An interview with a highly succesful Aspergers Adult

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It's definitely not just about being labeled gifted. I was labeled gifted as a child and need assistance with every part of daily life including "fun" things just as much as "necessary" things. (I no longer met that label by the time I was tested again at age 15 and at age 22 tested exactly on the edge between "dull normal" and "borderline". Given the trend it might be even lower if I were tested today. Not that I view IQ as a measure of much, but it is what "gifted" generally refers to.) At any rate despite that label I have enormous problems doing even ordinary things. I have a few areas of talent but those don't compensate in day to day living for the areas of difficulty.

Thank you both for your input but I feel as though we are comparing apples to oranges in our viewpoints of Aspergers/Gifteness intereaction. I am comparing ONLY Aspergers/Giftedness. Both of you have an assortment of other comorbid/other conditions at play here. So I agree that Giftedness cannot counter severe disabilities but Aspergers alone is also known as "mild autism" and is fairly treatable with congnitive therapies and adaptations. I believe that IFF (If and only if) we have a case with Aspergers and Giftedness in the same person that the giftedness can, in fact, greatly minimize the outcome of an individual and ther percieved success in this NT world.

Do you guys feel this way too or am I completely off in my theory?

You are focusing on a very narrow range of the spectrum so I don't see any problem with the idea. "Giftedness" may actually be something that applies to me (the word has been used to describe me but I've never felt particularly special), but the lack of support vis a vis my deficits resulted in a wholly unremarkable life. My 'gifts' allowed me to fly under the radar, compensating for my problems.

One thing I am beginning to recognize is that treatment means different things to different professionals and even among autistics. I find that I am less agitated by allowing myself to behave 'more autistically', so treatments and behavioral therapies that mold me into a more accurate 'NT' imitation are counterproductive. But if early in life someone had recognized my challenges and developed interventions that allowed me to better deal with the world without also compromising my core, I feel I would have achieved a closer match between my potential and my actual accomplishments in life.

Wavefreak, you are a person I have on my list of people to interview as I begin documenting my theories. I have a few more in my inbox since posting this thread. It appears there are a handful of us who get by quite well in this world despite being ASD. We are somehow avoiding the comorbid conditions from what I can tell. THAT (more than anything else) is what is setting us apart.

From what I can tell, it is more the comorbid conditions of AS than AS that makes us unable to integrate and be independent/succesful/etc

The "giftedness" label is one I have been given so I know it plays too in my own anecdotal view of this world. Is that the case with the rest of us? If so where does one label end and the other begin? THESE are the questions I have to answer before I go about trying to document too much. My goal is to create processes that are useable by the general population versus a very narrow demographic.

I think that it's easy to go there, but I am not sure where "there" is. I am not even sure as to the severity of my ADHD as - due to my brain - I'm able to do well on tests that should measure many of its impairments (to the point that one person who tested me did not think I had executive function impairments at all, even though the test is something I focus easily on and has no bearing on my day to day life).

I also know that when I have had stimulants, it got rid of my distractability and made it significantly easier to choose where to place my focus, but I still had inertia - once my focus was on something, I couldn't shift it off. This was useful in that I was writing for pay, and writing thousands of words every day meant I could get my work done more quickly and paid reliably. But I still managed to overcommit (at a level of commitment that many NTs I knew were still able to keep up with their obligations) and managed to burn out to the point that I was unable to write for over a year afterward. I was also still unable to keep the rest of my life in order (such as paying bills, maintaining a steady day job, and so on.

But I would hesitate to say having ADHD means it doesn't count, simply because so many people on the spectrum also would qualify for a diagnosis (estimates vary widely, but 30-70% comes up), and I mean I know people who have both who seem to do well (school, career).

I think I have mild PTSD at best, and I had most of the the same difficulties - in school, my first attempts at college - before any symptoms I can identify set in.

