Idiots amongst people with A.S. (esp. in support groups)

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Yeah I know Im just saying that while your expending this effort to hone skills your choices of skills seem counterintuitive.

Its like learning to balance on a moving bycicle and skipping the part where you learn to pedal.. as long as someones pushing your fine but you cant get anywhere on your own.

For your example where you were attacked your only illustrating my point.. luck you cant control but not everything is based on luck.. you tried your hardest to survive and ultimately that is what saved you or you would have given up, passed out and died before the person ever came along.

All anyone can do is their best but when you give up because the progress is too slow or it seems hopeless your not doing your best anymore your wimping out

You remind me in some ways of the gym teachers who were utterly convinced that if I became flexible enough, I would be able to reach a certain point past my feet. I trained for years and years in this, because it was so important for them, and I was never able to do this, even when they pushed me to the point where I was almost dislocating things.

I found out later that my arms are very proportionally short for my body. I also found out that I am incredibly flexible, my flexibility just cannot be measured by standards built for someone else's body proportions.

You assume that there is choice involved in areas where there is not choice. You have certainty that I am as I am in some ways because I "wimped out". You remind me so much of the gym teachers who never bothered to check the length of my arms, and never trusted that I was doing all I could. You don't understand what my capacities in various areas are, but you judge me for their existence, almost as if you could judge things like neurology out of existence entirely.

I have no more "given up because it's hard" than I did when I stopped trying to reach a point physically that was physiologically impossible.

As far as the death thing goes, no, I did not prove your point at all. You have distorted things -- as you seem to do -- by focusing entirely on my part in what happened. But my part was not the only part. There are factors involving the way they decided to kill me, the person who was walking by right then (who was the only person in the vicinity who even had enough good will towards me to do anything for me)... you forget all these ANDs and focus only on one person. That's not proving your point, it's just proving that you distort things around your views of one person's willpower. I maintain it would be egocentric of me to assume that I was the only factor in my survival or even the main one. Had they killed me in a way that was faster, had they been in a position to do so without being noticed, had that person not been there, had that person been more easily persuaded by them or more busy and indifferent, etc... those would just as surely have killed me as if I had given up.

I do my part, and contribute all the effort I need to towards what I need to contribute it to -- for reasons that are complex. You can believe that or not. It seems, from the stuff you're saying, that you may be determined to assume I don't, and to assume you know everything that is relevant about my situation (or that I'd be able to tell you all the relevant stuff in the space of a post to a message board). It would be easier if you took my word for it, instead of assuming all kinds of motivations I'm not even all that capable of having. But we're coming at this from two very different worldviews, so perhaps disagreement is inevitable. As I said, adversity builds character when you survive it, but it built a different sort in me than it did in you.

Im not saying you have to do the impossible its trying to do the impossible that often times results in the most gain.

Sure you couldnt reach past your toes x amount but trying to ended up improving your flexibility (and tolerance for pain hehe).

Again though your subscibing to a doctrine of fate.. what will be will be by chance and theres nothing you can do about it.

Sure thats true to a point but you did have some control over the situation.. control over yourself.

Thats what you did your best with and whether you lived or died you did so in a dignified manner by not giving up.

All too often when faced with an emergency situation and everythings going wrong around them people seem to give up, kick back and think "Ah well whatever happens happens" or even worse " god will save me" and that just ticks me off.

Anyways all Im saying is that striving towards a goal whether its possible or not with all your might is what expands your capabilities even if you dont succeed if you made any progress at all its still a victory.

Im not saying your a failure Im only saying that if you gave up you failed its the only way you can.

When trying something whether you succeed or dont doesnt really matter because if you dont succeed but havent given up and intend to keep trying (even if its some day in the future when you've grown a bit) you havent failed yet.

I dont know if it stopped being important to you because then it wouldnt be so bad to give up or it really wasnt important to start with thats for you to figure out but your not the only one having difficulties and who have considered giving up.. all Im trying to do here is get across the point that thinking "well she gave up so it must be ok for me to do so as well" is just plain wrong.

Its never ok to give up on something thats important to you.

