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The Cat Ghost
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker

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Joined: 27 Sep 2015
Age: 42
Posts: 60

27 Sep 2015, 1:32 pm

Hi everybody! As an intro I did a little write-up. It's a little "stream-of-conscious-ey" but should be fairly readable. I would like to apologize in advance if anything comes off as insensitive or anything like that; please know that this is not my intention. In time I will learn in what ways it is unacceptable to describe the condition or people who have it. In the meantime, I'm just kinda "wingin' it" and hoping that I don't unintentionally offend.

To start, I love my personality- I wouldn't want to be anybody else. I'm very comfortable with the way I see the world, the way I think, and the way I interact with people. To my surprise, after googling “why don't people want to talk to me” after a very stressful week at work where everybody seemed to be ignoring everybody else, the first result to come up had a description of Aspergers and it was as though someone had been following me around, writing down how I act and think, and then was kind enough to present it for me to read on the internet.

I was somewhat astounded. I was also intrigued, and a little bit scared.

After much research, I concluded that there was no doubt- I was a 33 year-old aspie. I always felt as though I had undiagnosed OCD as a teenager; I did everything in pairs of 4, wore my shirts pulled forwards at the shoulders for some reason, and I needed to check door locks and alarm clocks many times to ensure that they were locked. Quirky stuff, but not anything that affected my life to the point where I felt a diagnosis would be helpful or useful. I tried a friend's Ritalin once in Junior High and all it did was make me unable to sleep; staying up all night playing every song I knew how to play on the guitar over and over until I collapsed from exhaustion in the early morning.

Perhaps at this point a little bit of description of what “kind” of aspie I am would be helpful or interesting to read. I am always consumed by projects. I've been a musician and a performer for as long as I can remember and I love being in the spotlight (but never in the crowd!), I taught myself to take photographs of still-life objects up to a professional standard within one year, I was obsessed by fixed gear bicycles and unicycles for a good period of time, I've ripped apart every instrument and piece of electronics I've ever owned so I could see what it looks like inside and how everything was connected; basically, I find an interest, seemingly at random, obsess about it until I've learned everything there is to know and have brought my skill up to whatever standard was my goal, and then I drop the interest to pursue something else. Only music and audio engineering has stood the test of time... all the other really expensive hobbies are in the trash or in my stuffed-full closet.

I am trying to resist the aspie urge to overshare and write down all the specific ways that my personality fits the description, but I will try to satisfy myself while not boring others with unnecessary extraneous detail (see, I'm learning!) and mention that I have always been very social. Among my friends growing up I was the guy who never stopped talking and always had a joke or dirty pun to make others laugh. I wondered why most conversations usually lead to me talking incessantly about myself... my friends knew so much more about me than I ever would know about them. I figured this was normal.. or maybe it was just because I was so chatty and my friends were somewhat emotionally-guarded.

Lastly, I was really proud of my general lack of emotion and my ability to make snap decisions on how to fix anybody's problems (whether they asked for it or not) and was somewhat distressed to learn that this is typical of an aspie.

There's probably a moment in every aspie's life when their brain makes them think “how much of my personality is my own and how much is just the Aspergers!?”

All internal conflict aside, my new project is going to be to work on myself- find out in which ways my actions are inappropriate, catalogue them, and come up with a plan of action for how to correct them. This reminds me of years ago when I was working at a call-centre. There was no training manual and I found this to be unacceptable. So, between calls over a period of a few months, I wrote a 60-page manual on how every part of our ordering system and website works, and how to successfully-resolve every single type of customer issue that you will encounter (I had worked there for over a year full time, so I had “seen it all” ... or “heard it all” I suppose would be more accurate). But I digress. You can take a country boy out of the city... maybe it should read as “you can take an aspie out of the house but you can't take the house out of the aspie”... maybe that quote would only make sense to an aspie... well, it's about time that we have some inside jokes I suppose.

