What were your biggest challenges in school/at work and why

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2. Abstraction Problems

In order to understand my abstraction problems, you have to understand what abstraction is. Even the most concrete word is an abstraction. Take table. Most people look at a table and see a table. I look at a table and see, maybe, a brown flat shiny surface with weird swirly designs in it, and it's a certain shape and has protrusions out the bottom of it. In order to see the category of 'table', I have to sort of 'switch on' abstraction much the same way I have to 'switch on' language. My "natural state" involves not very much abstraction or language, so these are things I routinely have to switch on.

I've described myself before as an intellectual sprinter. For short periods of time, I can climb up high into the sky up where all the abstraction is. But rapidly I'm going to fall back down to the earth where concreteness is. So I can be in a weird position relative to most people, whose level of abstraction stays more or less constant. I may be able to temporarily become more abstract than the average person. But then I'm going to fall back down to somewhere less abstract than the average person with a fairly severe intellectual disability. Because both the average person and the average person with an intellectual disability have a more or less stable level of abstraction, whereas I swing both higher and lower than most people.

You can see how this would be a problem in school. It resulted in all-over-the-place performance on school-related tasks. One moment I could excel at something and the next I couldn't do it at all. This resulted in several completely ridiculous claims about the reasons for this:

• I was careless and making "careless mistakes" all the time.
• I was lazy and slacking off.
• I was too busy doing "fun" things and not busy enough studying.
• I was gifted, and because I was gifted, I must be bored, and because I was bored, I was underperforming.

That last one came back to bite me in the butt in some pretty spectacular ways. It resulted in situations with classes I was taking, where I would be passed and put into the next class up even if I didn't understand the material. At one point I failed the entrance exam to a private school (I was being put there because they thought my social problems would be better served by smaller classes) on the math section, and yet somehow they were persuaded to put me in advanced math classes there. This resulted in a lot of BSing on my part to try to keep up my grades in such classes. This resulted in further being put in classes I didn't understand. And it was a vicious cycle.

The thing is, my brain is not set up to be good at abstraction. It's set up to, rather than thinking in idea-thought, think in sensory-thought. Not "picture thinking", but more like I get this whole jumble of sensory impressions that sort themselves out into patterns, and this happens sometimes without my even being aware of it. That's the mode of thought I have when all other modes go away, and that's the only one I have any attachment to. To me my experiences and memories are on the ground with sensory-thought, and all the up-in-the-sky abstract-thought, even when it's happening, might as well not be there and later on might as well have never been there as far as my memory is concerned.

And after a few years of pushing myself through and beyond my limits, something happened to me. I just started crashing. My mind couldn't handle the strain. It started becoming obvious in seventh grade that something was seriously wrong. This is where "gifted and bored" began to well and truly bite me in the butt. So I was given an advanced set of materials to study in an individual study program. I started flunking tests. But since the material was so far above me I was given a lot of slack even just for trying.

The next year, instead of going to eighth grade, I was advanced to ninth grade. The same crash-and-burn routine ensued. At one point I backed up against a wall screaming because a math teacher in a class I couldn't comprehend at all, had switched my routine on me. I was thrown out of his class. After three months at that school, I had to drop out, I just couldn't handle it anymore.

So the obvious thing would be to put me back in a class where I could comprehend the material, right? No, I must still be bored. So the next year I ended up in college. I tried really hard by taking a lot of art classes that didn't require abstraction as much as creativity. I was good at creativity. I did well in those classes. I did decently in some others. I flunked my chemistry classes. By the middle of the year, I was suicidal from the strain. At that point, someone offered me drugs. I took them. They helped me function (this doesn't surprise me because it was LSD mostly, which enhances abstract thinking, although I think it was a stupid thing to do and don't recommend it at all). So I stayed on drugs most of the rest of the year. Then I went off drugs. And then the suicidality, the lack of abstraction, everything, landed me right back where I was before I was on drugs. I attempted suicide several times. One of those times got me put into a mental institution. It was there that I was diagnosed with autism with "idiot savant features" after a lengthy observation, consultation with my parents, etc.

