What finally made sense when you realized you were an Aspie?

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As a newly diagnosed Aspie, I have found so much now makes sense.

Why I get angry at certain noises
Why I get frustrated easily
Why I got bullied all my life in school
Why I thought I wanted to be a boy for 3 years (I think I thought I was transgender because I could not relate to women)
Why I can't relate to humans very well
Why I go through episodes of having extreme obsessions with certain topics (ie. Australia, Philosophy, law, Planets, etc)
Why I fear talking to people and never know what to say to people
Why I get nervous tics (finger flapping, arm flapping, arm cracking etc)
Why I have hypergraphia (urges to write)
Why I have meltdowns

This list could go on. Really, my whole life now makes sense.

Charlie

yeah, I fool people alla time with my avatar.
it's not even ME as a child.

Merle

hey wrongplanetmember,- that is what happens at home with me. i get migraines after social things and have to recuperate for a day or two or four - seriously - and i also have the experienceof others expecting me to do things i cannot. they think because i am super brainy i will somehow be able to manage with executive function things - which just is like a torture and i just cannot do it easily. it takes ALL my effort ot get to a bank or pay a bill and i live one minute from the shops. it can take a week to get there.


I also get roused on a lot because i ZONE IN when concentrating and i do not hear others around me. then if they shout and disturb me in the middle of it - i have a meltdown. pulling me away from a zone-in experience with a speical interst is like ripping kunji from a rock.

there are things i simply cannot do easily.

It took a lot to eat today.
it also took a lot to feed the animals. and i do these things at break -neck speed so i can get back to my special interest (which today - happnes to be WP and Facebook.)

as for health professionals - they were my gig too - and i got dxed with everything.


at least it is all clear now.

Making sense of... it's hard to do things I need to do. What that person said about needing to eat. I do that. Also will want to do something for weeks but not do it. Pull a weed or pick up a sock. If there is a bill to pay it is at the last possible second before it is over-due. I thought this was a symptom or a cause of the depression, but maybe it's the executive function thing. the last "dx" i got was ADD and dosed with strattera, seem to remember reading about executive function.

Hi noahveil23, and welcome back.

I identify with what you're saying, and I've been finding my way around it. One of the things I've noticed is that I can't remember to do the simplest things--eat, shower, put hand cream on my poor chapped hands, the list goes on. So, I made a list of the *essential* things I need to do at different times of the day, and it's actually working. It's been a real hit on my ego, because if I'm so brilliant how come I gotta make a list to remind myself to brush my teeth, huh? But my ego is calming down some. I'm learning that I'm so visually distracted by so many things that I can't remember much at all; and when I go out in the world with people, I'm so exhausted that I can hardly remember what day it is. And I know I can't remember, which makes me very anxious, which makes me remember even less, and then I'm in a vicious circle. The list is the way out of the vicious circle for me. I'm even keeping a notebook handy so that when I think of something to do/buy/read/create, I just jot it down and don't feel anxious I'll forget.

It makes me realize how impaired I am in certain ways, but that's the reality of the situation. There just too much data coming in for me to process all at once, and I lose my way, so the list is like a set of landmarks to get me back on track. And suddenly, those books I've been wanting to read or the sweater I want to learn to knit are actually starting to happen, because I'm not walking around terrified that I've forgotten something.

noahveil and neshamaruach - you echo my experiences precisely. These deficits and problems are the very things i haver tried to conceal and hide from others my whole life - to no avail of course. everyone has known it about me - i thnk i was really trying to hide it from myself! I had not been able to understand how i could be really exceptional at some things and yet fail to pay bills or even get down to the shops (one minute away) in order to buy milk or some other such fundamental item.

I went to the supermarket yesterday - 'tis hard to do some days. it is a combination of exectuive function problems and sensory integration problems. Yesterday was bad for that. today -not too good either. the light is like glass shards this morning.....

nice to read your posts and relate to your experiences.

My mom has boxes and boxes of "projects" that she is going to make. My aunt was the same way. She literally had boxes of rocks. But they were "ART!" rocks for an art project she was going to make "some day". We took 4 dumpsters full of "ART supplies" out of her little apartment (why apart-ment when they're all stuck together, Hmmmm?) when she went away. That's a lot of rocks.

I am seeing that in myself now. All the projects that I will never finish, because I can never compromise enough to do them imperfectly. Have started weeding through them, getting rid of some, finishing a couple. Executive function. I have this marvelous vision of how I want it to be, and anything less than all of it is an affront to the vision.

Happy holidays, Millie. Nice to see you Neshamaruach.

happy xmas to you too.

That the reason I was missunderstood was because I had higher interlect than most.

-Why I always felt like I was not like the other kids in school; why I questioned competitive stuff in P.E. (back in the day lol)
-Why at age 20'ish I still loved Legos
-Why I've had a strange obsession with World History/ History Channel
-Why I did things for shock value sometimes.
-Why I had strong sensitivity to colors, smells/odors (i.e. smelling after traces of fragrances left in hair from shampoo the night before), lights, and sounds, and why some loud things could be great but others would just drive me nuts.
-Being awkward in almost every social setting.
-Even though I loved screenwriting class, why I felt that you "couldn't just begin writing not thinking of a beginning, middle and end," -- that there was a way to organize it or structure it (which there was - that being the Hero's Journey.
-How I could spend so many hours if not ALL day on doing something like drawing, and seem to be able to block out everything else around me.
-Why some people called me a "walking encyclopedia" about certain things when I talked about them.

This is something I've been wondering about for a few days now.

I used to "practice" a lot of things. Yo yo tricks, frisbee tricks, very repetitive stuff. One thing in particular, I would play a single octave scale on the guitar, up and down, over and over. It drove my parents nuts. I always thought I was playing the guitar, but now I wonder. I would actually go into a kind of trance. Is this just another aspie trait? Is it related to "stimming"? I know I eventually progressed as a musician, but the scale thing has been sort of haunting me for awhile now.

I am pretty sure it all comes under the same thing, whether 'stimming' be the correct word (though very useful) is another matter; i believe it's also related to achieving hyperconcentration (e.g. me catching in cricket), the automation of the movement does trance off, or rather trance-up

This just to bring this thread back to life, next to the the Female Presentation one & now were also plagued with Millie lacking Self....

they are highly interrelated
see you all back looking for that self