Did you hypothesize about your social problems before AS?

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Before discovering AS, I was totally in denial. I thought of myself as being normal and everyone else as being somehow altered or flawed. I thought everyone else just didn't feel things the way I did. I was better, smarter, etc. and nobody else got it. I was convinced that I was the only real human being on earth. Later I attributed my differences to upbringing.... Parents are socially inept/shy, perhaps I am too. I was also diagnosed with a short list of anxiety disorders, and I figured that somehow that was the sum total of my problems.

Maybe it was drugs. I did a lot of them in high school. Burned out brain cells? Older brother has depression and alcoholism. Am I following the same course?

It took an extended relationship, the birth of my son, and a ton of independent research to finally wake me the hell up to reality of my condition. It has been damage-control ever since. Still hypothesizing too. Trying to discern the formula that shapes my interactions, because these things don't seem to happen naturally. Maybe one day. Still just hypotheses at the moment

Your sentence structure and word usage is definitely "odd" in today's society; it's more grammatically correct and you use more precise words rather than stock phrases. I don't mean this to be commentary on society's decline in grammar as much as pointing out your pedantic usage of language. Your language usage is one of the reasons I highly suspect AS in you. You and I have a lot in common in that area and others, and most evidence points to AS for me, so it seems likely it does for you as well.

Thank you for your honesty.

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*takes a breather*
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I wonder if someone neurotypical could naturally have pedantic language usage similar to AS (Because they wanted to appear 'intelligent'. Or perhaps they were schizoid? Or perhaps they were adopting intellectual habits to give off an intellectual air?)? If that's the case, then I'd imagine they could speak in a normal way if they wanted. I wonder if I could 'prove' that?

Fo' example, n***a, I started typing on dis keyboard and b' pretending i'm one of dah gangstas to be showing off my bling bling actin skillz that some foo with AS can't. i tink.

Last edited by swbluto on 24 Apr 2011, 12:55 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I still don't think it's being negative to point the evidence for a problem and suggest a path towards a solution.

Unfortunately, most of the people I have to get along with are wedded to the "try the same solution again, but do it harder" sort of approach, and they really don't appreciate it.

Your post made me literally face-palm. Please do not do that again. My brain hurts.

As for using "normal" language when needed, I can do that too. I've learned to talk in a mid-west US colloquial accent because it seems easier for people to relate to. I can and generally do speak in a fashion befitting my audience.

but, like, isn't that hard for those asparagus syndrome ppl? Like, i swear, that thing ppl call "theory of mind" makes that totally hard, right? Because, I heard, probs with like "theory of mind" like make it hard to imagine how to think like someone else and, like, I heard it like makes it hard to talk like them, too. Like, isn't that right?

Also, like, its the words you say, too.

(Who wants to play "Guess the stereotype" game?

Of course, those could just be surface affectations that anyone could easily mimic.)

Last edited by swbluto on 24 Apr 2011, 9:55 am, edited 1 time in total.

Any subsequent damage resulting from said face-palm was unintended and I cannot be held financially liable for any injuries requiring immediate medical assistance.

This is what I mean. I can often guess what other people are thinking, but that comes from my study of psychology and sociology rather than any innate ability of mine.

Oh oh, can I jump on the bandwagon? Do y'all think I have it?

*shrugs*

I always thought my lack of ability to make friends had to do with moving around all the time. My family was very unstable, and every time we had a bill we couldn't pay, or my mother had a new boyfriend, we would move somewhere else so we could pretend to the neighbors that this was the same "dad" we'd had all along. I went to 20 different schools before I graduated, and at every one of them I had the same problems. The cliques were already formed, and I had nowhere to fit into. If I came home from school and told of being bullied, most of the adults would say, "They're just testing out the new kid." And it seemed I was *always* the new kid. Remember that old Eagles song, "New Kid in Town"? I *hated* that song!

But then... I also started noticing kids newer than I was, coming in and making friends. Sometimes the newer kids even picked on me! So it had to be something else, not just being new....

Oh, I've got it! It's my weight! Or my front teeth. Or my clothes from the Goodwill. Or my lack of athletic ability. Or my early puberty. Or my straight A's. Or my name, which was easy to make a joke out of. No. Those were not the reasons the bullies targeted me. Those were just the handles they grabbed a hold of.

I was referring to the sub-cultures whose language I was adopting, the first being ghetto Rap culture and the second being valley girl culture, and also your admission of "I can and generally do speak in a fashion befitting my audience." which seems uncharacteristic of aspergers. If we can both speak in a different way, using a different vocabulary and grammar from another sub-culture, than that implies we don't have the rigidity in language usage typical of aspergers. It's quite possible that we're "more verbally sophisticated than the average NT", but NT regardless, and any seeming "Aspie-esque" qualities are solely due to differences in sophistication that make the sophistication more similar to that of AS. A test for this theory would be do you have the capacity of emulating another sub-culture's language that's "not above your verbal complexity"? (I.e., I'm not going to pretend I have the verbal sophistication needed to emulate the French post-modernist waxing that Jacques Derrida epitomizes. My verbal working memory only appears to be 4 words, after all. ;-P)

Maybe I'm entirely wrong, though.

Sorry, the two sentences of my post which you quoted were meant to be separate ideas. My choice to put them in the same paragraph was confusing.

As for the rest of your post, I see the ability to imitate other subcultures as a sign of AS, rather than a contradiction of it. My speech is still rigid, but I have several rigid structures I can choose from. The important facet is that they are all manually constructed. I do not think in the dialect I adopt when speaking to people; I translate to it. To even write like I am currently, I must stop and sound it out in my head to make sure it is correct. I try to make sure what I'm typing would sound correct when stated by someone else. I know the grammatical rules of sentence structure, but the articulation of my thoughts is by no means "natural." To me, that is rigid language use.

I seriously just thought I was a mean, evil and selfish person by nature. I thought I was being lazy/not working hard enough like other people as how my parents and teachers understand it.
Now i know that i just have asperger's and ADHD.
Glad to be released from feelings of self-hatred.

I used to think it was because I was intelligent, and my more "cerebral" interests isolated me from my peers. But it didn't explain why other intelligent people could get on with other people better than I could.

I also though it could be due to my sheltered religious upbringing. I just didn't have much in common with people who had a more normal upbringing. But that didn't explain why other people with religious upbringing could interact better than me.

Interesting, I've kind of noticed for me as well, as I'm not really able to just rattle off a sentence within 3 seconds like everybody else and I often have to correct grammatical mistakes in mid-sentence, which might not be noticeable in writing because it's been corrected, but it certainly is noticeable in real life conversation.

What I'm describing sounds like it could be better faulted to something other than aspergers, however. Were you a late talker? I've been wondering if late-talking might be related to long-term sentence construction abilities, as it seems late-talking is associated with under-education and under-employment outcomes which I'm sure must be related to "real life" verbal ability in some capacity (The impoverished social outcomes might not necessarily be true in your case, but seems like it's going to be the probable case for me with my unusual social difficulties that's not due to confidence or "bad intentions".). I think we can agree "verbal IQ" is not really a good indicator of your "socially acceptable verbal ability", in some cases.