Bottom line -- I should never have been pushed so far, so hard, for having trouble with abstraction. It still sometimes makes me angry. After college, I couldn't go back to any normal school. So I spent the next few years (ages 15, 16, and 17) in either no school at all, institution schools, or special ed. I was put back into ninth grade, but given almost no real academic work, and the work I was given was still a strain. In one of the institution schools, all I could do was sit there and drool all over the place, so they took me out of even the institution classroom and set me in an easy chair and put earphones with books on tape in my ears, although I was never tested or anything, it was just so they could say that they were "giving me educational material" or whatever. Special ed is the only place I've ever truly graduated from. Oh, and about "boredom"? I was never bored. I was overstimulated an overworked. I could have used some nice, boring, easy work.

Although this was a very traumatic time for me when my abstraction tried to mostly disappear, I think it was necessary. I think it was my brain's way of getting me back on track for my real abilities. Ever since that happened, my ability to do the kind of sensory-pattern type "thinking" has skyrocketed. I think I was really born to do almost entirely sensory-thinking and not abstract-thinking so much. Sort of like... abstraction only exists to "serve" the sensory-thinking and supplement it. It helps me put words to experiences that there are no words for, but I would never use it for its own sake. And the kind of sensory-thinking I do is not taught in schools and couldn't possibly be.

Also note that while I was initially considered 'gifted', largely because of hyperlexia (with the pretty standard thing of being good at sounding out words but terrible at understanding meaning of either spoken or printed words), I never did well enough on an IQ test to be called gifted after that. By early adulthood, I was right on the edge of the "borderline intellectual functioning" range. I don't give a lot of credence to IQ tests but I think part of it is my losing the ability to push myself into so much abstraction that doesn't belong to me really.

3. Sensory Perception.

My way of perceiving the world is extremely different from the norm. While I have the kind of sensory issues a lot of people discuss -- aversions to certain sensory input, and sensory hypersensitivity -- those are not my main issues with sensory stuff.

I am going to cut and paste my main issues from some of my posts on the sensory issues thread.

As far as sensory input goes as a whole, I feel like I'm swimming (or drowning) in huge swirls of it that make no sense to me.

Vision is like a whole bunch of fragmented pieces dancing around. Sound is about equivalent. Touch a little less so in some ways. (This is enough that I've had doctors, without my knowing until later, fill out certain forms a certain way. They'll have like boxes you check for normal vision, low vision, and blind, and they will check "low vision" and "hard of hearing" on those forms even though technically my vision is correctable to almost normal and my hearing is better than normal. Because it's not just about the acuity of a sense, it's also about how you use it, and I have real trouble using those to get meaning out of.)

My best sense is sort of... whatever it is when you are moving through space, as well as smell, and some elements of touch.

There are times, very quiet times, when things seem to almost fit together. But... it's weird. It's painful. It is like teetering on the edge of falling apart altogether. If it's vision, I will see things in great detail, each detail being its own sort of pain, and they just almost almost fit together normally. But then they sort of quiver and fall apart. I often take off my glasses when things are like that to try to make everything more blurry and easier to manage. That can also happen with every sense, I just know more words for vision so I keep describing it.

Any individual sense may cut out entirely, becoming unavailable to me at all. And in fact all or most of them cut out sometimes, as does understanding, so I'm just experiencing the world, but not experiencing any sensory input or any thought. But there is still experience without all those things, which is one reason that I don't like when people judge the life of people who have way more input and thought than that going on, as "not thinking well enough to be worth living" or something like that.

Trying to understand anything through a sense is a whole other thing. Generally I'll see shapes and colors and visual textures but I won't see "bicycle" or "table" and the like. Identifying things like that takes cognitive effort, because it requires using categories and ideas and abstraction, and my mind doesn't naturally do categories and ideas and abstraction without a fight. (Yes, "bicycle" is an abstraction compared to the feel and sound and shininess of any individual bicycle.)

