Just diagnosed yesterday

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Hey - my name is Ben Knaak. You can call me BBQ, or Platypus, though - I've always liked that screenname. Anywho, I'm a 20 year old from Minnesota who is currently attending college. As the title implies, I was told by a psychiatrist that I have Asperger's about 36 hours ago. I'd consider myself to be a pretty normal guy. A little weird - well, maybe more than a little weird. I think just a bit differently than most so-called "normal" people do. My favorite movies are Road House, Die Hard, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I like to watch House, M.D. and old episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I listen to music that's older than I am (my favorite album is Quadrophenia by the Who). Now that the basic niceties are out of the way, allow me to bore you all with my life story (DUN DUN DUUUUUUUUUUN!)

I started out pretty abnormally. I was the only kid in my preschool who knew how to read. There was this kid named Will who I liked to play with, but his other friends didn't like me at all. They actually made a concerted effort to exclude me. My memory of that period is obviously pretty foggy, so I don't remember exactly why this was. It seemed so clear to them, but I didn't get it. Will didn't seem to like it much either, but he went along with it because he would have lost more friends had he sided with me. At least, that's how I remember it going down. The social dynamics of this group confused and bugged the hell out of me, so I liked to read books instead. Oftentimes, when the other kids would throw picture books at each other, or use them as shields in imaginary battles, I'd just sit in the corner and read the ones they had tossed aside. The instructors at the preschool took notice and brought in a couple of social workers to do a couple tests. I couldn't even hold still to do those tests. I just kept running off to read books or look at stuff or pretend to be Batman.

It wasn't until I was about 13 that I found out what this was all about. The social workers determined that I would be unable to function in a typical school environment, and recommended that I be sent to a school for the developmentally challenged. Looking back, perhaps they were onto something. On the other hand, I'm glad my parents said no. I learned a lot from my school experience and actually excelled as a student.

They didn't say no without talking to someone first. And that someone was probably the person who helped me the most during those early years - a speech therapist named Janet (I don't remember her last name). I didn't know why I was going to see her at the time, but my parents would later tell me. I had attained a large vocabulary, but it was all a jumbled mess – I did not know how to use it properly. I knew what everything was, and I knew the words for them, but some of them were jumbled and misused based on the context in which I had first heard them.

Janet helped me out a lot - and I really liked going to see her. She would listen and talk with me about the things that I liked (Power Rangers, books, Batman) and avoid the things I didn't like (orange juice with pulp in it). She had me do exercises which, in retrospect, were similar to the ones the two government psychologists had tried to make me do, only more fun. After I was done, she’d set up an indoor obstacle course, and my mom would come to pick me up (usually bringing an Almondjoy® bar with her to bribe me into coming back). I saw her every week until we moved from White Bear to Forest Lake (where I still live today).

Socially, though, I did not do well at all during most of elementary school. In fact, I was something of a spaz. I would publicly freak out over relative trifles, and I did things that most kids would have been too embarrassed to do. But I gradually got marginally better, and got a better hang on the right way to behave in public without looking like too much of an ass. I think some kind of switch must have flipped in my brain in about fifth or sixth grade, because I started to get the hang of some of the basic things that most people knew. Stuff like "let other people talk," "don't freak out," and "don't change the subject just so you can talk about something you like." I think the most fortunate development of this was that I've had a very slow fuse ever since - I don't freak out over things.

Still, I didn't have a whole lot of friends. But I didn't mind - I never actively sought to be popular. As long as I had a few people to talk to and hang out with, that was fine by me. And I had some very good friends. Probably my closest one was a kid by the name of Dustin. Dustin was (and I imagine he still is) a really great guy - he had a winning personality, and was smart, hardworking, and talented - straight-A student, captain of the track and football teams; basically the all-American kid. He ended up getting a scholarship to MIT. Another one was Paul - tall and geeky like me, in the drama club and speech team. Like me, he was interested in computer games - we'd discuss games like Descent and Fallout. Generally, my friends were the "smart kids" - people who were about my intelligence level who shared common interests with me. Still, I didn't do things like stay over at their houses as often as my younger brothers did with their friends, nor did I actively seek out social contact as much. (I'll get back to social interaction in a moment).

