to fail in school/college without appropriate help. I could not have gone so far on my own with this kind of "featureset". And lack of structure / place to ask definitely put this topic away.

The topic now comes back to my agenda, relating some current issues. Recently I have been seeing a psychiatric doctor for the first time in my life and she told me being socially disabled. But nothing more, then discussion were more around a risk of depression and the possible need of medication, which really disappointed me since I came there to "know better who I am".

In the mean time, two people in my environment were just AS diagnosed. These are a long-time (female)-friend, which has lead a sucessful professional career similar to mine, and my best-friend's father who is a family doctor. I have not talked about asperger with them before, ever. For my friend, I have noticed her joining AS group on facebook, this has brought the topic in our discussion.

I did some quick research and noticed a lot of new contents, testimony, especially adults, who can talk, behave, work "normally".

Knowing that we do not "become" aspie, I am now gathering some facts in my memories and my mother's, in order to compare with NT and Aspie kind of development from early childhood. I know there are some really unusual facts and traits, that have been associated with a kind of "caricature", source of some (sometimes just humourous - for them) bullying even in my own family, for quite long.

One of my reference is Toni Attwood's book I have just bought. But I am no professionnal and everything can be a question of interpretation, but I find a lot of stuff of my own life in it, at a point it can frighten me ("Am I just running a kind of buggy software which is so predictable I can read my life in a random book ? ").

I know this is not the place for a diagnostic, but do you think there is a chance to have a point of view about these facts I might share? Anyone interested ? Just to know if it makes sense to put some energy in finding some specialist, which will consume a lot of time and energy for sure.

All the best.

Welcome to Wrong Planet!

Hey mart welcome.