Did you think/hope that you'd someday turn "normal"?

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I really enjoy your wit but I’m pretty sure you’ve heard that before as you have: “That not everything’s a joke.”

What are the sensory issues if you live in a less technologically advanced time? Our hyper senses developed to save ours and our groups “proverbial behinds”. Yes, the person with the hyper sensitive hearing walks point followed only second by the person with a hyper sensitive nose...

Dulled senses may be great now in a time of constant ticking and buzzing but less than 150 years ago they got you killed.

It’s been an interesting ten days WP but its back to RL now. Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!

Would I take a pill to eliminate meltdowns, shutdowns, catatonia, hypersensitivity, inability to grasp abstract concepts, difficulties, dependent on fixed routines, perceptual difficulties, dependent on others to look after self, inability to control physiology, echolalia, being extremely withdrawn from everyone, being nonverbal? Hell yes.

Tell me which of the above should I want to hang on to? You may be aware of the problems of autism, but you seem to obviously want to gloss them over. And they don't just pertain to my type of autism, they pertain to actual autism period.

See your idiology, and we've seen it here before plenty of times, is like the polar opposite of Autism Speaks and it's just as detrimental in its own way.

I think there should be a new category for people like you. Something that's not in the DSM. Something like, rainbows and sunshine spectrum gift.

I do almost everyday

I wish I knew more about life than just movies and art stuff

I wish I was normal and not so weird and bizarre

It would have been nice to be normal, and be able to relate to people.

Only recently have I gotten okay at relating to people.

It's just a pain in the tushey, godammit!

But it is nice to be Wolfie when others want you to just suck it up and join the human race.

My mother's boyfriend actually used to implore me to "join the human race."

Yes, I did. Between ages 10-14, long before I got my diagnosis (or even knew that autism existed), I assumed it was an age thing and that I'd automatically snap out of it and become normal in adulthood. In my mid-teens, I realised it wasn't going to happen on its own, that I needed to work at it, so I began consciously copying NT behaviour (eye contact, conversational styles, etc) until I started being able to mask my autism so well that not even psychiatrists could tell. At my formal diagnostic interview two months ago, the clinician said that they've only recently realised just how many adults there are who appear normal but are actually concealing autism.

I think your opening post was brave You've admitted to having feelings that clearly someone has reacted negatively. You were honest and open, something people of all nurotypes find hard to do.

Being able to share problems with others who will at least try to understand, is something most people have in real life. Finding somewhere to do this online has been life changing for me and I think for others too, as has reading about other peoples difficulties.

Clakker has been quite critical of our apparent lack of Autism Pride. His pride includes not putting anything of his status on his profile. This does not normally bother me, people should only share what they are comfortable with but I find it hypocritical in someone lecturing on being proud when they don't say what they are. I also don't think he had any idea what he was talking about.

I'm starting to wonder if being diagnoses young is a good thing. I was diagnosed at 42 which felt late, but all those things that go wrong, had been going wrong for 42 years, so getting an answer was great, I'm an Aspie All those things that turn out to be Aspie, I thought of as just me. To have not accepted them, would have been to not accept myself, so I accepted them. I'm indecisive, obsessive, petty, and self-centred. I'm not listing the ones people think I am, like unfeeling because I'm not. But I'm also kind, honest, and loyal, I'd make a great Labrador I think of those things as me, just as an NT person doesn't think to themselves 'hey I make quick decisions because I'm NT'

My point is, sorry I'm rambling, that for me taking away the Aspie would terrify me because the person left wouldn't be me, but being on here has shown me that our experiences are all very different and therefor so are our feelings.
Although I have a lot of integration issues, many on here have problems that I do not share and difficulties I have not had to struggle with so I think we're all answering the question differently and that's ok

That's a very good point. There's a great deal of my own thinking/hoping that I would one day become "normal" that was encouraged by mental health practitioners. My autism wasn't identified until I was 45, but my persistent anxiety and depression were very easily diagnosed. Now that I look back on it, almost all of the counsellors and therapists who I saw were actively promoting the idea that once the depression and anxiety were treated, the "normal" me, concealed by mental illness, would be revealed. For all of that time, they were, in effect, actively encouraging me not to accept my autistic traits as an innate part of who I am, albeit out of ignorance rather than malice.

