Page 2 of 2 [ 23 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1, 2

Learning2Survive
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 19 Feb 2009
Age: 38
Gender: Male
Posts: 1,777

04 May 2009, 8:29 am

And what effect does your verbal disability have on your life?

Mine means I can't explain things at work and can't keep up a conversation or tell a story to friends - hence they lose interest in me quickly. Forget about dating.


_________________
Some of the threads I started are really long - yeay!


Sora
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 15 Sep 2006
Gender: Female
Posts: 4,906
Location: Europe

04 May 2009, 8:42 am

Yes and no.

Literally, yes, I can't talk sometimes.

Learning2Survive wrote:
Like when you are asked to tell a story you start with the details from the middle, continue with beginning, and end with something that makes people ask "and so what? what happened? what's your point".


This one, no. It's different for me.

Because my TOM is deficient I do not tell people everything they'd need to know in order to understand me fully.


_________________
Autism + ADHD
______
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. Terry Pratchett


Brusilov
Deinonychus
Deinonychus

User avatar

Joined: 30 Mar 2009
Age: 39
Gender: Male
Posts: 330

04 May 2009, 10:19 am

Learning2Survive: From what I've seen you seem to have some of the opposite variations of the problems that I have. AS as a whole has a detrimental affect on my life, regarding as if I actually still wanted to form friendships and a social network. Since these days, I no longer care about the things that AS would limit me from achieving, most of my struggles are rather moot. I am no longer really under any pressure to conform, fit in, or hold myself to an NT standard. I would not accept a cure for AS if it was available, and I have no desire to make any life changes. "Curing" my AS would cancel out my positive traits as well as my negative ones, and I just can not see myself pounding brewskies at the bar with my friends or carrying on like normal people do. I actually delight in being different to the point of being a passive sociopath and I almost take a perverse pleasure in committing the occasional purposeful social faux pas just to test the mettle of others. Purposefully I will not respond to someone else's attempt at small talk or some such minor thing just to see what reaction I will get.

As far as how my arguable verbal deficiencies affect my life; it basically prevents me from carrying out preludes to actual meaningful conversations and stymies my attempts to make small talk. Thus, it hampers my abilities to flirt or carry out complex social functions. I can be quite eloquent and fluent if the conversation is on the right "channel." Unfortunately, it is the "lead ins" that necessitate small talk in order to build up to the meaningful dialogue that give me trouble. Besides that, I have no mental endurance to be in public or a social situation for very long, and mental exhaustion dulls my sharpness.

The combination of verbal disability, lack of mental endurance, and poor social skills or social comprehension definitely make me unable to hold down a job with any facet of social cognition. I am just unable to function at all in a job where I have co-workers or have to deal with customers, multitask, or really do anything besides monitor something. These of course are low-level service occupations that one is expected to have in their youth. I realized in my head that the cost of actually keeping me on as a worker makes me a liability in relation to the task I actually perform. At my old jobs I always used to have incidents or accidents that would quickly pile up and lead to termination. When I am actually trying to complete a task, I am so slow as to be counter-productive, to say nothing of dealing with customers or co-workers. Politeness, obsequiousness, and deference are alien concepts to me. I just have no conversational ability, particularly for the plebian topics such people typically like to discuss. But I am done with these sorts of jobs forever and hopefully I will never have to mix with the "other half" ever again. I hope to find a better sort of coworker in my law career. I hate to say such things but I feel the need to be totally honest and rationalize with myself that I just will never get along with Joe Six-Pack, Nascar watching, Beer drinking, Barbecue guy.

I too lack TOM and thus have no idea what others could be thinking as I am speaking to them. As a boy, I assumed that they knew everything that I knew when in reality they didn't. Looking back, I realized that most of anything I tried to say to anyone was incomprehensible, which I am sure led to much merciless shunning and teasing. In High School, I would write essays or give presentations and I would always include excessive and irrelevant informaton(even though the information was relevant to me.) I don't really know how to streamline things. Teachers would always bash me for being too rococo and florid. I understand that less is more and it is important and tasteful not to overdo something, but I just can't give it in layman's terms, because I don't know how laymen think. I have little symbiosis with the plebians, and I have trouble throwing the ball back and forth with them due to conflicting lifestyles and behaviors.

As far as dating goes; dating is the one thing that I still want to be assimilatory with. Despite my AS, I still have the sexual urges of other 23 year old guys. I have discussed this in detail on other posts, but I don't have the werewithal to invest gobs of time in creating a prolific and rounded social life in order to become a viable and attractive partner. I want to date, and I am looking for a partner compatible with my existing personality, but I am not going to subtract from my free time in order to become a mulitfaceted social animal in order to become a playboy. I could well spend my evenings at the bar or call guys from my old Army unit to hang out with, but my time is better served on other things, such as writing this.(sarcasm)



fiddlerpianist
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 30 Apr 2009
Age: 47
Gender: Male
Posts: 1,821
Location: The Autistic Hinterlands

04 May 2009, 10:49 am

I'm really bad at telling jokes or recounting amusing stories. I leave out punch lines or just get them wrong, and I usually don't set up the story correctly. Often I find myself starting to tell them, realize that I'm doing a bad job, and then let my wife finish the story.



Learning2Survive
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 19 Feb 2009
Age: 38
Gender: Male
Posts: 1,777

04 May 2009, 11:13 am

Brusilov, I still think that people know what I am thinking and trying to say. I am amazed at how people misunderstand me or when they go "You.. what? Wait, Jeff, say that again."


_________________
Some of the threads I started are really long - yeay!


cataspie
Toucan
Toucan

User avatar

Joined: 10 Jan 2008
Age: 47
Gender: Female
Posts: 296
Location: UK

04 May 2009, 11:42 am

I have this problem with speaking as well and poor TOM.
I need my mother to help with things like speaking to the school my son attends my son has AS.



Aimless
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 1 Apr 2009
Age: 68
Gender: Female
Posts: 8,187

04 May 2009, 5:19 pm

My mother, my sister and I are all like this, but we try to have a sense of humor about it-My sister and I decided we were like that county agent character on "Green Acres". Mr. Kimble?