It was about this time - sixth grade, to be precise - that I had some psychiatric testing done. They did a bunch of tests on me - both verbal and spatial. In the verbal section, my scores were practically off the charts - I was in about the 99.9th percentile in that regard. When it came to spatial relations, though, I was almost at the level at which I could be classified as mentally ret*d. In light of this (and my difficulty in keeping track of my schedule and paying attention to subjects that didn't interest me), they diagnosed me with ADHD and Nonverbal Learning Disorder. I was prescribed Adderall (and, later, Vyanse). Six months later, when I started to experience depression as a side effect, I took Zoloft along with it (this, too, would eventually be replaced by another drug, in this case Fluvoxamine).

I went through junior high, and later high school, at a similar academic level as before. As usual, I wasn't an active participant socially within my class - rather, I tended to experience it (and appreciate it) more passively as it came to me. My friends tended to be people I saw in school every day. Most were more like acquaintances that I was really friendly and familiar with - we didn't do all that much together because I didn't really "see" the point or urgency in doing so. I didn't "hang out" at a favorite spot after school like some other people did. I didn't have a girlfriend, either - I tried to make excuses, like "I don't want to get tied down to this trailer park town," but the real reason was that I had no idea how to approach the issue. A notable exception to all this was my high school debate team, the experience of which provided me with some of the best days of my life. I liked personal relationships, but I never really GOT how to initiate them, what made them tick, or how they worked when the person in question wasn't standing right in front of me, talking. There was something I was missing - I just didn't know what it was.

I graduated in '06, and later that year went to the University of Minnesota as an Honors student. It was there that my issues really started to bite me in the ass. I had always been piss-poor at managing my time and getting a bunch of stuff done on time. I would often not even know where to begin, and I would just kind of give up. A bigger problem was that I was commuting all the way from Forest Lake rather than living on campus. This impacted me in two ways. First, it gave me less time to do work (public transportation sucks). Second, it diminished my connection to the campus and college experience itself. I didn't make any friends at all at the U of M. It was about halfway through my second semester when it hit me that I didn't even feel like I was really in college. I was just one guy, alone and confused, attending classes by myself in a place where thousands of total strangers congregated. I knew there were certain groups and clubs on campus, but I didn't really know how to approach them. More importantly, the limitations that taking the bus placed on my schedule kept me from participating.

I didn't even feel any particular sense of urgency when it came to my schoolwork. I just went through the motions, doing as little as possible (sometimes even less). I didn't really understand the "big picture" when it came to a work schedule in high school, either, but I had a better drive back then because I knew where I wanted to be after school was done - what my goal was. I wanted to get to college. And now that I was IN college, I had no idea of what I wanted to do for a career (and it wasn't for a lack of having thought about it). So instead, I sat at my computer, surfing the web, playing Morrowind, and pondering deep philosophical questions. Three semesters later, I was placed on an academic suspension.

Now I'm at a community college, with the aim of finishing my generals before transferring back and getting a fresh start (living on campus this time). I decided that I needed to get help like I did in high school (like how I got extra time on tests because of my slow, sloppy handwriting). In order to do that, though, I needed new testing (because my old testing had "expired," so to speak). So my parents arranged a meeting for me to take these tests. It was a series of stuff - a personality index combined with memory and coordination drills. They were spread into two sessions - Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning.

It was in the morning that the doctor diagnosed me. He asked me if I wanted my parents to hear it, and I said that I did. So he told me that - all this time when I thought I had NLD and ADHD, I had been misdiagnosed. This, he said, was not because the doctors were stupid or incompetent, but rather because most doctors educated before the 1980s tend not to spot Asperger's because they're less familiar with it. He explained that all the symptoms they had seen - poor spatial coordination, difficulty in picking up visual and facial cues, occasional inattentiveness when faced with a boring subject - could, when my personality and personal history is taken into account, be traced to Asperger's. And my social difficulties - both in my early childhood and today - made the connection more markedly noticeable. He went into great detail about it. He talked about other signs that I showed - a tendency toward verbose or excessively erudite speech patterns, my intense, obsessive interest in certain subjects (i.e. history and philosophy of religion). He said it was the best explanation for the vast divide between my abilities and my performance. I don't remember every single aspect of what he said, but the way he told it based solely on the information that I had given him made it quite clear to me.