More than co-morbidities, I think there are impairments that come with ASDs that are not obvious. They measure the social impairments, the repetitive behaviors, the special interests, and so on, but it seems like - for example - executive function and how it manifests in ASDs doesn't seem to get a lot of open attention (although there's awareness about it) as compared to ADHD and executive function. And I think that at a certain point, it is simply difficult for intelligence to overcome the distraction and inertia that executive dysfunction causes. It may come from more than one source (as it does for me) or it may come from a single source (such as ASD or ADHD), but I don't think a diagnostic label (such as AS) can necessarily describe the potential severity of this or other elements that aren't directly addressed in the diagnostic criteria. How much you stim or how strange your voice sounds to NTs or whatever doesn't necessarily correlate to your ability to switch tasks or how much sensory sensitivity you might have.

I also believe that the "mild" label for Asperger's is primarily a reference to the fact that by definition, everyone who is AS experiences no obvious speech delays and is always verbal. The blog post I linked above is by someone who is blind and diagnosed with Asperger's, who is measured as gifted as well, but who is pretty much completely unable to live independently and has voluntarily institutionalized herself to get help with this. She posts rather frankly about the difficulties she's had, and I would hesitate to say it's simply the combination of blindness and AS that causes these problems for her.

Not to dismiss your achievements at all, you've had some pretty awesome successes. If I sound like I am, that is not my intent. I just find it difficult to believe that giftedness alone can counter impairment so readily in all people, and that regardless of one's intelligence, one's impairments can turn out to be overwhelming.

Or as a friend of mine (in medical school) said: "Focus is more important than intelligence."

Last edited by Verdandi on 23 Jan 2011, 5:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

My primary co-morbid is depression - often related to the extraordinary frustration with difficulties in externalizing my thoughts and ideas into real life actions, goals and achievements.

Another thing about co-morbids. Many of the things common among autistics are not actually part of the diagnostic criteria. Trouble with shifting focus, sensory issues, dyspraxia, synethesia - these and others are common among those on the spectrum, but none are necessary for a diagnosis.

This:

And this:

Thanks guys. That's so precisely expressed and I couldn't find the words to do it.

Karla - Your achievements are remarkable, and I'm not doubting you have an ASD. However, most Autistic people could never have achieved what you've done because their condition is simply too severe. I think you fall into the category of your ASD having noticeable symptoms, and providing you with some challenges, but, crucially, you haven't been impeded by what I believe is the single most disabling aspect of Autism: severe emotional immaturity. You must have been relatively mature, for example, to have succeeded in the military, and brought up two children singlehandedly, in your twenties. At that age I had the emotional awareness of a child/adolescent. With all the will in the world I couldn't have got into the army, let alone brought up kids (I still needed someone to look after me!).

Again, definitely not undermining your achievements, but your story is more of an inspiration for Aspies who are mature enough to confront their limitations, rather than most Autistic people who can barely make sense of the world, never mind function successfully in it.

How was the military for you? Most people on here who are aspies (Not sure how many of them have comorbid issues) didn't fair well in the military though most got through it.

I realize that I am an exception and THAT is precisely why I am trying to figure out what the deal is with that. It is my belief that there are two distinct types of Autistic people when it comes to emotions. Those who are more flat (such as Temple Grandin is) and those who are overly emotional. I am one of the flat types. So my physchologist calls me very emotionally immature because I cannot speak to emotions on any "normal" level at all. BUT, I also am not one to act with emotions. My life is driven by logic first and emotions much later. Besides Temple Grandin, look at the Vernon Smith video done by CNBC. He is also clearly gifted and more "flat" emotionally.

When I found myself at 19 years old with a baby and subsequently single with two babies, I had no choice but to grow up or give up. I describe in painful detail how much pain and suffering it was for me to do that. I did it for my kids.



My experience in the military is again different than most people's experience and this is due to the giftedness label. I worked in intelligence at the National Security Agency and Camp Lejuene, etc. I was a Russian and German Linguist and cryptologist in the Cold-War days and did analysis and counter intelligence work after that including in Desert Storm. With the exception of training exercises and drug ops and the war, my job was pretty much in an office being quiet and studying, decoding, or screwing off on the computers. When on exercises, it was sometimes very hard and war was pretty unbareable to me. If I had to do these things more regularly, I think I would not have made it.

If you know Aspies who were in fields other than Intelligence, their lives were much more random and hard to manage.

Last edited by kfisherx on 25 Jan 2011, 2:16 am, edited 1 time in total.