Oddly enough (or perhaps not so oddly) despite the fact that I have all these apparent problems with sensory information, sensory information remains the entirety of my natural thought (the kind of thinking I do without putting effort into it). I don't naturally use ideas, abstractions, categories, etc. I naturally just deal with the direct sensations of anything, and then the (concrete) patterns those sensations form. This happens without my intending it, sometimes without my even being aware of it, and it has gone on so long that it has evolved into a complex system of navigating the world. (Many autistic people say they were like this up to the age of about four or something, and assume that being like this inevitably means being utterly confused. It doesn't, it's just that when you're four, life is confusing whether things are like this or not, because you haven't come up with a good way to understand it yet.) I even do things with this way of thinking that seem like they wouldn't be possible without the other way of thinking. (I can do the more "normal" way of thinking too, but it's difficult, painful, and short, even when I manage to do it extremely well -- it just falls apart.)

I find it extremely, extremely difficult to function if I am removed from a familiar environment and put into an unfamiliar or even just less familiar environment. There's a reason why. In familiar environments, my brain has already mapped out the basic layout of the room in a sensory way, through all of my senses. I know what things look like, what things sound like, what things feel like, what things smell like, etc. This allows me a heightened ability to function in this environment, because my brain can only understand sensory stimuli very slowly. I mean... I get the sensory stimuli quickly enough, and I feel them, see them, smell them, extremely rapidly, so rapidly that it overwhelms my entire mind. But with that huge bunch of sensory stimuli to process it is very hard for me to come up with the meaning of all that information. So I can only come up with a bit of information at a time. In a familiar environment, the information is all stored in my head so I don't need to do it fast. But an unfamiliar environment?

Get me in an unfamiliar environment, and all kinds of things start happening. My brain is overwhelmed with new stimuli from every single sense. Imagine floodgates opening and crashing through my brain to understand the violence of this. Anything else my mind might have been doing is swept away in the flood of information. I experience excruciating pain, not exactly in my body, but almost like in my mind or something, it's hard to explain but it's just as bad as body-based pain. Because for half my life now I've been prone to motion sickness, I often become "seasick" from all the visual jumble dancing around, and I may vomit violently just the same as someone does on a boat (someone described it once as being like something she'd never seen except in someone extremely drunk -- I'd just moved into a new apartment and she was helping me and then suddenly had to clean up my puke). There's no sense to be made out of any of this information, it just swirls and dips and dances, it doesn't form coherent patterns yet. I can't find my mind or my body in the jumble. Eventually my senses shut off. One or more of them just vanish. Sometimes it's all of them. And I'm just left... nowhere, really. No mind and no senses and no body (I perceive my body as if it's just external sensory input anyway), just awareness.

The "fun" isn't done when I come out of this. Once I end up in a safe, familiar location and lie down, something painful and discombobulating starts happening to my mind. It's almost (I'd have trouble believing it's as simple as this, but this is what it feels like) as if there's a buffer zone that contained all the sensory information I wasn't perceiving directly at the time. This buffer starts spitting out sensory data into my mind. I then perceive these things as if they are happening to me again. There's no difference, and I can't remember that I'm really just lying down on a bed somewhere. I just... feel all the sensory information as if I'm still in the place where I picked it all up. It happens in spurts. I'll go back to just barely noticing I'm lying down and then there's another spurt. It's highly painful, like a burning sensation accompanies it most of the time. When I'm done, there's a blank space for awhile, and then I find that I'm lying on a bed and usually I've drooled all over the place.

All kinds of things can happen when I'm still in the unfamiliar place and disoriented by all the sensory information. Sometimes I'm not really bothered by the sensory jumble, no pain exactly, nothing like that. It's just there. Only, my mind isn't there, not my idea-mind, just my sensory-awareness. I may end up pulled towards some kind of sensory experience. Only, I'll walk into the middle of the street because I don't know what a street is at that point, I just see something shiny and it attracts me. I'll be unaware of the concept of danger, of people, of streets, of violence, of anything that could cause me trouble, and I'll be operating on a set of rules that's purely sensory and not based on ideas. That other set of rules won't necessarily help me survive in that kind of environment. (For me, mind is a temporary thing that only happens when it's both possible and something I can put effort into. Much of the time it's not possible, much of the time I have no effort to put into it or no desire to put in the effort even if I have the effort.)