However, I do also agree strongly with the points made by EzraS. For example, my poor executive functioning interferes greatly with my ability to get things done which I want to do. Many of these things that I wish I could get done more easily are independent of any expectations placed upon me by the society around me, and are not being hindered in any way by other people or institutions, only by my innate autistic traits. While I do accept that these traits are innate and should not be a source of guilt, that does not mean that I am necessarily proud of them or happy to have them.

Even if the world around me were to come to accept my autistic traits as simply another flavour of "normal", there are some traits which would be no less frustrating to me, just as many non-autistic people have personality traits which frustrate them or make them more susceptible to mental illness.

I thought I was "normal", it was everyone else who had a problem.

Yes, in the past I had internalized ableism. I think I've gotten better with that now. People shouldn't be judged for the wrong attitudes they had in the past. And I put normal in quotation marks for a reason. I know there's no such thing as normal. But that's how I felt back then: like I was different from others, and wanted to be like everyone else.


Thank you.

I have been wondering about this "aspies are not good at grasping abstract concepts" for some time now...I've read this at numerous places, but this doesn't seem to fit anything else. Many (not all) aspies are very good at maths, physics and computer science, which requires lots of abstract thinking. In computer programming you have to form abstractions out of real world objects. Then there are also aspies who are very good with literature and arts, which are way less formal than STEM.

Also, when I read this message board, most postings seem to be about abstract and difficult concepts like disorder, empathy, intelligence or even abstract concepts (yeah, I love recursion, which is a concept again ). In fact, there is much more talk about concepts than with usually with NTs (who talk about other people, the weather, the tv and something like that).

Also aspies seem to love generalization (yes, I'm aware that this itself is a generalization), many threads here are about "is there some connection between x and y" or "I noticed a general pattern in something". Some aspies are described as being very good with finding patterns (doesn't that involve some kind of abstraction?).

To summarize this...many threads here are really, really abstract. How does that fit? Isn't someone writing blog posts theorizing about they cannot grasp abstract concepts contradictory in itself?

It's probably another one of the contradictions of autism. Some autistic people may have trouble grasping abstract concepts, while others may be good at that.

I really sucked at grasping abstract concepts until recently.

Same with sarcasm and irony. I was the "classic stereotypical Aspie" in that sense.....

My bad. I am unable to grasp abstract concepts. Especially mathematics. Although I had abstract philosophical concepts in mind at the time.

A list like I made out or any list of things people experience because of autism is usually some of these things but not necessarily all of them are what comes with being autistic.

The point I was trying to make is autism is indeed a disorder because of the neurological and cognitive problems it causes. Rather than it's supposedly only viewed a disorder because society mistakenly calls it a disorder.

It's like there are some if not many who want autism to be viewed as someone who's very smart and creative but simply happens to behave differently. Therefore it's supposedly not a disorder at all, it's just a difference. It's supposedly not a disability, it's just being differently abled.

I think people who have that view of their autism should call themselves something else since they obviously want to remove themselves from any of the clinically negative aspects of having autism.

What would happen to people like me if autism is no longer viewed as a disorder or disability? And I don't mean just level 2 and 3 autistics. There are many level 1 autistics who still need the substantial support that comes with having a disability.

Just like there are people with cerebral palsy who are capable of walking and running, while there are others who can't walk at all.

^^^ The above is an illustration of why Autism is called a "Spectrum" these days.

Cerebral palsy is a spectrum as well I suppose from being mild to severe. The problem with a term like spectrum is it seems to conjure mental images of rainbows and eliminates unwanted words like disorder and disability. I don't think I've ever heard of CP being called a spectrum or there being an "aspie" version of CP. If you have cerebral palsy, you have cerebral palsy, period.