I am not (at all) saying the "giftedness" can counter all the possible comorbid issues that come with Aspergers such as executive funtion disorder. I think Executive Function disorder is nearly impossible to overcome. What I am asserting is that I was blessed with good old fashioned AS and Giftedness without any other undefeatable comorbid conditions. (Most Autistic people have many other conditions to try to comabt.) So the logic is that

IF a person has no coexisting conditions with their ASD AND they are gifted == possible great success despite the ASD part of the label

My Autistic symptoms are actually pretty severe but they can be overcome provided I keep myself from depression, anerexia, and other conditions that I have succesfully beaten down over the years. (yes, I have had both of these at a minimum already) I had to rationalize my way out of them but I was able to do it via my long/realistic goal setting process and my determination.

Sorry for hijacking your thread with another long post but if we're looking into differences between highly successful autistic people and otherwise, I think it's important. I'm going to bold the relevant parts. Note that there's two parts where I'm quoting Jim Sinclair, and in those parts I bolded the entire quote. They're both from an excellent essay called Bridging the Gaps (that's a link).

I think it's fairly easy to go to the "It must be comorbids that separate us" idea. But... I'm not so certain it's all of the issue. I have watched other people with my particular type of autism, and even those of us who can manage a job for a little while, and have none of the energy-sapping and pain-inducing conditions I happen to have... they're rarely wildly successful in typical terms.

My "type of autism" isn't the most common at all, at least not among online autistic people and autistic people who make it to the meetups and conventions. I suspect it might be less rare among people who'd rarely to never make it to those situations, for reasons I'm about to get into.

I've come up with a lot of different aspects of "people like me" that we all or most of us have in common. But I suspect the one attribute that really contributes to our lack of typical success (and may contribute the same way in other autistic people) is the inability to "walk uphill" when learning new skills, combined with starting at a much lower level than most people even think is possible (regardless of whether we can climb higher than people who start off higher, for short periods of time). Sorry to use a metaphor like that but it's very difficult to explain what I mean by this otherwise. And then what might also contribute is the amount of ability to drive ourselves, and that's one area where energy becomes a factor.

So about walking uphill.

The way that I see most people's learning process, is that it's something akin to walking up a mountain (I've actually hiked across mountain ranges before my stamina was so crap so I have a lot of familiarity with this). When you're going up a mountain (in a place where it's possible to hike with little to no climbing), there are steep parts and there are flatter parts. There are even parts where you go downhill for a little while and then you go back upward but go further up than you went downhill (sort of two steps forward one step back sometimes). And that's how I see most people learning skills. They start at a certain elevation, and they make their way upward. They can stay overnight at a place, even set up permanent residence at a certain altitude and rarely or never climb any higher. But it's an upward climb nonetheless.

For me, learning skills is closer to climbing (which I have some but no serious experience with, I was more a tree climber than a rock climber growing up, although my brother took me up some easier rocks) than hiking. And climbing a fairly sheer rock face. I can't hike a little way up, then set up camp for a while and refresh my energy. At least not often. The most I can generally do is hang there and rest on a little ledge or something. When I'm done using the skill, I have to go all the way back down again. If I don't deliberately go back down, I will fall all the way to the bottom and that injures me enough that it's much harder to climb up the next time.

I just strongly, amazingly amazingly strongly, resonate with something Jim Sinclair wrote about a similar process. I quote this all the time but here I go again:

***BEGIN QUOTE***

I taught myself to read at three, and I had to learn it again at ten, and yet again at seventeen, and at twenty-one, and at twenty-six. The words that it took me twelve years to find have been lost again, and regained, and lost, and still have not come all the way back to where I can be reasonably confident they'll be there when I need them. It wasn't enough to figure out just once how to keep track of my eyes and ears and hands and feet all at the same time; I've lost track of them and had to find them over and over again.

But I have found them again. The terror is never complete, and I'm never completely lost in the fog, and I always know that even if it takes forever, I will find the connections and put them back together again. I know this because I'm always connected at the core and I never lose track of my own self. This is all I have that I can always count on, all I have that is truly my own.

***END QUOTE***

So I have a much harder time building on skills I already have than most people do. I may gain a little altitude here and there, but it's never the sturdy ground under my feet that other people have if they are walking uphill rather than climbing. So every time I want to add onto a skill, I have to climb up to the skill level below that skill, and then I have to climb even further. Every single time, I'm putting the building blocks together all over again.