To be honest, when I heard him give me the news, I wasn't all that surprised. I had read about Asperger's before, and had remembered thinking "Hmm...sounds a bit like me." Really, I wondered why no one had thought of it before. Still, it made me think about myself in a way that I hadn't before.

There was one metaphor the doctor used that really stuck to me. He explained my lack of urgency in college by saying that it was like the way most "typical" people react to paying taxes. On a technical level, the average person knows that taxes need to be paid in order for a police, schools, or transportation to exist. Still, most people would pay less taxes - or even none at all - if they could. This, he said, was because people don't have a close relationship with the government - they don't have a totally clear idea of how exactly it works or how the money is spent. Because people do not - and CANNOT - truly "know" and "love" the government the way they do other things, they value their own interests above that of the government. It is like that with me, only with a broad spectrum of social and societal rules and necessary contributions. I tend to just ignore it all and bury my face in my laptop instead.

There are a whole bunch of levels I haven't touched on, and I'm not quite certain I understand it completely. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it yet. My thoughts in the first day alone seemed to range from stifling imprisonment ("Geez...am I just a disease? Some kind of label?") to contented acceptance ("Well, I know more about myself now.") to confused and apprehensive ("So what happens now?") to euphorically optimistic ("I'm gonna pick myself up by my bootstraps and kick the world in the ass! POW!") to strange, fantastic, and dreamlike flights of fancy ("The day I finish writing my masterpiece...").

Still, I know what I have to do now. I have Asperger's, and I have to live with it and overcome the consequences. I figure that I'll probably try to make more of a conscious effort to "connect" - try to understand it, feel it, and get involved as best I can. At the same time, I have to remain true to myself. I'm not going to force myself to be "normal," or anything that I'm not comfortable being. I still want to have maybe an hour or two to myself every day or two. I have a way of thinking about things that's unique, and I like it.

I listened to Quadrophenia again today. That album speaks to me on so many levels - it always has, ever since I first listened to it as a fifteen year-old. It's really a story for all frustrated youths. People like me. It's about a big, confusing, and often cruel world, and trying to find your identity and your place inside it. I hope I find mine. And I'm confident that I will. And if I'm ever confused, well...I guess I'll have you guys to talk to.



Anyway, that's all I have to say. I hope it wasn't too much of a bore for you to read through!

It's quite a bit to read, I'll read it later.

Regardless anyway, Welcome to WP

Yeah, I figured as much. I just wanted to get it all out there, so to speak.

First off: Welcome

Secondly: Woo descent! did you play descent 2, 3, and mercenaries also? I personally loved mercenaries.

Thirdly: Sounds familiar. Except I was the other way around. My spacial recognition abilities were incredibly high (still too uncoordinated to take advantage of it in sports), but my ability to use speech effectively was (and somewhat still is) very poor. That is why I prefer typing, you get the chance to edit before submitting.

Best of luck choosing your career. History, philosophy, and religion are hard careers to make a living off. I personally went for engineering myself (I love physics and problem solving). What aspects of history are you interested? Human history, paleontology, any specific area?

I didnt find about about AS myself till I was 21. Unfortunately, I was only 3 months shy of graduating from college, so I didnt get to take advantage of any special help, but I did finally figure out alot. So, your not alone figuring this out in your early 20s. The next few months will be interesting to say the least. If your anything like me, you will read every book, and every website there is about AS in order to understand everything you can. Then you start noticing things about yourself which you didnt notice before (like rocking back and forth when sitting in a chair). Overall, the best advice I can give is to embrace your difference, and make the best of what it gives you. Im not saying that you should try to struggle to overcome a burden. Infact what you have is a gift, an amazing ability to absorb and process vast amounts of information, you just need to learn how to steer your interests to take advantage of them.

