Me without the Asperger's ?

Post Reply New Topic

Have you ever had a glimpse of someone that you thought you might be like if you DIDN'T have Aspergers

This week I got a glimpse of what I MIGHT have been like without Aspergers and it gave me a great feeling of inner peace.

I had dinner with a close family friend of 20 years.

I tutored him in math when he was in High School and we both joined Mensa (try not to all scream at once) at the same time and with the same score.

We were undergraduates in two of the top universities in the World and then the divergence.

He embraced and thrived in the Corporate world (global consulting) and to watch him with people is like experiencing the best poetry, art or symphony music. It is really quite beautiful (and rare in my experience) to see a gifted person whose social intuition matches his/her intellect.

But we communicate perfectly, he has (expresses) no difficulty with my occasional diatribes because our communication is in fact remarkably Autistic!

We can spend 30 minutes (like a tennis match) exchanging information/details/facts.............and he doesn't get tired of it!

Perhaps I should seek out and spend more time with gifted NTz, as they seem to be the ONLY people with whom I can communicate with any modicum of rapport and without being totally bored

Last edited by Blindspot149 on 21 Jul 2010, 9:54 pm, edited 3 times in total.

I honestly struggle with separating my condition from who I am.

I'd have a hard time imagining, since autism affects so many different parts of my life (not just social). I do know someone who reminds me of what I'd be without institutions and a few related things in my past, but she's autistic too (and I remind her of what she'd be with those things in her past, which she narrowly escaped).

As far as gifted nonautistic people go, I have virtually nothing but terrible memories of gifted programs and the people I met within them. Imagine being bullied by people with enough brainpower at their disposal to mess with your mind in the most intricate ways, and watching them do so to others who don't fit in. It was just like regular school only worse. Not that I think they're any less ethical than most people are (except for the bit where they get told they're better than everyone else and that invites narcissism), but I certainly didn't experience them as fundamentally more like me than nongifted people were. In fact some of my best social experiences have involved people who had, or were perceived to have, intellectual disabilities (not that those experiences are uniformly wonderful either, but at least they grasp what ableism is). Then again I don't identify much with giftedness at all, because I think both my overly high and overly low IQ scores really just reflect developing in a different order, rather than being ahead of other people in any uniform sort of way.

I was in gifted classes throughout school, and many of my classmates never missed an opportunity to remind me that I wasn't smart, that I didn't belong and that they were better than me. I'm sure if I met up with them now, they'd still have that opinion. I have no idea who I'd be without autism - I'd probably have different interests, made different choices in life, have different values - basically be a completely different person.

Um, me without Asperger's... I don't think so! I'd just as soon give up my soul as I would give up the source of my humor, what my friends see in me and FINALLY being able to accept myself THOROUGHLY and without reserve!! !

Without the autism, I'd be a completely different person, with different tastes and interests, from what I have, now. No, thank you. I think I'll pass, thankyou.

I don't know. If I'd been born without AS, I'd be a completely different person, so different that I don't think I could recognize someone who is like I would be. It's one of those "for want of a nail" things... everything just snowballs; one change and everything's different.

I'd be a completely different person, so I have no idea what my life without AS would be like.

In some parallel universe, that version of myself exists, but I have no idea what she's like.

I seem to be the only one in this thread so far to have met an NT that seemed like an NT version of himself/herself

How fascinating. It depends on your definition of Asperger's, of course. Simply missing one of the diagnostic criteria would do it for one definition, which would yield a BAP who was essentially me, with one minor change. (Which one? Impairment? No delay in speech or self-help skills? Special interests? I guess, going with the requirement for impairment to be present, I'd actually be a worse person; it got me out of a bad situation by making it so bad it wasn't ignorable anymore.)

Or if you say that I have to be normal-- ah, but it doesn't work that way. There are NTs with special interests, introverted NTs, unwashed NTs, fashion-challenged NTs... I don't think there are NTs with the trace of synesthesia (I'm not synesthetic, but I don't know what else to call it when I have colored days of the week and such things), or NTs with the same sensory stuff, so we can go with that, but those aren't in the diagnostic criteria...

Hmm.

Suppose I had been NT. Let's just go with a sort of "know it when I see it" definition, and say that I would have been extraverted (I might still have been; I was a lot less introverted before some stuff happened). I would definitely have been good at it. I would be less clumsy (gross motor delays are characteristic). I would probably be very close to my mother, and we probably wouldn't... ah, but maybe that's just our personality clash. Or is it? I can't tell. Suppose it is. I wouldn't understand my dad, so I'd be estranged from both parents, but would see nothing wrong with lying and deceiving them to make them think I loved them...

I would never have met the friend I value most. I would never have become interested in my special interests. I would not have played Kingdom Hearts (I played it because I read about it on a website related to a special interest I would never have discovered if I hadn't been bored and lonely playing videogames), so I would never have read up on DID and Benjamin Rush and etc. However, I've always thought it might be interesting, and I was given a chance essentially independent of any Aspie traits, so I might have become interested.

I don't know whether I'd still read fine print when I came across it. But, for instance, I read TOSes and Privacy Policies, I read the ingredients lists on the food I eat...

Would I be as wary? No. I would be more cavalier risking life and limb by walking outside, or eating a lollipop. I certainly wouldn't consider the likelihood of my best friend ever suddenly up and betraying me, and plan for that eventuality. (It's more likely that another person will, anyway.)

I'd have more friends, I'd be more social, and with my knowledge of psychology I would then be a force to be reckoned with. (Since it was once an unfulfillable longing that I had for a long time, I assume that I would have learned it anyway, even if it weren't a special interest.)

I would probably still write, and I would definitely be better at characterization (maybe worse at some other aspect, like worldbuilding). My reaction to swastikas would not be "oh, pretty." I'd have whiter teeth, I'd be thinner, more conventionally attractive. I'd smell better, I'd be tan more often and darker.

I spent several long paragraphs on this comment working it out in more detail, but I didn't like the result, so I figured I wouldn't share it. Suffice it to say, there'd be nothing to hold back my worst traits... and then... *shudder*

In my case, me and the person I mentioned are intellectual equals and we are able to sustain an extended conversation at a high intellectual level

BUT..............he moves among and talks with people with such remarkable ease (which I do not)

A high school graduate or dropout with no plans for college, father to 2-3 kids, possibly a drug addict, paying child support, working a crummy part time job and getting in trouble with the law. My interests would be swapped with sports, girls, drugs, cars, crime, etc etc. Just a blind guess here considering the people I've been around in my lifetime, and all this is assuming that my goals are to fit in with society, not go against it and march to my own beat.

The problem with trying to think of my "intellectual equals" is that every time my intellect has been judged by others, no matter what they judge it to be, it's been judged on its autistic qualities rather than as some kind of "objective" idea that would exist whether or not I was autistic. As in, since I developed in an unusual order I have at various times been judged ahead and behind other people, often both at once. I have never been judged in a way that divorced the way I was being judged, from autistic developmental qualities. And I'm not even sure such a thing is possible.

If I think of people who have traits that allow them to communicate on what I personally consider to be my most consistent level, none of them are nondisabled, most of them are autistic, some have intellectual disabilities, some have severe epilepsy, some have specific learning disabilities, some have dementia, some have brain damage. None are NT. (And when I consider my most consistent level, I am not talking about being "gifted" or "slow", I am talking about a specific way of perceiving the world and communicating that as far as I know, people without neurological oddities just don't have.)

I certainly wasn't asking about how 'others' judge us