Its possible this might be what I have

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Huck Finn

Last edited by Huckleberry Finn on 06 Nov 2023, 9:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Regarding Mensa...

According to Mensa:

It's not for training, etc. Once you're in Mensa it is, essentially, a social group. There seems to be some affinity between people eligible for Mensa.

Aspies are sometimes reported to tend to have higher-than-average IQs. So, I would expect more than 2% of the Aspie population to be eligible for Mensa.

I am an Aspie. Not surprisingly, I am not good at socializing. I joined Mensa in 1981 and have found myself to be more comfortable with that community than I am with the general population. It was not until 2019 that I learned I was an Aspie, which explains my weak social aptitude, yet with that weak social aptitude I do OK in Mensa. (Where I met my bride!)

P.S. Another group of people I like is those on WP.

Of course, I would be happy to read your feedback!

You are nice and pleasant @Double Retired.

Sorry for the statement but I didn't translate well.

I meant that intelligence can be trained.

I couldn't stay in a group for long.


I usually disappear after some time.

From what transpires from when we interacted: you are sociable, you always tend to help with diagnoses and understanding autism.

What you write is beautiful.

I always enjoy reading your posts.

I also find WP a nice place.

You wrote, "most people actually assume I am slow"
Most people think small thoughts. They say a few words and then move onto other subject. When you think, you delve deeper. You look at the subject from many different angles. Your assessment is with around a 98 percent accuracy rating whereas most NTs work around a 60% mark. But that takes time to accomplish.

Then you went on to say, "I don't wear glasses, I wear lipstick, have long hair, I like to wear bright colors. A lot of people assume these things must mean I am vapid."
Many Aspies have quirks. In my case I have one of the most severe forms of color blindness. The initial color television sets used three colors to produce all the colors of the rainbow. In my case, I only see two colors. It is not that I only see black and white, but rather my mind invents the third color. As a result I see colors but they are very different than the colors that most people see. I might dress in the morning and wear clothing that most people would faint when they saw me. I solved this problem by getting married and letting my wife choose what I wore.

You wrote, "So for that reason I just wonder how the Mensa members would see me? Would they accept me as one of their own? "
I am not a member of Mensa, but I would guess that they definitely would accept you as one of their own.

James: If he exceeds a relevant IQ.


And from what Croissant writes I think I also have excellent chances of accessing MENSA.

I see an AQ test of 18, in women the minimum reference score for subclinicality is two points lower, therefore 15 and not 17.

You may be a person with subclinicality.

My AQ test is definitely high, 45 out of 50.

The cut off is reduced to 26 if I'm not mistaken.


The majority of autistic people therefore almost four out of five of them are at level 32 out of 50.

Aspie Quiz I helped with some questions in finding the most understandable wording in some that we chose as controversial, but it was the penultimate of the Aspie Quiz.

There the self-diagnosis result is relevant.

I know this for a fact (I was a contributor to the sister forum to this one) which Attwood highlighted.

Even if he is prodromal to a professional evaluation if valid.

Many are not and are hasty.

I already had the first one in 2012, but I didn't give it importance.

The latter has been the subject of public scientific research.

I have a whole detailed report from the scientific researchers.

So the Aspie Quiz score is very high, my graph has moved everything to the ND part, in Aspie talent it reaches the circle.

Almost the entire graph is in the semicircle on the right: I'm working on myself to reduce it, I'm always learning new things socially.

I realize that I have significant deficits socially.

The more I reduce them, the more I realize my deficit, that is, I find a lot of social communicative inability.

Then it depends: if I have to speak to an audience with a microphone I can do it for 2 hours.

But if I have to ask people even trivial things, I tend not to do it well.

I don't fit into many social rules that apply to NTs.

For example, I say things as they are.

Instead we need to mediate.

Or I break social rules.

Even non-verbal communication: I don't look at people, I've been working on it for years.

Or I look at them too intensely: so I avoid them.

Regardless of the score you obtained, you clearly appear to me like one of us.

They already wrote it to you, but the same thing applies to you too. I recognize myself in at least 70% of the things you write.