So those are a lot of my current sensory issues. Of course, right now is not exactly the same as I was when I was younger. I had more capacity for unfamiliar situations back then for some reason. I still had trouble, but I didn't shut down as easily or as hard as I do now. But all of these things still had an effect on me regardless of fluctuations in severity over time.

I couldn't really learn much in a classroom. There was too much going on. Particularly the visual overload was pretty intense. And the smells… too many smells. I'm remembering back and it's not anywhere I want to be again. The flickering lights. The visual clutter. The echoing sounds. The hard chairs. Everything was a new and unwelcome piece of input. My skin burned from the overload (well really an unholy combination of Central Pain and overload). So anything school-type that I learned, I learned at home.

Recess was even more chaotic, and definitely easily got into sensory-swirl-land even when I tried to impose some structure on it by playing some of the games. It just didn't work.

All the sensory stuff meant I was on a hair-trigger. Other kids knew how to exploit that. They'd surround me and then start making noise to provoke me into a meltdown and get me in trouble.

After I got home, I'd sometimes just scream, and cry, and scream, and cry, and scream, and cry. It's common for autistic children to either "hold it together" at home and fall apart at school, or "hold it together" at school and fall apart at home. I was mostly in the second category although I did my share of falling apart at school sometimes too.

As my level of overload got more as I got older (due to some of the stuff I described in the other parts of this post) I ended up using more and more visible strategies to deal with it. I started stimming in public again (more than I already did). I would flick fingers or objects in front of my eyes, or stare at walls or other blank surfaces, things like that. I was a highly "sensory seeking" person (at least, that's what some people seem to call it) and I wrote a blog post about it (I'm about to give a link to it) called On growing up with strange sensory reactions, and the difference between passing and being passed off. You might want to read it if you're interested in the sensory aspect of how I behaved and how other people responded to it in my school years.

In my three months of regular high school, I really went overboard on the odd sensory behavior. I used to hide under my desk, sometimes even shouting "sensory overload!" as I did it. I once got my French teacher to talk at a near-whisper by covering my ears all the time until she did it. (It was still too loud even at a near-whisper.) I hid behind my long hair a lot. At dances, I spun in circles. Other kids called me crazy. My math teacher accused me of doing drugs. That rumor spread among kids too. (That's part of how I was curious enough to try it by the time people offered them to me. And they offered them to me because I was acting in ways so they thought I was already on them.)

On a field trip to a new place, I started experiencing my really dramatic shutdowns in that high school thing. We went to southern California. I ended up so overloaded that I froze in place for a long period of time staring straight at a bright light and my irises were even involved in the freeze so my pupils dilated despite the light. (More drug rumors.) After I came out of it (but was still walking slow and barely talking) people avoided me… it was as if I had done something… I don't know the word. Distasteful? Beyond the limits of normality? I don't know the right word, but that's how they treated me and I felt horrible.

At that point in time, I still didn't experience motion-sickness. So after awhile, instead of doing the usual autistic thing and resisting change, I absolutely reveled in the sensory chaos. It was like my own personal funhouse. And if visually everything was weird, then so what, it was weird, actually kind of cool, the sort of things other people had to take drugs in order to experience. I could see spots in the air (probably retinal lights) and I used to stare at things to bring the spots into very sharp focus and then try to find patterns in them like you do in clouds. Or stare at one spot until everything went grey and blink until my eyes had tears that then refracted light so that I could see rainbows dancing around. I knew a whole lot of tricks to make my body give me sensory stuff and I did it as a way of coping with being totally in over my head in just about every part of life including school.

