Hello folks.
I am a 30-year-old in Newcastle, UK and have had 'issues' and 'quirks' all my life. Back in the 80s child physiologists struggled to decide why I was the way I was. They ended up effectively throwing their hands in the air and tagging my surname to the word 'syndrome' and said 'lets just call it that, since we cant find another name for it'. As a child I had trouble making friends and would rock my head from side to side without realising it which led, along with all my other social issues to the inevitable teasing and bullying which just made me more weary of social interactions.
I learned very early on that if I wanted to fit in, I had a battle on my hands. That is not to say I am a loner - I had the odd awkward, short-lived, superficial friendships through primary school. During secondary school I gradually began forming friendships with a few people I could relax a little more around. I began to get more of a feel for expectations within social situations (mainly through trail and error) but they have always required quite a bit of effort to read correctly. I continued to have problems in all sorts of apparently different areas and at around 17 became very seriously depressed and found it very difficult to cope with the intensity of emotion and despair that would wash over me. I started cutting myself as a means to calm down which, though massively socially unacceptable, did actually work. I don't do this any more and am not advocating it other than to say it worked as a lesser evil in my case at times when I was suicidal.
I was also terrified of my inability to make a good impression with the opposite sex but eventually met an amazing, beautiful and patient woman who I have been with for ten years and recently married (Something I thought impossible at one point in my life). I have a mortgage and quite a good job developing databases and software which suits me very well. I have always been interested in computing and while other boys would be out playing football I was content learning to program on my ZX Spectrum.
For a few years I have been faintly aware of there being slight similarities between autism and a few of my own issues growing up. This was something I always rationalised as only a partial match and largely irrelevant in terms of my current life. I dismissed the idea that I could be actually autistic in any real way as just ridiculous. After all, I didn't act like Kim Peek of Rain Man fame and could happily make eye contact with those I am very close to (although have a minor internal panic when I make accidental eye contact with a stranger - something I never really thought about much before).
Then came Daniel Tammet's book Born On A Blue Day. I had seen a documentary a while ago about synaesthesia (the brains overlapping of the senses leading to people who can see sounds etc) and had been meaning to read this autobiography written by such a person for some time. It was going to be a fascinating look at a mind so very different to my own. The writer, it would turn out, grew up with Asperger's Syndrome and described in intricate personal detail what it was like growing up with this condition. and how it felt and affected him. I was astounded to realise that the things he was describing - clearly meant as en example of how different his experiences were as an autistic child - seemed to describe my own childhood almost exactly. That was shocking enough to me but, as he went on to describe becoming an adult with Asperger's, the things he explained as typical traits were parts I recognised in myself - little quirks of my personality or things I found difficult but had found methods of dealing with so that I didn't need to think about them consciously very much, things too that I didn't even realise were unusual.
The book is only about 200 pages but it took me days to complete as I would read a paragraph and have to sit back and digest the importance of what I had read. There was the head nodding, the social inappropriateness and awkwardness, the passion for number and logic related subjects (computing in my case) and in very specific but quickly developing obsessions (Current one is urban exploration photography), my 'Clumsy Child Syndrome', the inability to get to sleep at a reasonable time for thoughts rushing through my head - night after night, the frustrating inability to make progress in my driving lessons due to problems with spacial awareness and predicting the other drivers, the embarrassing meltdown I had the week prior when experiencing difficulty re-bagging a split bin bag - I went from being perfectly calm to needing to sit in another room for 15 minutes because I was shaking and sweating. The list seemed endless. These had always been unrelated aspects of my personality which I had no reason to associate with one another. Some were curious and some were embarrassing but the thought that almost everything I would pick out to describe myself is typical for someone on the Autistic Spectrum absolutely amazed and terrified me. How had I gotten into my 30th year and never put these things together before? How could I be effected by something so massive and not realise? Am I reading too much into this or seeing connections where they don't really exist? (One of my interests has been how the human brain operates and I am well aware of the brains capacity to trick itself into something.)
I investigated online and found sites listing symptom after symptom but, again, worried that I may be just getting carried away and talking myself into exhibiting more of some symptoms that is really the case. I took the Cambridge Autism Centre's AQ test while trying to be as honest with the answers as I could....verdict: AQ of 37 and 7.4 on the 0-10 scale this put me well past the 'shares some similarities' region I had expected to find myself, and into the 'very likely autistic' region. I needed more so I took the Aspie Quiz which asked even more questions at a much more personal level. Verdict: Aspie rating of 129/200 and NT rating of 80/200 - 'very likely aspie'. Some of you may be able to better explain where I sit but it seems to indicate that I am indeed somebody with Asperger's Syndrome. The idea that there may be a single condition that explains almost everything about me is paradoxically both comforting (I always hoped I would be able to explain my problems someday) and mind-boggling. I would very much like some of your feedback and whether you think someone like myself could in fact really be autistic? I have matched up the symptoms, recognised the first hand account from the book, taken the tests...two of them, but I still feel uncomfortable with the idea. I don't feel autistic - I just feel like me.
Sorry for the very long post but it has been a bit of a rollercoaster finding out about this and I still feel like I have a lot of questions. Please let me know what you think.
Si
Last edited by Si_82 on 18 Sep 2012, 11:11 am, edited 1 time in total.
18 Sep 2012, 7:42 am
And you definitely aren't the only UK user either. 