Mind you, I may be able to climb higher than someone who's on flat ground, for whatever reason. But even if I get up higher than they do, it doesn't mean I don't have to go all the way back to the ground again. So for instance, I know people with intellectual or learning disabilities who find it hard to come up with all the words to write a post like this one. So when I am writing this, I am climbing higher than they may ever climb. However, when I go back to the ground, I don't even know what words are, that they ever existed, that they ever could exist, that even the categories that help people use language exist. So I may excel at writing in ways they just can't do. But then their writing and general language ability will be way way way more consistent than mine is. Because they are always starting at the level they live at, they don't have to worry about dropping through the ground the way I do. So I sort of swing both higher and lower than they do in any given ability.

Note also that the one effect I get from learning something is that it becomes easier to climb that cliff. But easier to climb a cliff doesn't mean that I don't have some amount of relearning to do every time I do something. It just means I get more adept at not falling every time I do it and that kind of thing. So there's a familiarity to the climb but I still have to muscle it up there every time I want to do something.

So, on to the second thing we usually have in common: When it comes to any given skill, we start at a lower level than usual. In fact, usually we start at a much lower level than most people realize is possible. They think the ground just plain doesn't go that low because they assume where they started, or a little below it, is as low as it gets. (I'm not talking about low/high functioning levels. Just low/high "elevations"/specific abilities.) This ensures that not only do we have to climb from the place most people start at. No, we have to climb from way way way lower than they started at when they were first learning.



That's a picture I made to illustrate what I mean by this. That shows several different levels of language comprehension (specifically reading comprehension) abilities. I made it to show what I mean what I say when I talk about being "beneath words" and stuff. So there's eight different levels (note: there are probably levels "above" this but I didn't want to get into that, and there's also many levels between these, and different orders they can be in, but I wanted something really simple, not something totally complex to the point of incomprehensibility). The bottom two look like just one. They sort of blend into one another, the lowest level being the black area and the one above it being with all the colored things in it.

So if the elevation of the top level were 8, then 8 means understanding the words. Level 7 means being able to sound out the words but getting no meaning from them. Level 6 means being able to understand the letters but not sound out the words. Level 5 means being able to understand that these are symbols but not being able to know or recognize the letters Level 4 means being able to notice these as sort of separate squiggles but not really understanding that they symbolize anything. Level Level 3 means where they sort of all run together in your mind. Level 2 means where there's this whole connection to the sensory world going on where there are so many other things going on visually and otherwise that you'd never even pick up on the existence of the words, meanwhile all you notice are like color, shape, etc., you don't notice "meaning" or "category" or even really differentiate objects from each other and stuff like that. And level 1 is where even sensory impressions don't make much of a dent in conscious awareness (the white circle is to show that the awareness still exists, though, and there's 'something' there even if you're not perceiving the world in anything like a normal way). There'd be a layer zero but I didn't know how to draw it. I enter it sometimes during shutdowns, I call it "disappearing".

There's also sort of barriers between those layers, each of which requires an extra "push" to cross. There's a barrier between layers two and three. Another between layers four and five, possibly another between six and seven. (There are also tiny ledges at the top of each barrier that can be rested on a little.)

Most people don't seem to be aware of (among literate people) layers below perhaps 5. (There's arguably a difference, but I'm going to be a little arbitrary here because it doesn't matter.) And most people have climbed to layer eight and only ever go to layer seven when really exhausted, possibly heavily drunk or something (I don't know much about alcohol so I don't know if it has that effect.) Autistic people who have climbed to the highest layer may shut down into lower layers than nonautistic people do. But for them, it's shutdown. For me, it's life and I have to climb out of it every time I want to read.

Oh, and I live in layers one and two naturally. If I want to go higher, I have to climb. I shut down into zero, at times into negative numbers I haven't even attempted to describe. If I'm higher up when I shut down I can shut down to anything below where I'm at, it's equivalent to falling or sliding down the cliff until I hit a certain level. Shutdown can also put a cap on the level I'm able to climb to. Much of the time when I'm shut down but able to climb at all, I will find myself hitting level five and then it's just excruciating, horrible pain. I can't convey what it feels like to look at a letter in that state. Because it will stand out to me as a symbol, and my brain will try to place the symbol, and when it does that, and tries to read, and can't, it's just searingly painful. It's like trying to access something that's not there.