4. Deliberate vs. nondeliberate learning, and problems with the school system in general

My best skills have always been things I didn't set out to do deliberately, and neither did anyone else. I have a sharp divide between my ability to do things on purpose, and my ability to do things if they are triggered. This affects movement, complex actions, thought, language, memory, and really just about everything. To give a concrete example, there's a way that I have learned to get into my wheelchair. Often, I have trouble with the act of crossing boundary lines. This includes transferring from sitting up on my bed to sitting on my wheelchair. Sometimes it's worse than others, and one day that sort of thing was really bad. So my friend grabbed a coathanger, and told me to grab the coathanger. And in order to grab the coathanger I had to stand up, so in grabbing the coathanger that triggered standing up. If it hadn't been triggered, I never would have been able to get back into my wheelchair because conscious deliberate action is much more difficult for me than triggered or automatic action.

Anyway, the same thing is true for learning. I don't learn what I set out to learn. I don't learn what other people set out to teach me. I have this sort of fake-learning I can do, where I learn the thing without really understanding it, and then do all the crap I have to do to "prove" that I know it, and then forget it never to be seen again. And that's all school ever was to me.

Meanwhile, I was learning all kinds of things that school was never intending to teach me. I learned a lot about… I guess it's called sociology, although that sounds very stiff and formal. I learned about how power changes the way people interact with each other. I learned some things about class issues by spending four years in a private school for rich kids when I was only middle-class. I learned about the ethics of the way people treat each other, including bullying and the moral cowardice it can cause in people who are afraid of it and won't stand up for the person being bullied. I learned a lot. But I did not learn most of the school subjects. To this day I could not answer some of the questions we were asked in places like first grade, let alone higher grades.

I also learned a lot about the school system itself. When I was twelve, I envisioned it almost like a horse racetrack. Where the horses have to move in a certain direction because they are forced into it by the shape of the track. I knew that in reality real life lay far outside the track and that school taught very little about real life.

I learned how gifted programs often can teach some students that they are better than others on all kinds of levels. More worthy of experiencing some true educational enrichment that would be valuable to all students. (For instance one gifted program I was in involved students going around in groups to places where people, mostly parents, would directly teach them real-life skills including in actual workplaces. There's nothing about that that says the child has to be classified gifted to benefit, and that sort of situation was far more educational than anything in school ever was.) Through being in the special education system, I learned how that taught people that they were inferior and that to be "mainstreamed" was their hope and dream.

I learned all of these things, but I did not learn what I was being explicitly taught. I only ever learned all the realities underneath the blah-blah of people's language use. (Remember -- much of the time I functioned as totally unable to comprehend language, so I picked up on just about every way of conveying meaning other than language.)

Honestly I think I was better off not learning the lessons school was trying to teach me. Because school is a thing that tries to railroad you into a certain kind of thinking. If you make it to college, you're also taught that you have skills superior to people who aren't in college and deserve a better lot in life than they do. It's ugly stuff and not stuff I'd have wanted to pick up for real. I know people who have been seriously messed up to the point of becoming snobs because of messages like that. And I have little tolerance for those who think their education makes them superior in any way, including even knowledge, to those who aren't educated.

I would have been even better off not going to school at all, and I think really most kids would. There are better ways to get an education. Personally I'd have done well in an apprenticeship situation. The good kinds of apprenticeship, learning in the real context where life is taking place. Not the bad kind of apprenticeship where you have no rights. I'm also far better at practice than theory, so that would also help with that part. (When I flunked chemistry, it was the theory that was doing it to me. I was good at the labs, it just took me a little extra time because of my movement issues.) A friend of mine has suggested it would be best if schools were converted into places where experts on various subjects could be, and then people (child or adult) could learn from them in whatever way suited them best. Sort of like a variant on a library system. And people wouldn't all have to get the same education if parts of it didn't suit them.