That is, the level of functioning is either poorly calculated in your test and is higher, otherwise something doesn't add up to me and in your place I would try a professional diagnosis.

Of course you are welcome here and will adapt easily.

I don't see any differences from how we autistics generally think.

Regarding MENSA for me it would be a cosmic inconvenience, I can't stand social groups, I like the fact that people benefit from them.


But I wouldn't feel comfortable there, honestly.
It is known that on WP, however, many love social situations, and parties, perhaps also other things that a



Not with IQ tests by the way: it depends on the rating scale on the score.

In general, our average compared to the World average places us first in Europe on pure IQ.

7th place in the world championship.

On the world level, schooled in 6th place as an average value.

So the level is at or just above 102.

I believe only Mongolia has a pure average high IQ.

If we interpolated the two results it would already be understood just visually.

<>

MENSA makes me anxious.

And in any case a heterogeneous elite.

The bad situation of being first in school.

It made me uncomfortable.

I noticed that even to the only classmate who surpassed me, and he was a great and very loyal friend.

Which I met in the last years of my studies.

So MENSA brings back unpleasant and not pleasant memories in my case.

But this is any social group.

In fact, I had also erased myself from here.

Even though it is the forum in which I found myself best of all.

I tend not to be a member of anything for a long time.

Huck Finn wrote something that was interesting. He wrote:

Even non-verbal communication: I don't look at people, I've been working on it for years.

I do the same. I always look off to one side. I have come to the conclusion that this is a key element. NTs can spot me within a few seconds as being different. I put this theory to the test several years ago. I wear glasses because my vision is poor. I purchase a very unique type of glasses. They controlled the light so that only true horizontal and vertical light would pass through but not from other angles. They are a type of one way sunglasses. Years ago, most police wore this type of glasses because they provided protection. If a policeman approached a suspect, the suspect might be normal or a killer. The policeman didn't know. Many criminals will quickly look in their eyes and read them. By wearing this type of glasses, the criminal element could not know what the policeman was observing. They were looking at a dead wall. So it gave the police a means of protecting themselves.

So I purchase one of these glasses and WHAT HAPPENED NEXT.

Well when I was out in public I wore these special glasses and guess what happened next. People, even strangers would come up to me and begin to talk. Some would ask for advice. It was crazy. It was almost like I had become an NT. All I did was prevent people from making eye to eye contact.

I was a Mensa member but didn't enjoy the experience of attending meetings.

I enjoy wearing bright colors and lipstick. I wore a Lily Pulitzer skirt to a potluck lunch this summer!
She makes bright colored vacation clothes. Something you would wear to a tourist resort or cruise ship!

You may need to hook up with people that are similar to you so you can get past the small talk.
I attend garden club meetings where there area lot of experts in attendance.
I also play golf to meet people, though I also enjoy playing by myself.

You mentioned that most people assume you are slow. I tend to be a slow but deep thinker. I can spend years thinking about certain things and expllring every single avenue I can find in my mind relating to the subject, but I need to "Switch onto" the subject to do this and most subjects I can't.
I can"t remember technical terms (Unless they directly involve one of my two main hobbies) but rather, I am one who thinks by forming pictures in my mind, as my mind thinks best using pictures and in film form.

I am being assessed to see if I am on the spectrum which in the UK has been a long wait, as our health system has a lot of people waiting and not so many experts to assess or funds etc (They are doing their best).


I scored in the area where it said "See a psyciatrist, doctor or a health professional" on that online test even when I said "No" to things because I disn't know what the technical terms meant!
I sort of hid behind intelligence so that I slipped through the net at school. I am not a quick thinker though, and my exam results were inconsistent. Would tend to get either low or high from one exam to the next (Especially in Maths) which not only puzzled me, but puzzled the teachers as well!

Found school a stressful place to be and collage was even worse! (Note the spelling, as it felt like that!)

I survived by specialising in the type of work I did until after several burnouts I ended up not working.

Is Mensa for men hence the name? (I like to simplify the meanings of things as languages are something I am not good at, though that was a joke I said based on that!)