Jim Sinclair again has a very memorable quote for me because it speaks to so much of what I have to do all the time:

***BEGIN QUOTE***

Being autistic does not mean being unable to learn. But it does mean there are differences in how learning happens. Input-output equipment may work in non-standard ways. Connections between different sensory modes or different items of stored data may be atypical; processing may be more narrowly or more broadly focused than is considered normal. But what I think is even more basic, and more frequently overlooked, is that autism involves differences in what is known without learning.

Simple, basic skills such as recognizing people and things presuppose even simpler, more basic skills such as knowing how to attach meaning to visual stimuli. Understanding speech requires knowing how to process sounds--which first requires recognizing sounds as things that can be processed, and recognizing processing as a way to extract order from chaos. Producing speech (or producing any other kind of motor behavior) requires keeping track of all the body parts involved, and coordinating all their movements. Producing any behavior in response to any perception requires monitoring and coordinating all the inputs and outputs at once, and doing it fast enough to keep up with changing inputs that may call for changing outputs. Do you have to remember to plug in your eyes in order to make sense of what you're seeing? Do you have to find your legs before you can walk? Autistic children may be born not knowing how to eat. Are these normally skills that must be acquired through learning?

***END QUOTE***

Anyway, those incredibly, below-basic skills, that's where I start at. Perceptually, I generally start at either a level where I'm only perceiving my surroundings in a weird unconscious sort of way, or I'm perceiving them on a very sensory level instead of a conceptual level. This includes my body, which affects all connections I make with my body. Cognitively, all of my thinking at that point is more perceptual than conceptual as well. I'll notice concrete patterns (very different from abstract mathematics-like patterns) and sort of map those out sensorily, and that'll be the extent of my thinking. (Many autistic people who do this don't even refer to it as thinking, because it does not resemble idea-based thinking at all. I see it as a different kind of thinking. But that's just semantic when we're referring to the same thing. So if you hear autistic people saying that they don't or didn't think at a certain point in their lives, they're probably referring to something like what I'm describing.)

Everything I do has to be built up from that level. There's no shortcuts. No hiking up to a different level and camping out. Everything starts at the more-basic-than-basic level, and everything I achieve from there is on the strength of my climbing. (And that's the other thing -- capacity to climb and capacity to hang there. The amount of effort you have that you're able to put into the whole process of climbing these cliffs over and over and over again, every time you need to do something. That's the thing that seems to be much affected by "comorbids" because they can reduce energy or divert your will and effort in other directions.)

So to sum up those two things:

1. Walking uphill on solid ground versus hanging off a cliff in the air.

2. Starting at or above the usual level in each skill, or starting much below that level.

I'm sure that there are a lot of people who have otherwise very different "types of autism" than I do, who still have trouble in those two areas. They're cliff-climbers starting at a very low level, who don't have enough energy to climb far enough out to achieve consistent success.

And I've found it's about as rare as hen's teeth for someone with the first two problems to have the energy required to be a mega-success. And those that do manage it, it tends to happen in very unusual ways that have as much to do with luck as with anything else. Like they may end up in a life situation where they're able to put a particular savant skill they happen to have to use in a way that garners them acclaim for it. But they're still going to have serious problems with day to day functioning and need a lot of extra help to get through the day.

I have a friend much like I am. In fact more similar to me than anyone else I've ever met. Except she's missing most of the "comorbids". She has a job (unless she's unemployed for reasons that don't have to do with her abilities). But she's hanging onto that job by her fingernails. She has severe difficulties in daily living and needs significant amounts of help to get through the day (even to avoid getting hit by cars when she's outside and things like that), which she gets informally through a significant other. And that's where all her energy goes. She doesn't have the time or the ability to accomplish what you've accomplished. (Not that she's unhappy, she just can't do all that. We're both rather happy, just also rather impaired at a lot of things that the world values a lot.)

