ocdgirl123 wrote:
I have never met anyone with AS who is more socially adept than me.
This. I never met someone in person who's better and diagnosed.
Some of them are simply too young to know whether they'll be better than me (likely) or not.
However, I met people with AS who had a greater potential at being more socially able than me. They spontaneously understood more of social interaction, were able to read more facial expressions and perceived more of the implicit aspects relevant to a conversation or interaction.
Yet they weren't doing better in terms of what others and I were able to see and hear from them. One was brilliant and more interested in academics and his special interests than in paying attention to games on the yard and small talk. We went to school together for a long time. He was a good person. He was better at formal conversations when we were kids.
One was particularly "cuddled" (parents said: he has AS, we can't teach him that social skill(s)), one has co-morbids that add a little to some of his autistic symptoms. The others I simply did/do not know well enough to make a guess.
But I am sure they had their reasons why even with a greater social potential they weren't doing better than me. Even if a person is not affected as bad as me in reading facial expressions, they might have it more severe in having to keep to routines, for example. That in turn could make it harder to adapt socially. Or co-morbid disorder. That can get in the way of living up to what you could do.
I went to school with a young man who I only suspect of having AS. If he has it, he is the one autistic person I met who back then has been better than me socially.
He had very noticeable verbal and motor stims, he was highly intelligent and very verbal, but had an odd posture, odd intonation, had inappropriate/non-normal social skills... so on.
He had a group of friends and was on the surface, well respected by his yearmates, though not by others because of his autistic-like behaviour. He also picked on me for my more classically autistic autism/my language difficulties from autism which I always felt made him such a hypocrite.
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Autism + ADHD
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The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. Terry Pratchett