If there has to be a school system though, there's a way that school systems work in certain countries other than the USA and related countries. Instead of being either competitive, or all about striving for your individual best. Instead, they are about where… if you do really well in a subject, then you help teach the kids who are behind in that subject. You don't get special classes for the fast learners and special classes for the slow learners. And in those places where they do this, they score much better on tests of actual knowledge. That's still not ideal for me, but it's better than what I grew up with.

But really? The only way I have ever learned anything is by going through life. My sensory-based learning method only works by picking up a whole lot of sensory information. Then somewhere in the back of my brain that information settles into patterns. Not abstract patterns. Very concrete patterns. And then those patterns, when triggered by the right situations, guide my actions. It's knowledge without knowing how it got there, it's using knowledge without knowing what the knowledge is. That's how I do everything in my life. The best way for me to learn is to be exposed to many different real-life situations and soak those into my brain and let my brain do the rest.

Unfortunately for people who want everything including learning to be predictable and orderly, this is nothing at all like that. It means that I would learn random stuff that nobody including me was expecting. It means I wouldn't even necessarily know what I know. I would just do what I know, and that would have to be enough. That's what I do now. Even typing this, I don't know what I'm going to say, it just comes out, and it's accurate. (It took me a long time to learn to use language accurately to what I'm thinking instead of just repeating what someone might say in that situation regardless of what I was thinking.) More or less accurate anyway, I still have throwbacks to the days when I just wrote whatever came out randomly and it was only randomly correct when it was correct at all.

Someone who's known me since we were kids once told me that my brain kind of works like this: It's as if there are these vast, vast vaults in my brain full of direct sensory knowledge of the world in all kinds of situations and circumstances, and full of the patterns that this sensory knowledge has formed itself into in those vaults. The only problem is that I can't access it on purpose. But when it's triggered in just the right way, it all comes out perfectly. But I can't even see what's in those vaults myself until it comes out, and neither could anyone else. I think that's a pretty accurate description of my brain. There's a lot of depth in there that can't be accessed on purpose so you just have to let the situations unfold.

And there's no way that fits into the school system. It just doesn't. I'd have been better off without school. School didn't teach me anything useful that couldn't be taught in other ways, and it really created serious problems for me.

5. Bullying

I don't know what I can say about bullying that hasn't been said before. It's bad. No, it's awful. It leaves lasting scars. And autistic people have targets painted on our butts, or we might as well.

I remember thinking that the bullying had gotten better when I was in my brief attempt at ninth grade. But later on? I knew a guy there who tried to be my friend. He was another oddball. And he said later that he'd been bullied badly in junior high but he had never seen bullying as bad as what I experienced in ninth grade. He said even the teachers were involved.

In the first school I went to for grade school, I was constantly bullied in obvious and simple ways that were terrible. I developed PTSD-like traits. I got so defensive it really bothered my parents, it was like I'd attack first before anyone could attack me. I was jumpy and I really…. I wasn't suicidal because I didn't know about suicide but if I'd known I would have been suicidal.

Then the idea was that if I transferred to a private school with smaller classes it might be better. I had to repeat fourth grade though. (Except for a couple classes I was allowed to do at fifth grade level.) The bullying was just as bad there.

In both schools, I was sent to counseling fairly early on because of bullying. The bullies weren't sent to counseling. Counseling was useless to me. They didn't mean badly, it just didn't do anything for me. They knew I was very different from most kids but it was just an MFCC so she didn't know anything about autism. She decided that it was because I fell into a duck pond when I was little, which is the weirdest cause of autism I've ever heard of.

Anyway, in private school the bullying grew more sophisticated. There was a group of girls who claimed to be my friends. But they ended up really just using me in their constant rotating wars against each other. There were three of them and were always forming into "two against one" groups. And somehow two of them were always using me against the other one and vice versa. It was awful.

I tried to get out of that group and then they started gaslighting me. For instance, at one point I encountered them and they got right in front of me. They started singing a weird song about the shape of my nose (they said it was the shape of a wall outlet, so they kept calling me "plug-nose" -- my nose is turned up with extremely narrow nostrils). Then they started going around to each of them singing the same song, like one of them was "flat-nose", I forget the rest. But when I came up to them and sang the song they acted like they'd never sung it to me. And when I flat-out told them what they'd done, they told me I was probably hallucinating. They did a lot of things like that.

