Either Normal or Mentally Slow All Together

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I've noticed that NT's tend to think that if your smart academically, you must have innate social skills just like everyone else. If they know you have social deficiencies, then you must be mentally challenged all together?

See when I was in college, everyone knew I was smart. For one, just to get into that school, you had to be very smart and roughly in the top 10% of students in the nation. So people interpreted my behavior as deliberate and its hard for even my friends to understand I have social deficits.

But I work at a Supermarket now, and you dont even need a high-school diploma for that job. Its not uncommon for people who are mentally challenged to work that job. So my workplace thinks I'm a bit mentally slow because I have social deficits.

And it seems before people know you have social deficits, they think your rude. Once they know you have social deficits, you get pitied? And somehow, I'd still like to be respected? Is that too much to ask?

And NTs are suppose to see in shades of gray?

I think intelligents people will be more tolerant. But there are also some stupid people who will never try to understand you, on Internet or IRL, it's the same. But I think that if you explain your difficulties, it will be more easy for you in the future. Write some things to say before so you will be more clear.

I think that when you say you're autistic, open-minded people will give you a chance to explain that they're some things that are very hard for you, that it wasn't deliberate etc...

Meow.

Black and white thinking isn't necessarily an aspie trait and I hate that they have made it one because everyone is black and white to a degree. Even I can be black and white and then I realize it and change it. I see black and white thinking in NTs all the time online and it annoys the hell out of me.


I have had that same problem too with people. In high school, kids acted like I was unfit and then once they realized they had underestimated me, they over estimated me and it was hard. There was no in between. Plus I have been told by my old boss that I am so smart I can go to college and she had a hard time believing I had difficulty in school.

It's like smart people can't have learning disabilities and people with learning disabilities are not smart. Funny, as a kid I didn't think I was smart either so I tried very hard to be smart because I didn't realize you can still be smart and still struggle. I didn't know other disabilities existed and I didn't even know I had one myself.

Frustrating, isn't it? You're either completely competent or completely incompetent; no in-betweens. As though people are so desperate to put each other in categories that they are willing to ignore half of what makes up a person to force them to fit.

I think people are still stuck in the early stages of realising that there are other real psychiatric/mental/developmental disorders besides mental retardation.

Nowadays, a lot of people struggle to understand basic things about disorders such as Tourette's because they're amazed and confused about that you can have a real disorder that affects your brain but doesn't lower your IQ. Parents, grandparents, great-grandparents didn't know that many such disorders and indirectly "taught" the next generation that there are roughly four types of disorder: "normal" sicknesses, illnesses of the "old", "spooky" missing limbs and cerebral palsy and mental retardation.

(Edit: sad thing is that most people also don't know what MR really is but they delude themselves into thinking they know.)

It's not limited to disorders. 17 years ago, some people still "knew" that I couldn't possibly be gifted because I while I showed a lot of those "early signs", I didn't gloat about my novel discoveries of the universe's mathematical and physical secrets at age 6.

Humans can't understand what they don't know exists and they experience trouble to acknowledge and understand what they've been taught over and over doesn't exist in that form. It's the way people are.

I think I would have been helped more in school and possibly diagnosed with something had I just been stupid and not good at taking iq tests and other tests.

Like Procrustes. Ignorant folks. It's hard to believe anything would change by a magic spell if you told them about what being autistic means. It'll be still all your fault...

I think I read somewhere that, typically, with neuropsych testing people tend to score high on all the sub-tests or low on all the sub-tests (or average for all the sub-tests). IOW, people who are smart in one way tend to be smart in other ways. But ASD people typically have "spikey" sub-test scores, meaning unusually high in some areas and unusually low in others. Since ASD people are 1% of the population, people's assumptions that low-social-ability==low-ability-in-other-areas might actually be true a lot of the time.

I'm not saying that it's not annoying and obnoxious, though.

They say people who underestimate someone should really be the ones underestimated.

I have seen people on forums correlate intelligence with pronunciation of words. Like if you mispronounce a word, then you are unintelligent, and that intelligent people always pronounce all words correctly, including obscure ones that they have only ever read and never heard.

Luckily at work, co-workers get the whole picture of my abilities. I excel at finding details, and I know how to do my job well. However, I struggle with common sense sometimes and cannot follow verbal directions or hear things correctly for the life of me.

But it seems like people who don't see you much or get to know you well take what they do know about you and assume that you're either smart or dumb. In middle school, I never paid attention in class. Due to this I couldn't answer a simple question, and I heard two students talking about how I was stupid. Depending on the situation, people may also ignore contrary evidence that you're actually not unintelligent and engage in believe perseverance.

I attended a talk by Dr Wendy Lawson earlier this year and she is an intriguing case of someone who challenges perceptions of intelligence. I believe she has only managed to get an IQ mark of over 70 in a one test and an IQ below 70 in a few others. Technically, she is a low to moderate functioning aspie though she is qualified social worker and a well known academic in the autism community with a PhD in psychology.

IIRC, Donna Williams also has an IQ in the 70's, and she doesn't come off at all as any stereotypical notion of "a person with a low IQ."