Aaaaand we're back on track. Hopefully. Sorry about that. Got a little off the rails. Working without an outline and all that. SO! The plan is, like someone who has been told that they have had a piece of food on their face their whole life without realizing it, to find the weirdness in everything that until very recently I've thought was normal. This is a fantastic challenge and one that I think I will be pretty good at. Unless it's boring or exhausting... in which case I will be terrible at it.

I'll deal with the two or three big ones that I've thought up so far and then refine and add more items as time goes on. Here's what I've got so far:

1. Be very aware of my actions when in contact with others

a. I've never noticed my body language before. I will see what mine is like
b. See how much or how little eye contact I give. I always thought I was pretty good at that, but I realize now that this is based entirely on assumption, not on my actual observations of my behavior
c. When I tell a joke, I will check the person's reaction to see if my amazing sense of humor is appreciated by anybody but myself. But seriously, believe me, I think I'm very funny. Maybe I should stop laughing at my own jokes though, apparently that isn't supposed to be done.
d. Try to initiate contact (waving, hand shaking, etc) as opposed to accepting contact from others.
e. When I provide an interesting, unsolicited, summary of an article I've read recently, I will check with the other person to see if this is something that is interesting to them. Did you know that things can be unbelievably facinating to me but not to others? That's so weird!

2. Deal with the root causes of my social phobia and anxiety

a. I get very stressed and tired at the idea of leaving the house now that I've moved from my small hometown in Nova Scotia to Montreal. Side note: I've found out that listening to music with noise-cancelling headphones seems to make me feel much more confident in public. I don't know if this is simply because I now can't hear if someone is trying to talk to me so I can ignore everybody in a socially-acceptable way, or whether it helps with sensory overload. As an Audio Engineer, my sense of hearing is very well-developed and it's hard to turn down the input knob on my ears. I'll explore this further and see what I can find out
b. I have no problem going out with people I know to places I've been before, but I get “too exhausted” to leave the house the moment it is suggested that I go out to meet people that I don't know. Must find a way to create the internal motivation necessary to leave the house with minimal procrastination.
c. Why does paying bills cause me anxiety!? I have no idea. I have the money.
d. Answer the phone whenever it rings as opposed to my current “run away from the phone like it is a flaming serpent hell-bent on devouring Irish flesh” response. Thank god for text messaging, btw. I may be in my thirties, but I can text like a teenager. This is likely not an accident.

3. Try to create some deliberate changes to my routine to perhaps dull the “scary factor” that change brings

a. I tend to wear jeans and plan, dark tshirts. Maybe I should get a fancy, trendy wardrobe so I can feel really confident when I'm out. Apparently this works for NTs. Nice clothes = a form of social armour with +1 confidence.
b. Once, I made a project for myself where I would meet and talk to 10 people in one night at a local pub. I'm bad with names so I assigned numbers to the people and informed them that I would be referring to them by their number and enlisted their help to find others so I could get to number 10 before the bar closed. This worked brilliantly with #4 and #5, who saw this as a really fun social game and they became my wing-women for the rest of the night. It was brilliant. Maybe I should do this again. I'm older now, so maybe I'll do it at a local game night or at a library or something. Less “dutch courage” that way... let's try and do it sober. Or maybe with a few beer... baby steps, afterall.
c. With a possible link to the last item, I should join a club. This way my incessant yammering about my self-professed incredible knowledge of facts and theory might be interesting to someone else. Audio Engineers love it when I talk... or I guess I always just assumed that they did, oh what a weird world this is. My current interests are Magic Cards (I know, I know.. don't be a stereotype... but... but.. it's a fun game!), and music (I tried joining a few bands in this city but it's hard to find people in their 30s who still want to rock out like teenagers. I don't have children but there is nothing rock n roll about a bandmate having to cancel practice because the babysitter didn't show up)

4. And lastly, a companion to #1, develop an awareness of others

a. I will try to remember to check the body language of the person I'm speaking to. I've never done this before... hopefully it won't break my concentration and make me lose my place in my lecture.
b. Develop a “checking process” whereby I can quickly scan for verbal subtext and non-verbal communication to see if there is any. This will also be tricky since up 'til now I've never realized that I take a lot of things literally. Lately, I have thought back to quite a few conversations where I've missed things after replaying conversations in my head.