Oh, I'm not resigning myself to fate at all. That would be saying that I have no part in what happens. I am just saying, that having a part in what happens, is not the same as having all parts in what happens. I have a part -- and will do that part to the best of my ability at all times -- but I am not the only part and do not have total control over the results.

I can definitely assure you though that I don't give up on anything important to me. In some cases, though, I take alternate routes to the same goal, or have very unusual goals to begin with. My mind doesn't work the way of "I will set a goal and accomplish it," it works somehow differently than that -- it is more like this:

"I will do what I have to do or should be doing, and I might not always know what that is until it happens, and any goals that might pop up in the course of that may shift around in the meantime."

But it's not easily translated into words. It is not a surrender to fate, and at the same time my life is not a TV movie about striving and striving and striving for an obvious material goal (and ignoring more important things in the process often). I hope that makes sense. I have no particular long-range goal, of, say, "I will learn to become a plumber," it is a lot more general than that: "I will learn what I need to learn, when I need to learn it, and I will adapt to life in various ways, and do what I have to do, and do what I should be doing, certainly to the best of my ability at all times, but I am not always going to know what all these things are until I'm in the middle of them." Translated into goal terms -- find out what I need to do and do it.

So, it is neither really a surrender to fate nor a focus on an over-specific goal throughout time, just as I neither say I have all agency in what happens to me, nor do I say I have none. I suppose I take doing my best as so much of a given that the whole idea of not doing so is... foreign to me and not something I think of right off the bat in others. I have in fact had to learn to put slightly less force into things than my initial inclination is -- because I get both better and more consistent results if I'm not in my customary overdrive.

Thats what I mean about consigning yourself to fate though.. what you have just described is "going with the flow" and only picking and choosing from those minor goals that present opportunities for themselves and are relatively easy.

You gain so little its almost pointless doing things that way.

You need to set a long term and lofty goal or you will never get anywhere.

Striving towards a goal doesnt have to be at the exclusion of all else.. usually that only happens when people are impatient about it or have convinced themselves they have to sacrifice the minor everyday goals in their pursuit of it (you seem to have done the opposite of this which isnt much better).

Figuring out what that long term goal is isnt that hard. Just answer 1 question "If you knew you were going to die in 6 months what would you wish you had time to accomplish?" and get to it.

If you succeed just ask yourself the same question again.

That's the thing though -- I don't live in the symbolic-thought-land that makes it look, in words, as if what I am doing is the opposite of having any major goals. That is an illusion created by the language I have to describe this stuff in. I do have what would probably be considered lofty and major goals.

The picture you have painted of my life is still not really accurate. I accomplish many important things towards those goals (some of which I am sure will never be accomplished in my lifetime) on a regular basis. I do not take the same route you would towards those goals, and the way I live my life is in fact because of those goals. Everything I do is because of those things -- goals, whatever you want to call them -- that I am constantly trying to live up to.

But, they are not easily put into words, because I do not live my life in word-land. So, probably whatever I say, can be turned into making me look rather pathetic and ambitionless, if someone were so inclined to do so. But I accomplish so much in the world that I know that I cannot be what you seem to imagine me as. It is just that, the path I take to my accomplishments, looks superficially very wiggly and goes in many different directions, yet at the same time, is all because of one thing.

It seems though that I cannot get at the non-superficial aspects of this, so any way I state it it could be made superficially to look like something other than what it is. It's a weakness of words, and my goals -- and greatest skills -- are mostly the absolute antithesis of things that words can handle. There are things that I certainly pursue, that are the opposite of minor and empty, and yet if I were to try to put them in words they could sound very minor and empty indeed. That's not the fault of these things, it's the fault of words, if it's anything's fault.

I suppose the reason is that my goals are general. They are about doing the right thing. Doing the right thing is not a minor goal, it's a major one, and in some respects unattainable (such that the most I can hope is to do as close as I can get to the right thing, but I still strive to do the right thing), but it is the closest I can get to a part of what my major goal is. I seriously doubt that "doing the right thing" is the same as "resigning myself to fate and going with the flow", but it does vary enough from situation to situation that I cannot say that "doing the right thing" is always going to be, for instance, something far more concrete (and less lofty?) like learning to paint.