Things like that became a recurring theme. When I was in college, I similarly thought I finally had a group of friends. Was really proud of myself because my brother always had a group of friends and they looked so happy. Except… these people weren't my friends. Some of them gave me drugs to watch me act weird and then treat me bad for it, like getting me to jump out a window and stuff. Others of them tried to convince me that I had multiple personalities (and since that often involves amnesia, and a person often doesn't know they have that, then I believed them). They even gave me a FAQ for a newsgroup on it and I thought it was just a guide for how to socialize so I followed it to the letter. Some of them sang loud songs and when I fell to the floor covering my ears, they laughed at me.

But the worst part of all of it was when they did a thing… they used my disadvantages against me. If I was at a vulnerable moment you could bet that they would exploit it for a cheap laugh. And I had a conversation once that summed a lot of things up about how they treated me. It's subtle but it's insidious. It's really an awful thing. Keep in mind that I was barely hanging on to the meaning of words at this point, so I was strained to the limit trying to hold certain conversations with them. So this one conversation went:

Girl: Do you think in words, or pictures?
Me: [Okay this is a one or the other question so I have to pick one or the other. I don't do words. So…] Pictures.
Girl: Ooh, then you're autistic!
My brother: I think it takes more than that.
Me: [So how to talk to them, I guess since she asked me a question I can repeat it back using echolalia to my advantage…] Do you think in words, or pictures?
Her: [Very, very smugly] I think in thoughts! (laughter)

I can't describe how conversations like that made me feel. It made me feel like they were always one step ahead of me. They'd do things like that, ask me questions with only two answers, and if I answered with one of the two answers, they'd prove their superiority by answering with a third answer. I mean it's not the same as just answering with a third answer because you want to. I do that all the time and that's not bullying. It's setting someone else to look stupid because they didn't do the same. And other people agreed with me that this was a subtle form of bullying, basically using my weak points against me to look better than me.

The horrible part is I looked up to these bullies. I really did. I thought they were smarter than me and better than me and cooler than me, and felt good that they even spoke to me. I can't believe how naive I was.

I only learned that these were bullies because I eventually made some real friends. Mostly through the autistic community. I started meeting real friends in my late teens. Very late teens. Also there was one girl who had tried to be my friend all along but I had lacked the ability to reciprocate until then. And around these real friends, who treated me like a real person, not like a stupid tagalong little kid who is just annoying and dumb to be around, but fun to get a laugh out of messing with. Anyway, what really made me realize something had been wrong, was these signs I started getting.

First off, when I began meeting autistic people who understood me and were a lot like me, my first thought was that they were actually my "friends" posing as people who were getting to know me, as a joke against me. And I thought this was normal behavior for friends. But it became obvious this clearly wasn't normal behavior for friends. Then, there was this thing… I would have these moments of just utter vulnerability. I would be crying, or terrified, or whatever. And I would brace myself for my new friends to hurt me. I expected friends to twist the knife at that point in time. But they didn't. And after they spent enough time not hurting me, I got wise to what had been going on and began to avoid my fake friends. Later on my real friends told me that the bully "friends" were obviously bullies in their point of view, but they'd wanted me to figure it out for myself so they wouldn't be acting like they were forcing me to choose to avoid them or something. Another thing I'd never have expected. (Some of my fake friends did things to people like breaking up a boy from his girlfriend so one of them could sleep with her. They thought this was entertaining.)

