Do you ever wonder if you DON'T have AS?

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I am not very reciprocal with most people...The very few people I am close to are people who interact in odd ways themselves and seem to understand/tolerate my peripheral nature...In the rare event that I do get close to people I can get pretty fixated on them though. I do want friends...just most people/interactions stress me out. It is a rare person that I am able to "small talk" with...but they do exist...most of the time they are pretty awkward themselves...

I have had little trouble with getting into relationships...as in..I have been in plenty...where we got along well...so that is one of the reasons I have doubted I am on the spectrum....though the reasons we got along well might have had more to do with me not being a "typical" female.

Tonight, my partner Flakey made the rare admission that he thinks he might be PDD-NOS...and thinks the same of me.

He does not think he is an aspie...and he does not think that I am one either....BUT he does have Obsessions, social anxiety, executive dysfunction, a high IQ , sensory issues...a sort of unusual brain chemistry...etc...

I am in some ways "lower" functioning than him...He can drive, and has more social flexibility than me...it stresses him out..but he can "make the effort"...

I need to not be so fixated on this stuff...I need to peel myself away from the computer and fixate myself on other things...so it's good if I can convince myself that I am not an aspie..and fixate on my arts and crafts and music.....I have been a weirdo all my life...and being stuck in this cyber-whirlpool does me no good at all.

I wonder, sometimes. First off I haven't been officially diagnosed (I'm in the UK and from what I hear, I don't know how easy that is for an adult - I'm 40) and secondly, being older, I guess I've learned to compensate over the years for my lack of social skills. However, when I think back to what I was like as a child and teen, I recognize the symptoms instantly. (I'm not totally sure I wasn't ADHD as well, and I'm not sure if I grew out of most of that or not. I still have immense trouble finishing things, which I'm told is an ADHD trait, but it's not something I've looked into in any great depth.)

(Edited a few minutes later: I just took a look online and did something called the Jasper-Goldberg test, and came up as 68, moderate ADHD. Which does not, of course, a diagnosis make, but it's interesting. I think the thing is I think of myself as a slow-paced person because I'm not always physically 'on the go', although I was when I was a little kid of 6...but my mind is another matter entirely.)

I'm better at getting on with people than I used to be. I now know, as I didn't at age 5 or even age 12, that taking a book up to someone and showing them an article you're interested in (and hope they will be too) isn't generally a good way of starting a conversation. But I still have times when I'd rather do that than indulge in the social smalltalk other people seem to like. Again, I still have obsessions, I just know not to talk about them all the time. I still have sensory issues, but as an adult I can, say, walk out of a room that's getting too full of people (or not go in there to begin with) in a way I couldn't as a child. How you are, and how you appear to the world in general, are two very different things.

I have since I was 16, my mother has told me for the last decade that I have AS since I fit some of the characteristics. I read about the symptoms of PDD-NOS and felt that I fit the criteria more than I did AS. I think that I have a little bit of both, but then again I technically shouldn't even be speculating on stuff like that because that violates some unwritten NT code that forbids me from doing some sort of self-diagnosis.

For about the first two years after I was diagnosed with Asperger's, I didn't believe I had it. This came from one of the three psychologists/psychiatrists I'd seen that didn't believe I had it. He was the second of the three, and felt I empathized too well with people to have Asperger's. He agreed that I was very different, and was the one who administered the tests that would ultimately be used to prove I had Asperger's, but continued even beyond that to say if I did have the syndrome, I was a unique case. My IQ was too high, my thought speed was nearly double that of your average person (gets tired about twice as fast too), I seemed to treat animals and inanimate objects with about the same humanity as I would a person, and caught on to a wide variety of emotional cues, which would be a violation of the most important distinction between aspie and neurotypical, a lack of empathy.

I shared that same viewpoint until I met a very clever psychologist later in life that made me realize that I wasn't always this good at reading emotional cues. He posited this, then made the revelation that I'd managed to circumvent the most crippling aspect of Asperger's through cold reading. I'd unconsciously memorized the wide variety of facial changes and body language a person could have and learned to deduce their meaning through other clues and likelihoods. As for everything else mentally different between me and an aspie, that was probably a completely different neural situation, and also very likely the reason my diagnoses proved frustrating to my several past therapists. I probably wouldn't have figured out cold reading if my mind wasn't unusually fast to begin with.

After that, I've come to terms with having Asperger's. I do, and I don't doubt it anymore. I'm also weird in some other way that makes my mind race like a horse on a racetrack. But that's for some other psych to figure out.

I'd suspected I might have it for a while, but doubted it for various reasons. I knew my thought processes were different than most people, and that I had some abilities and traits that were vaguely autistic and otherwise impossible to explain. Then I talked with some people who did have it, and asked a few specific questions, and I knew beyond any doubt. It's like suddenly my whole life made sense. For once, I knew what the hell is wrong with me, and that there are people out there who understand me and won't think I'm crazy if I talk about these things. And, at last, I have somewhere I belong.