A reason why I say to getan assessment is that one could go through life questioning and not knowing? The not knowing part and suffering (Missing out etc) will be nagging on ones mind later in life..

Just saying this as understanding oneself can bring a freedlm as one then is not blaming oneself... Also one is not pushing oneself too hard like I did through life! (Not saying there are not times where one needs to push. Saying that one can not over do it... As knowing when and when not to go through pressures, prevents things from getting too much and causing damage which twkes time to repair! (I am on the mend! ). Seriously though. Protect ones mind from too much stress.
Laugh about life if you can! Laughter is a great de-stresser! Even if one laughs on ones own!

You know James, the head of the research team that diagnosed me also carries out expert reports for the Court, he is a genius as a former collaborator of his who I met after his very complex diagnosis told me.

I thought at the beginning of the first visit that he would keep me with him for no more than a few minutes.

Instead he chose me both for research and to provide me with a very extensive diagnosis.


He is very cold as a human being, but he helps children for free, he does it at a young age so he has an easier time helping them in what can be done to make them socially skilled, and not make them lose precious years.

He kept telling me that I wasn't looking at his face when I was visiting.

He saw exactly how I looked at him.

My gaze struck him immediately.

But then without even realizing it I answered but without looking at him.

He asked me to do it and the thing I always reflect on is that over the course of the initial 2 hour visit, I thought I was looking at his face the entire time.

He replied that it hadn't happened like that.

But it was as if my gaze had deviated.

He has also published in Nature.

Also on other things.

And he has a patent on eye tracking.

He also collaborates a lot with the USA.

He told me that the look of a person with autism is unmistakable for him.

I hope I can recover from post-covid now the viral load has dropped to zero.

But I struggle to do anything on the move.


If I pass by on a bicycle with sunglasses, no one looks at me except to calculate the best trajectory.

*I learned a lot about action and reaction in people.

I dedicate a lot of my time as if to studying them, as if they were elements to understand.

To read: and I can't decipher them so much.

It impresses me that I have to learn new things every time.

I thought I would end this study of people sooner or later.

Instead, I've been going on for 4 years and I still haven't understood maybe 50% of what I should understand.

<>

If I cycle the same route wearing glasses with clear lenses, I notice that the stares increase.

Not being able to understand the exact reason in the absence of dialogue, I reply to their actions.

If they smile at me I try to respond the same way.


*Very important for those with autism: smile in response to a smile.

Or in any case always relax your gaze and face, we naturally don't notice it.

I notice that if they talk to me my attitude changes markedly, and theirs too, 80% of the interaction is pleasant for both of us, even if it's tiring for me and I know I'll pay for it later.

We don't even have some sort of overflow valve.

So we overload ourselves with stress (Distress).

<>
Sorry, my posts are generally long, and in English they are not very usable.

My aim in the forum is to always provide a possible key to understanding and be useful to people like us.


Then it doesn't matter if many diagnosed people in the forum have something similar or proxemic.

*They need to understand as soon as possible from our experiences.

I mean everyone's.

The Forum is definitely important

Thank you all for the replies. I have enjoyed reading them and feel like I can relate to many people on here. I did mull over the Mensa thing for awhile but I think I have to stick with my original intuition about it. I am not sure I will fit in because its a group thing and I just have an aversion to groups. Although I do appreciate the poster for recommending it and I will give it more consideration. As for now though, my aversion to group activities is overriding.

For now what I think I want is to just be able to vent and to read other people's venting posts.

I am trying to work out where a lot of general frustration comes from and I think a lot of it is just wanting to vent and feel understood. I know I experience this and a lot of people do. Maybe the root of is comes from having deficits in emotional intelligence. One can be intelligent but when it comes to emotional intelligence, that's another thing. Making friends has come somewhat easily to me, because when I was young, I was a girl and a somewhat attractive girl, and I found other girls naturally are social and they came to me, to make friends. I didn't have to do much. But keeping these friendships long-term was not so easy. I always felt like I just wasn't holding up my end of the bargain. I feel like I am about to go off on tangents but I am trying to get to the bottom of things and this is my way of introspecting.