So yeah, this might be tricky. It reminds me of a quote from the novel “Good Omens”:

“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”

That has never been more relatable than it is now.

The last few things on the to-do list are to figure out if I want a formal dianosis (I doubt that I will get one) and write a list of the few people that I'm going to tell. The internet is a pretty excellent place... I get to spill my guts to an infinite number of people but, at the same time, tell nobody if I choose not to.

Results to follow. If I don't post again it's probably because I decided to become a master chess player, an architect, a street performer, or some similar nonsense that will consume my life for an indefinite period of time. Luckily, the two years of being the world's worst breakdancer are behind me.

Thanks for reading if you've made it this far. I intended to post the graph of my quiz results but new users can't post links. If it helps my results were: Aspie score 168/200 and NT score 46/200.



AnonymousAnonymous
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27 Sep 2015, 4:05 pm

Welcome to Wrong Planet! :)


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RoadRatt
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27 Sep 2015, 6:19 pm

Hey The Cat Ghost welcome. :sunny:


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ProbablyOverthinkingThisUsername
Raven
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Joined: 24 Sep 2015
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Location: Wisconsin

28 Sep 2015, 3:02 pm

Wow you sound a lot like me in the way you express yourself. You even worked in my favorite quote from Good Omens. If I weren't 10 years younger and from Wisconsin I'd start to wonder if I were dissociating or something...

Anyway, I myself am embarking on a somewhat similar project and would be quite interested to hear what you figure out. Perhaps some note-sharing would be in order?

Either way, nice to meet you!



The Cat Ghost
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker

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Joined: 27 Sep 2015
Age: 42
Posts: 60

28 Sep 2015, 4:45 pm

I would love to note share! Send me a message with your info and we can chat about it on Facebook or something.

Good Omens is such a great book. So... quick compatibility test time: how do you feel about Rick and Morty?

Also, the fact that your username is too long to fit in the box beside your post is goddamn hilarious. Kudos!

Today's developments were okay. I found out that I give decent eye contact to people I know but when I'm talking to my manager or to someone at work I don't know that well, eye contact is basically non-existent.

Also, I was able to find out from a co-worker that whenever I'm telling a story I do it in the most confusing way possible.

Here's an example storyline:
I went to the park with a friend to sit on a bench and watch people (that sounds creepy, but you know what I mean).

Here's how most people would tell this story:
Hey man, I went to a park the other day and we saw a whole bunch of interesting people! One guy was really big but was walking two really tiny dogs!

Here's how yours truly would tell this story:
Hey man, the other day, I mean on the weekend, well, Sunday, in the afternoon, we went walking, well, me and my friend John, he's the guy from my music class, he's really funny. Anyways, so we were walking, like, in this park, together, and while we were walking we saw this bench and decided to sit down. Well, actually, that's why we went to the park in the first place. You see, a few days before that we decided that it would be fun to people-watch and so we went down to the park on the weekend, well, Sunday, but yeah, I think I mentioned that, and ........ ETC.

I would probably never get to the part about the big guy and the two dogs before someone changed the subject or interrupted me to say they have to get back to work. Then, of course, I would have this unfinished story burning a hole in my brain, which would drive me crazy because I never had a chance to make it to "the good part".

le sigh. So much work left to do. So much to figure out. The weird part is that I speak fairly normally when I'm in a quick, clippy conversation that doesn't require me to describe past events or explain complex ideas.



ProbablyOverthinkingThisUsername
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28 Sep 2015, 7:33 pm

The Cat Ghost wrote:
Good Omens is such a great book. So... quick compatibility test time: how do you feel about Rick and Morty?

I've only seen one episode about parallel timelines, and I thought it was pretty awesome! I've been meaning to try and watch more but I've had so much going on lately that I lose track of things.