Are you ALMOST an Aspie?

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Interesting discussion. I met a chap the other day who's running a business to help Autistic adults. I stood there chatting with him, then said, I'm AS. His mouth dropped open. Nice eye contact, he said. He said he didn't know much about AS. He helped mostly HFA's.

Some people here just don't understand spectrum.
I see it this way. Autism is a pond. If you have AS, you might be only in as far as getting your feet wet. Or even just one foot wet. Lower Functioning Autistic people would be over their heads, or barely able to stay afloat. Some of us who are AS are in up our knees, or waist deep.
I have the tell-tale 'signs' (hate the word symptom) and most days I'm able to keep going without any problem. BUT if I'm tired, or into overload, I'm aware of how quickly the 'problems' come back.

Yes.

As I understand it, Asperger's and autism are an assortment of characteristics, traits and sensory perceptions on a broad spectrum. People on the autism spectrum can have various permutations of 'signs' to a greater or lesser degree. Then there is the NT spectrum and at some point the two spectrums merge together, so there will be some people who are only just NT with AS traits and AS people with NT traits. To take Prof_Pretorius's pond analogy, if the autism spectrum is the pond, the NT spectrum is the land around the edge, gently sloping into the water.

Here on WP we do seem to get hung up on labels and working out where on the spectrum we fit. For myself, I am too old to have been diagnosed as a child and the label or acronyms don't matter to me. What matters is that somewhere I can find other people who can relate to my experience and who I can feel comfortable with. None of us experience the autism spectrum in quite the same way, even if we are roughly at the same place on it. For example, I may respond to being waist-deep in the autism pond quite differently as compared to Prof_Pretorius, who could be standing in the water right next to me.

I think it is possible to learn to over-ride some AS instincts as we grow up, even to the extent that it becomes second nature, and it appears that we slide along the spectrum, nearer to the NT end. I suppose you could think of it as like an onion adding layers, so that the core or kernel remains the same but beomes more hidden as the onion matures.

Having been on WP for a month now I have been wondering if people who are more mildly AS (like me) do better without a diagnosis. I only have my undiagnosed experience to go by, but I do wonder whether I would have tried to 'fit in' (and developed some reasonable NT social skills in the process), if when I was growing up, I could have had a name and recognised condition to account for my weirdness.

I think that then raises a question of precisely what a "need" is, though. I've not sought a diagnosis, but knowing I'm AS seems to be helpful in dealing with my OCD (well, we'll see - not making much progress so far, TBH, but at least in theory it ought to help). In my general life, I was doing OK, but knowing more about Asperger's is, long term, going to be helpful I think. It's nice to have an explanation of why I was fired from every job I've ever had that didn't involve sitting infront of a computer not interacting with anyone. A better understanding of the sensory issues I have is, to a small degree, also being helpful, and knowing that I need to trust my wife's judgement over my own in personal interactions is also helpful. Do I "need" all those things? Those pieces of understanding? Probably not, I'd muddle by. But I think a better understanding of why you do the things you do, and how you can best get through life, what to focus on and what to avoid is really helpful. I wasted years of my life trying to get into fundraising. I now understand why I failed. Had I a diagnosis in my earlier years, despite the fact that on a surface level I was doing OK, I could have avoided that wasted time and instead focussed on finding a career in a field I might actually have succeeded in.

People often say this like labels are a bad thing (I got that from my dad last week: "You have to be careful not to be labelled."). I like labels. They provide a convenient shorthand to explain on a cursory level precisely what you're talking about. "I have Asperger's," is a lot quicker than "I have a pervasive developmental disorder on the autism spectrum which is far milder than what most people would consider autism, which means I have great difficulty reading facial expressions and body language, it is difficult or impossible for me to look people in the eye, I get consumed by obsessive interests, I stim which means I make repetitive motor movements in response to stress or excitement, my muscle movements are imprecise and my coordination is bad, and I find it very difficult to understand or take part in the normal back and forth of social conversation, amongst other issues." What's to dislike about being able to use a quick label instead?

Well spoken. Here on this Forum, you would think we throw labels into the rubbish.
We're all on different paths together.

Yes

I'm well off, and don't need "support" - long-term employment, happily married with kids. But, I'm definately not NT. It was only when I started dating that I began to really realise just how different I was. The signs were always there, but I was too caught up in my own head to see them!

At first, I considered a diagnosis out of curiosity, to find out what I was. I think it's part of the "systemizing" - labeling, putting things into neat categories. Making everything exact, and right. Learning more about AS meant I learnt more about myself - I thought I had great eye contact (hard to compare, when you aren't looking at other's eyes...). I didn't realise how much my inflexibility about some things was bothering others. I finally linked together all the little things that made no sense through my life.

After all that, I realised that I didn't need a diagnosis as long as I wasn't having trouble. I know I'm not NT, maybe I'm not AS - I'm definately 'AT'* though .

(* invented term alert!)