There is of course challenges with AS, but every life has challenges. Being AS doesnt give you anything more or less then what normal people get dumped on them. You just have to learn to navigate life in a way that is effective for you. Who cares if it is different then normal, it is what works best for you. So, I invite you to make more posts, ask more questions, and get advice that works for you in your situations.

You have a place in das Techno ikings army of dance!

very interesting reading, indeed. i like reading about others, specially about people as interesting.

i have found out about AS only during my phd studies, so later than you. it was amazing time. for next few weeks i went everywhere with pen and notebook writing down everything that i just realized was connected with AS. sudenly, whole my life had an explanation, even things that didn't bother me before, they just were there, they made me different, but i never thought about them. it's really good to know.

Last edited by tomamil on 16 Oct 2008, 8:31 am, edited 1 time in total.

I enjoyed reading your post! In many aspects, you sound much like me - I have always been verbose and used a large vocabulary but mixed my words around, and I pretty much spent my entire childhood with my head in a book (my reading skills were also very advanced - when I first learned to read I pretty much skipped picture books altogether and went straight to famous five books).

Anyway, without further ado, welcome to WP!

i was exactly the same. i remember the first book i had borrowed from the library shortly after i reached the age of 6, it was picture book with short texts under every picture. i had brought it home and got dissapointed that i finished reading it in less than an hour. so i went to the library the next day and borrowed a book for teenagers with a lot of text. first i had to convince the librarian that i really intended to read it lol.

i, still, mix my words around. some people think that my English is not good enough, but i speak the same way in my native language, too. even though i have to be careful not using infrequent words when speaking with other Europeans whose English is also their second language.

Well, I'd consider it more an intense hobby than anything - I like to think about it and study it, but I'm not sure if I'll make a career out of it. I'm just interested in the narrative of history in general. Classical antiquity, Alexander the Great, feudal Japan, the Enlightenment, the World Wars - I like pretty much all of it. It's like reading a good book, only the stuff in it actually happened. (I think maybe the one thing in the world I like best is a good story). I think it's a bit like how my dad was - he's a lawyer, but always had a great deal of interest in astronomy. I think the task (that is, something that I DO rather than think about) that I do best is writing. Not handwriting - God, no, my handwriting is awful. I always type - it's easier to take time to think and edit it. I always liked writing essays. I like to write stories in my spare time. I'm a lot better at it, I think, than I am at speaking on the fly, because I have more time to think about what I'm writing (which obviously doesn't apply to ordinary conversation). I can choose and measure my words that way.

As for philosophy, I might actually be decent if I went into that discipline. But I've known a few philosophy majors, and the most common advice that they've all given me is "Don't become a philosophy major." Go figure.

Still, I'll admit that I'm not as interested in mathematics or the sciences as I am in things like history. I was pretty good at them, but I didn't find them particularly compelling, so I had to work a lot harder to pay attention to it.

Not entirely sure what I'll do with that talent, though - perhaps I'll be a journalist or a technical writer. I'll have to think about it before I decide. Still, I know that I want to do something where I get to write about stuff.

Last edited by bbqplatypus on 16 Oct 2008, 10:55 am, edited 1 time in total.

"Hello," BBQ, and welcome aboard Wrong Planet.

Your story has so much of interest and a few similarities with me. I too could read before kindergarten and don't remember learning how to read. It was just what I did. Apparently the teachers did not figure out what I was doing with all those books and I was sent to special ed reading. The school thought I was ret*d until the fifth grade when my IQ was tested and I got glasses and could finally see the world. I was already reading encyclopedias and adult novels by then but now the school knew I was gifted.

Anyway, I wanted to make a remark about Descent. If you played Descent III, you might be interested to know that my oldest son drew everything that did not move in that game.

welcome to the club!

Welcome