(It's also not the entirety of my goals in life, it's just the only part I can sort-of put into words.)

But this is partly more about the weakness of language and the many ways it can be interpreted.

Also partly about the perceptions of people like me -- I get the sense we often get misperceived as stupid, aimless, out of it, ambitionless, and "just going with the flow", even when that's not a particularly good characterization of us. (I don't know what is, though.)

I've already faced the knowledge that I could die within minutes, several times in my life, and many of my goals are in fact the result of the knowledge that I could die at any time. I try to ensure that I will die secure in the knowledge that I have contributed to the world in the best way that I can. It's given me quite a good idea of what is and isn't important in life -- and I focus on what is the absolute most important in life, and in trying to do that as much as possible, and always doing so to the best of my ability. I know that if I died tomorrow, or in six months, or in six years, I will have been aiming at the right things and doing my best at that.

How you get the aimless emptiness you seem to see in me, out of that, is a little beyond me, because it's the opposite of the truth of what I am doing. Perhaps it's just part of language being a strange thing, when it comes to describing what's important, and possibly I have not described things adequately to begin with. I guess another thing is being a little too practical in some ways -- I don't usually talk about this stuff, I just do it.

Im not making generalizations Im simply drawing conclusions based on what you have said I only have the information you give to go by so if I dont understand you its because you arent telling me what I need to know.

"if I were to try to put them in words they could sound very minor and empty"

Try me.

Not all goals are tangible its true but calling being a moral person a goal is redundant (nearly) everyone wants that its not a goal its a way of living.

If theres nothing major in life you want to accomplish then you dont have a goal its that simple if its something so ill defined you cant explain it then it might as well not exist.. how can you plan to accomplish something you cant even define?

I can define it. I, in fact, know exactly what it is, and pretty much how to get there (or as close as I can to there). I don't think I could even vaguely tell you what it is.

It confuses me how I would have to be able to put a goal in words before doing it. If that were true, I'd never have been able to learn to consistently use language as communication, because, while that was very much a goal of mine at one point (before I accomplished it -- for the most part, there are still obviously things I don't know words for), I would not have been able to do so because I would not have been able to put that goal into language. But, I had that as a goal, and I accomplished it, lack of language beforehand notwithstanding.

And that is part of the problem here -- I am not a native to language, I do not operate in language except when I have to (in order to learn from and communicate with other humans), and I certainly don't organize my life around whether I know the words for it or not (if I did I would be engaged in very unimportant stuff indeed, considering what I do and don't know the words for). I don't really know the words for what I want to do, but I know in an astounding amount of precision what I am aiming at. Being able to tell someone else what it is, is separate from being able to aim at it -- it would not even occur to me, either, that someone would think they are the same.

Does a person need to know the word "target" in order to shoot at a target? I learned how to fish before I knew how to define "fish" or "fishing rod" or "bait" or "reel" in words. The fish that I caught -- and I am good at fishing -- were not ill-defined, I am just not a language native (despite learning how to do more language stuff all the time).

"Does a person need to know the word "target" in order to shoot at a target?"

No but if a person wants to explain to another the concept of shooting at a target, pointing and going "unn unn" doesnt cut it.

Its fine as long as you have a long term goal Im satisfied though I am curious to know what it is.

Kinda bugs me that your hesitant to put it into words though.. embarassing? Afraid that writing it down will make it harder to forget if you fail? Eh Im just being a pain because now youve peaked my interest and Im not a happy camper if I cant scratch the itch

True about the pointing, although there are ways of demonstrating without talking.

Fortunately it's not the sort of thing I'll ever have to explain to anyone else in order to fulfill. It's more a matter of -- I can't yet get words close to the concept (as in, in the vicinity), I'll let you know if I ever do.

It's not particularly embarrassing, and I'm unlikely to forget it whether I succeed or fail, just... yeah, don't know the right words (not even sure I know the wrong words) yet.

Perhaps explaining your plan to get there from here could give an idea of where your going?

Its strange we stumbled upon this because its a good opportunity for you to improve your communication skills.. abstract concepts are often very difficult to adequitely explain.

Im good at charades so just give me a hint