I suspect that if we were able to look into this more, we'd find that differences in those two areas would account for a lot of whether someone's the kind of runaway success story you are.

Energy levels (and thus physical, cognitive, and psych issues besides autism) can contribute to how much you can overcome that, but there's a point past which people aren't going to have the energy required to do something. Motivation also matters, I bet. I'm ridiculously motivated to the point of doing myself harm at times, and so is the person very like me, so I know that's not it for us. But I bet some people lack that intense drive, and that can mean that even if they start ahead of you, they might not get as far. (And you don't even have to be lazy to be unmotivated. Although I've met someone who had... not exactly laziness, but more like a really dubious motivation to be unmotivated in order to soak up others' pity. Fortunately that seems to be much rarer than stereotype would have it, because I can't stand to be around people like that. OTOH there are plenty of good reasons to simply not want to drive yourself towards that kind of success, which can just have to do with valuing different things in life and setting different goals.)

Intellect probably plays a role with some people, but it too has its limits when bumping up against the two things I described. Below certain skill levels, it's not even going to be useful, because you're not going to have idea-thought in the first place, and intellectual giftedness is generally about being skilled with ideas. (Although, especially when quite young, it's possible to do really well on standardized tests without being that good with ideas.) Personally I think that my cognitive strengths lie heavily into that sensory realm, and as a child some of those skills got me a high score on a test, but as you get older it's harder and harder to do that, hence the drop in scores despite my abilities in that sensory realm getting stronger. (Maybe not even "despite". It could be that my brain was shifting into a mode that favored that kind of thought above all the others. Several people I know who seem to have my type of autism, have similar stories about their test scores starting high and then dropping. Not just the usual way the score drops, but dropping so that by adulthood their IQ was borderline or lower.)

Anyway, sorry again to have taken up so much of your thread (and congratulations again for the really cool interview) but I've been interested in this topic for awhile about what makes that difference.

WOW!! Thank you so much for this long and wonderful insight. No apologies needed. I am honored that you took the time to help me understand,.

The thing is that I am being asked to do interviews and provide insight for others and I feel like I am an exception (as you guys so rightly point out) and as such am NOT the best voice for ASD issues overall. But, of course, since I hit success despite my ASD, I am being asked to articulate what it is that makes me different. I think there is benefit to this so have agreed but I cannot articulate this without understanding the other side and trying to compare from that starting point. The "giftedness" label makes it all just that much harder to understand.. My pyschologist keeps saying to me, "You are really, really (or super) smart" when I ask him why I have managed to avoid under-employment. He stresses to me that my ASD issues are masking my true potential and that I might be in even a better place without them. It is fascinatingto hear these other perspectives.

I'm also ASD/gifted but haven't been able to achieve much in the world of work. I am looking forward to learning from you.

I'm your age, but currently on disability. My goal is return to work.

I have always been under-employed with no map to get out of it.

It is so frustrating to me because I'm aware of being gifted, it's part of who I am, not a side dish. If it weren't for that, I feel I could function better at work, oddly enough.

I hope to stop wishing to be normal and accept the way I am.

Generally, "giftedness" means having academic potential--" having brains."

It's going to take brains to be an Ivy Leaguer for one, and having a non- verbal impairment might not be as problematic in 'Academia land' as there are plenty of diverse people here to begin with- (a good thing ).

I'm guessing "success" would come with the "passion" being marketable. "Success" would also be contingent upon overcoming other ASD type obstacles, such as executive dysfunction.

High Intelligence ( a gifted intellect) would definitely be an asset in overcoming these barriers. The innate talent would be unencumbered less with more cognitive ability; but all this riding on how disabling the autistic expressions are, though, as brought out "here."

I see the correlation.

Thanks for posting your interview, Karla. You have accomplished some impressive things.
I am the mother of a 5 yr old with an ASD. He was diagnosed at the age of 2.5 and we knew something was going on from about 1 yr of age.

You mentioned that your mom said you were an odd child. Do you recall anything about your childhood that would have indicated AS as a child? I am wondering about whether it is beneficial to tell a child about their diagnosis at a young age. Many parents feel that the child should be told right away, but I am wondering if the child will start to use it as a crutch or an excuse to get away with certain things.

Anything you can share is appreciated.