Does your AS sometimes go on and off in a very sudden way?

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So I am hanging out with some people, and they have assumed me to be competely non compos mentis due to my stimming, my tics, that bad stammer that's always been there, my weird facial expressions, my rambling speech, the rocking, my mercurial and confusing moods, and my incapability of making a mental "connection" with people. It's almost like I'm a golden retriever who wandered into the room: I'm appreciated and am sometimes the center of attention, but in a way I'm sort of cut off.

But it's not always like that. In fact, when I do this weird flip, sometimes a person who has assumed up until then that I'm brainless will get this panicky or perhaps betrayed sort of look. Really, I don't do it on purpose, but sometimes I'll go very suddenly from being this charming, stammering absent-minded professor type of person to being almost like someone else entirely. It's like the part of me that says "stop and think" gets shut down and the part that says "go out and do" gets turned on and put into overdrive.

And there'll be times when I can do it the other way. I might have times when I'm behaving normally or close to it, but then my eyes will cloud over. I'll start thinking about things that have nothing to do with my present surroundings, and a few hours later I'll give a lengthy and boring lecture to someone on the subject that was spinning around in my head. If I were to go out and take a walk while I'm in this state, I would be on the opposite side of town before I really took in any of my surroundings.

Now, I know that there are people who are either one way or the other, but does anybody else seem to have almost an internal switch that almost completely shuts the AS off for periods?

I've had it described to me, in all seriousness, as "scary."

Last edited by WilliamWDelaney on 04 May 2011, 3:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I can relate somewhat to what you're talking about. I can only hold the "normal" stuff together for so long, and it's like there's an overflow mechanism that turns off the normal behavior to give my brain a break....

The concept of an overflow mechanism sounds promising. You see, sometimes the flip happens when I am under severe stress. One minute I'll be going into an aspie meltdown, and then the flip will happen. Suddenly I'm not just calm, but I'm also a lot more focused on the world around me than I usually am.

It's like usually I'm a million miles away from planet Earth, and the world around me is a dimly recognized supplementary material to what I have going on in my head. But sometimes I get this sensation of the world around me snapping into focus suddenly, but also the mirrorland I usually live in is this dim, theoretical thing that might have just been a fantasy.

I can relate. There are times when I'm around a bunch of people I've never met before, who notice nothing awkward about me at all and get along with me right away, and other times I'll find that people are kind of whispering around "what the hell is wrong with him?" or "is he always like this?"
One of the things I hate the most ties in with my prosopagnosia (face blindness) and my poor perception of distance and depth: sometimes a person will be talking to me and I'll be completely oblivious. Afterward they'll say things like "why is that guy ignoring me?" or "that guy is so stuck up!"
Things like this make it very easy for me to come across as an a**hole when I really am out to be peaceful and make friends.

I can relate to the part of your experience where you tune in to the world around you without trying to, except that for me it happens in opposite circumstances--when I'm going into a meltdown, the world around me disappears. It's only when I'm very very calm that the clarity happens. Are you saying that your focused-calm is a way of shutting down the overload inside by focusing on the world outside?



Similar things happen to me, because I can't disentangle sounds when there's too much noise, or notice people I'm acquainted with in crowds--the effect is similar to what you describe: People think I ignore them on purpose. It sucks.