When I was about 10, I threw a birthday party for myself. As I said, birthday parties weren't ever my thing. For some reason I wanted to throw a party for myself. I did end up having a gathering of about 5 or 6 girls, but someone told me another girl had said "Wouldn't it be funny if no one showed up." I remember being very hurt by this. I still remember this decades later, which shows how hurt I was. Those 5 girls did show up though, and I still think those 5 girls liked me and we are still loosely in contact via social media. That one girl didn't like me but that doesn't mean other girls don't and that I can't have friends.

My older sister was a "popular girl." And she kind of bullied me, calling me a nerd, giving me wedgies, stuff like that. As did my older step-brother, he was downright mean to me sometimes. These are just things that I think people internalize. (I think I am chipping away at it little by little.) My father also kind of bullied me and had this image about what a cool person should be, and I didn't fit it. Which didn't mean I wasn't "cool." I just wasn't someone's narrow vision of what that meant.

If I am being totally honest, I have to admit there were times I was a bully to other people too. Though it wasn't that often. I was generally a pretty soft-hearted and compassionate person, but when I was giving in to peer pressure or something, I could do that too. It took some time for my empathy for others to completely develop. Though I wouldn't put what I did at the same level as what those other people did to me. I think some of them were coming from a more malevolent place, I am guessing (only they know what their intentions were).

But as for emotional intelligence, I think people can be very intelligent but without a high developed emotional intelligence, there is going to be struggle with social situations. Some of it may be coming from taking things too personally even. Internalizing things that really aren't meant to be taken personally. My older sister who called me a nerd and gave me wedgies, well, she probably really didn't intend to hurt me, not in a true sense. She was a child herself and probably experiencing some of her own struggles. What we should have done, would have been to support each other. But instead, rivalry and competition took hold and being mean may have seemed the better way, to our immature minds.

And now, as I have grown into adulthood over decades, I am still struggling to find my place in the world especially when it comes to just interacting with other people and figuring out social relationships. I think I am realizing I am struggling with figuring out emotional intelligence.

I don't think I agree its a problem of just having superior intelligence. Its a problem of just not getting it, socially. I would like to be able to care about people more, i.e. to have more compassion and empathy and more social intelligence. I would like to know how to carry on conversations and small talk and know the right questions to ask people so that they feel cared about but not like I am prying into their personal lives (it seems like a fine line). I want to be able to be interested in social issues and explore them but not in a way that is insensitive and offends people. I guess I am just not playing that well with others, is what it comes down to. And I am not fully understanding what I am doing wrong. I got by as a child just from being another cute girl other girls wanted to be friends with, but I never fully learned how to have good friendships and relationships. More dominant people like my older sister, brother, and father, felt compelled to make fun of me and bully me. I didn't really know how to deal with that and internalized some feelings of inadequacy because of that. And now here I am, trying to figure things out.

Being smart and logical and rational doesn't really help, in my case, with the more delicate and nuanced social interactions, and emotional intelligence, required to fall in love, and have deep life long friendships. It requires something else, which I am struggling with.

In fact, very intelligent people answered you.

*I apologize for my statement about MENSA.

Because there are people who benefit from it for their lives.

I'm alexithymic and maybe you are too.

Regarding emotional intelligence, it concerns those theorized by Howard Gardner which, honestly, I find largely useless, and quite misleading.

And there are some that cannot be cataloged if we really had to argue about this.

There are ways of thinking that cannot be appreciated only because they have not yet been understood or perhaps studied(?)

For me, it's traumatic to try to compete to prove I'm the best at something that all in all only shows me that I'm good at what?

In the IQ test batteries I had an initial average of 180 correct answers out of 200.

Then as soon as I realized it I felt stupid.

I was taking tests to measure how much inability to understand things I really had.
If I have 159 IQ I will *Only* have 159 IQ.

An artificial intelligence will soon evolve the robotic IQs of the square of its initial value towards an infinite number of numbers times their square of the square of the square and so on.
I will have a grain of sand at my disposal against an immense quadratic Universe of IQ...