Anyway one of the worst parts about bullying was that teachers normally either joined in, or told me it was my fault, or told me it wasn't their problem. They never tried to enforce no-bullying rules even though they talked about them. Enforcing them would have been too hard, I guess. There were only about three teachers who ever did anything. And even with them, they didn't punish the bullies, they just watched out for me and tried to steer me into situations that were supervised and were away from the bullies. But that was only for the three months of high school. When I was in special ed, two different kids sexually assaulted me. The teachers blamed me. When I told them about a kid who used to go to that school sexually assaulting me in a mental institution, they laughed about it and said "Yeah, that's John all right." (His name wasn't really John.) People either didn't take bullying seriously or acted like it was your own fault or like you ha to toughen up or something. They often acted like if I just stopped being weird people wouldn't bully me. But I couldn't stop being weird no matter how I tried.

6. Organizational skills

I had horrible organizational skills. I couldn't organize my desk, my locker, my homework, school projects, anything. I also couldn't organize my own self-care skills, which became a serious problem when I went away to college and only bathed an amount of times that I can count on one hand. As an adult, lack of these skills combined with other aspects of autism mean that I need very intensive services. But in school it was of course all about organizing books and papers and assignments and other things I could not organize even when I got extra time after school or after class to do it. This was always treated as if it was my fault of course.

But what it really had to do was a combination of sensory/perceptual issues, and skills… some people call them executive function but I don't like that term for some reason. It involved a lot of stuff about finding my body, sequencing movements, that kind of thing, which was very hard for me to do on purpose. I see it more in terms of movement disorder than I see it n terms of "executive function".

Here are two links about movement and autism:

http://www.iidc.indiana.edu/index.php?pageId=468
http://www.iidc.indiana.edu/?pageId=464

The first page has a chart copied from a book. It's the easiest way to sum these things up I've ever seen. It says "Marked difficulties in: {Starting, stopping, executing, continuing, combining, switching} may impede: {Postures, actions, speech, thought, perceptions, emotions, memories}." And that in a nutshell explains my organizational problems.

I could have done with help doing it. Not help learning it. I've never been able to learn it. Just help doing it so that I could go on and do something else. I've heard people tell me that I'm not the kind of person who needs order in order to function. That's not true. I do need order. I can't create the order for myself. Not being able to create it doesn't mean not needing it. So what I need is for others to help me create that order, and not to be expected to be able to do it myself.

Yep, that's a biggie for me. I don't even mind repetition, if the goal of the tedium is something that interests me. If it doesn't interest me, I zone out during the orientation, much less can I stay focused on the actual task.

The inability to respond to bullying and pressure has been a problem in both work and personal relationship situations. Once someone gets angry and starts pressuring and berating me, I can't do anything but shut down and remain silent until they go away, which does nothing to resolve the problem and only leaves me feeling resentful and frustrated.

And the panic attacks that overwhelm me and make it impossible to do the simplest things, like make a phone call, or go somewhere and talk to a stranger. Its impossible to explain that to someone who doesn't experience it on a regular basis. Yes, its similar to the terror that most people have of public speaking, but when it happens to you several times a week your whole life, its not the same thing.

And I have a virtually total inability to ask someone for help. Not that I don't need or want help sometimes, its that I feel unable to ask, as if I'm proposing a huge imposition, or that having to ask makes me appear weak and stupid.

Then there's the chronic depression that is a lifelong result of living with the previous four conditions. That rounds out my top five.

i was always cr** at pure math (ie involving differentiation, algebra etc), but was very good with math involving measurements, financial matters (risk assessment, interest, rate of returns etc), probability etc. basically differentiation relied on the use of abstract concepts, which were an absolute no-no for me.

also have a problem with organizing skills (which sucks as i'm now doing a degree - so we're "left to our own devices" a lot more, which doesn't help.)

plus when im bombarded with information its like my brain CPU hits 100% and stops responding.

My biggest challenges at school and work was always socializing, or anything the involved some aspect of socializing. I never worked well in groups with other students. I never did well in front-of-class presentations either. What made them most stressful was being confused on what is the right thing to do. I was aware that I often made the wrong social moves, so I felt worried that I might do something wrong again and pay the consequences for it. I used to never say "Hello" or "Goodbye" to people when interacting with them, and I learned that it is rude not to do so. I then made it a compulsive habit to say "Hello" and "Goodbye" to everyone I spoke with.