This Is All New To Me

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This is my first post here. I was born with ocular albinism (although it took fifty years to learn exactly what was wrong with my eyes), acquired a reputation as a "genius" early since I was reading Reader's Digest by the time I got into first grade, and had parents so weird I used to think I'd have fit in better if I were raised by wolves. With all those reasons for being strange, it took me a long time to figure out I had anything else going on.

Later, I had a son who got into trouble at school, and was diagnosed with ADHD. When I read the psychologist's report, my strongest reaction was "Who is anyone to decide what is an 'inappropriate' amount of attention to something?". I'm a writer, and I often pay an 'inappropriate' amount of attention to things that prompt ideas. Over time, as I read more about ADD, I started to figure out that it explained a lot about me.

I'd heard of autism and AS, but in very early 2007, a chance conversation led me to dig up and read a bunch of blogs that focused on the subject. I am aware that it is easy to think you have symptoms of every condition you read about, so when some of it started sounding like me, I assumed it was my imagination. I shoved it out of my mind, but last month, I finally decided to sit down and take a close look. I haven't been formally diagnosed, and I don't know what would happen if I tried; I am atypical even for AS. But when I look closely, even many of the traits I didn't think applied at first are under there, just distorted and buried under layers of other stuff.

In my own mind, I am pretty sure I must have AS. But there are a few things that nag at me. One is the fact that I've read people with AS are supposed to lack creativity and imagination. I'm a writer. I have imagination. And although the descriptions of AS fit how people see me on the outside, in some cases they aren't at all like what is really in here. In fact, if I do have AS, the shrinks don't understand what goes on in there very well at all in some cases. Take emotion: yes, I don't always show it well, and sometimes it "freezes" and I feel nothing for a while, but as far as I can tell, that is actually due to an overload. There seems to be too much there for me to handle, so the whole system shuts down.

I don't know if this all makes sense to anyone else, but I do know it is the only explanation I've found that really seems to fit me. Heck, even when I joined a writing community, where I've seen other people post things like, "Thank God! I thought I was crazy until I joined this site.", people there did understand the writing issues - but I still didn't fit in. I am a misfit and an outcast everywhere. In a lot of ways, I'm used to it. But the thing is, I want to understand myself, so I can be the person I was meant to be. So far, this new understanding seems to help me make sense out of things that I've tripped over all my life.

I have so many questions about this, but I'm not even sure where to post them.

A very special Welkome to WrongPlanet, with a K.

The Kink of WP

Hello and welcome to WP!

Welcome

My advice will be: take a pen and read.

If you are AS, and things are not clear yet, take some time to read the forum, read the threads with odd titles, read and read. Maybe you will be able to scratch through all the defense mechanisms you built during your lifetime. You will find what you were protecting.

I am diagnosed since less than two months, while I read (and I am still reading) I remembered events, feelings and behaviors I have almost totally forgot.

Hello, theWanderer - and welcome greetings to the WP neighborhood.

Thanks for the welcome, everyone.

And SuperAspie, yes, that's good advice. I've already done some of it - but I need to do a whole lot more.

Welcome!