There are individuals who had an IQ higher than Da Vinci, Einstein, Goethe, etc etc...

but they haven't created anything useful for the world.

It would definitely be more interesting to be brilliant with an intelligence over 180.


Many confuse genius with intelligence.
But one is the structuring and functioning of a very limited number of brains, and the other is just the fuel to make it work.

They are two different things.

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*Why don't you try to solve the problem you are asking yourself starting from the solution itself?

An Autistic contact of mine did exactly what I do, when I can't understand a simple thing for NTs.

I copy, mentally paste and make their ways of behavior my own.

Then they become like mine.

In some we can succeed, in others we won't succeed.

Another problem is social relationships.
Now I tend to make them minimal.

I copy their patterns and respond as NTs do.

In a good percentage of things I can interact, in others I can't.

You are like us.
It comes across in what you write.

Try the tests in a professional manner and then write about the result here.

Always let others talk and insert yourself into the conversation by saying a few words, then you have to change it, as if you were in front of an old numeric combination safe.

Anxiety: look, it's healthy to have anxiety, certainly not pathological anxiety.

But it is easily treatable: with a drug with a long plasma half-life, social anxiety disappears (Puff!).

Some ND skills also disappear I'll tell you.

Just as some sensory disorders are alleviated.

Doctors know which drugs to use.

Then you have to work mentally: always with doctors.

Until you eliminate medications if prescribed.

If the infamous emotional intelligence exists: you beat me three sets to zero and eliminate me immediately.

It is perceived that you are hypersensitive and very emotional, even if you tend to contain everything in hyper-logical and rational thoughts.

And you also think about it calmly and afterwards.

I deduce from the answers on MENSA.

You didn't say no right away, but you were assertive.

You tried to understand.

I also don't like parties, and I was always invited.

It still happens.
Luckily for me, the last ones I didn't have to find another activity to do first, also because if I lied everyone would notice.

croissant, in Italy it is now a must also with Grillo flours on request (For real). Compared to the croissant, it has a more brittle surface and the interior has a much higher empty/full ratio than the croissant. This, in addition to the absence of eggs in the dough, is the big difference between croissants and croissants.


Croissant: Many explanations come to mind.

Growing? Crumbly? Skip over?
Or a simple traditional French dessert, from which we have copied almost all the pastries, reinventing them.
Except that the French one remains the best in the world, together with the Arab one.


We are not inadequate, we are just different neurologically from NTs.

Which unfortunately makes up 90% of the world's population.

We "Aspergers" now HFA, from DSM 5°TER, are only 0.7% in the world.

There are just fewer of us.

We have to live with it.

Many here write that they would like to be like them, or rightly point out that autism is not a very simple thing to experience on oneself.

I hear about impostor syndrome: always by logic... for an impostor there must be an advantage in pretending.

What benefit would it have to fingesri ND?

As a psychology/psychiatry enthusiast, I would challenge anyone to be diagnosed with autism if they don't have autism.

I read some time ago, I reply here: if you have a diagnosis, the diagnosis is correct.
We need to work on that where we can.

Also because it is different to discover it at 1 year of life rather than at 18, 30, 50, or 70 years of age.

The important thing is to understand this and not feel strange for no reason.

There is a reason.

But the diagnoses can be multiple and even intersect with each other, or be subclinical.

Oh well: I have dozens of relatives with the exact same neurology as me.

We are just different from each other.

Some are Gifted.

You croissant could fall into the hypersensitive category.

Hi, I'm stopping here.
Huck Finn

Hi sister. I say sister because I am exactly like you. Probably due to cultural reasons (I am Italian) I tend to socialize more. But I crave my alone time. And I used alcohol (especially red wine) to stand social gathering. Last week I was diagnosed with autism, level one. But what is interesting is that my autism is probably overlapping with HIP (high potential intellectual). I’ll be tested next February but it’s pretty evident. From your description, I am quite sure you are the same. We were what they call “twice exceptional kids”. Not an easy life, I am afraid. But full of joys and deep interests!
Have a nice journey
PS I am 51