Since then, I've noticed a lot more comments about my lack of empathy, diminished ability to "read" others, my inflexibility. I can recognise when my obsessions are "obsessive" rather than normal. I've actually been asked by someone close to me to see a psychologist, which isn't arranged yet but will likely happen in the next month or two. So I guess I may find out anyway!

QFT

I must be almost aspie or I wouldn't have been diagnosed. I could be above it most likely because I was slower than other aspies but was placed in that catagory anyway. I seem to be more autstic than AS but I don't have any or ever had any of the sterotypes auties had. I don't think I lined things up or flapped my hands or have good memory as auties do.

I don't feel aspie because I can change my routines, I'm flexible to an extent, I can do eye contact (not true eye contact though), I can stop what I'm doing to do soemthing else now, I can talk to people off and on without a problem, my sensory issues aren't that high and I don't have sensitive hearing, smell, and taste, and fluorescent lights aren't an issue for me. I can' even hear them or see them flicker most of the time. I don't have a photographic memory.

Does it really matter if your nearly a Aspie or not!.

If your on this forum and want to know about thats enough for me.

Diagnosed or undiagnosed, family, friends and/or anyone and everyone who knows an autistic person, can be affected.

We all need to learn and know, as we can learn so much from each other.

That is basically what I have done. I do not appear odd or out of place. However, it has taken years of observation and imitation.

- sensory sensitivity – sound, ouch

- special interests – jack of all trades, master of none

- social anxiety (and social exhaustion, LOL) - exhaustion, yes, anxiety, no

- stimming and tics – so many

- not good at expressing myself in a social way (tendency to sound upset when I'm not, lack of emotion, etc.) – not, can read people like a book and express well even when I don’t feel it (aka disinterested)

- adherence to routine – love consistency but need variety

Someone can’t be a little AS even though there are levels, which is why I think AS is different than autism. Either you obsess over irrelevant human interaction or you don't. An NT brushes off rudeness, an AS thinks too much.

Brain differences, different reactions to stimuli, like an allergy.

I see so many things here I “suffer” from, but I “get” people. So no matter what, I am NT, but my quirks make me accept and the most normal person I know. When we met I had no idea about AS, but his quirks melded fine with mine.

You are one or the other in spite of the melding.

He has great accommodation skills in public, but when at ease, he is who he is; PERFECT for me!

mmaestro,

I agree, the diagnosis explains your weaknesses and your strengths (social retardation to the awesome ability of fixating on one thing). If you were having trouble with maintaining employment due to the former social difficulties [for example], obviously, knowing your weakness in said area will help you immensely in the future, and applying it retroactively, it would have helped you if you knew it sooner.

There's people who show autistic tendencies, even if it doesn't affect their life at all [compared to "normal" people]; said people most likely won't meet any diagnostic criteria, for good reason. Whether the tendencies they show are due to a "mild" form of the disorder or some personality characteristic doesn't really matter when we share the common theme.

On the Internet AS test, I scored 99, putting me in the middle between AS/NT. I have some of the traits, but probably wouldn't qualify for the full diagnosis.

I have no way of knowing whether I really am or not...unless I win the lottery and can afford to go see a doctor.
I have lots of things in common with many of the people on this site and that is why I am still here.
I will sometimes say that I identify with people who are on the autistic spectrum, but will not say I have anything that I am not officially diagnosed with.....and dealing with the jaded, impatient, intolerant folks who I have met who who work in the mental health care industry (i have met only a couple, and the both were..)...I think it is unlikely that i would receive a diagnosis.

For quite some time I have been considering the possibility that I may have AS. Since first hearing about it I found it very easy to sympathise with many of the symptoms. This lead me to research the condition, whereby I found the greatest descriptive emphasis in seems to be on unfaltering obsessions about very narrow interests. I didn't think this could be readily applied to me: I'm fascinated by just about everything; and upon finding a new topic of interest, it will dominate my thoughts only for a matter of days, before settle back down to my normal state.
Despite becoming quite sure that my initial tentative self-diagnosis was just me seeking an 'excuse' for what I perceived to be oddities in my character, I carried on with the research, and came across Wrong Planet. As I read, I see-sawed back and forth between positive and negative self-diagnoses. Eventually I found this discussion and read about online Asperger tests and entered those words into a Popular Search Engine (who don't like people using their name as a verb).

I came first to this one which stated an Asperger threshold of 32. I scored 31. It doesn't get any more almost than that.

Next I took this test, which I found much broader in scope than the first. It assessed me, if memory serves, "very likely" to have the condition, and produced this graph:



I then spent several hours utterly unable to stop myself reading a thread called You Might be an Aspie if.. and often thinking, "This person is exactly like me."

I am now leaning quite strongly toward "Aspie positive", but it is not in my nature to commit to such a decision, based on these data (I was dissatisfied with the phrasing of some questions in both tests).

I am officially diagnosed, but I like to think I have made enough improvement that, if one were to diagnose based on symptoms present now, I may not qualify or may qualify only for PDD-NOS. Then again, my social skills still have quite a ways to go.