NPigeon wrote:
I'm a 19-year-old NT who is four years younger than my brother with Asperger's. We've always been really close and there's something about our relationship that makes me curious about other folks' experiences who might have similar situations. I've always been of the opinion that being his younger brother sort of encouraged me to adopt some pseudo-autistic traits thru imitation. I wring my hands a lot and have some distinct body language, I stutter like him sometimes and I similarly get really interested in certain hobbies and fields. I think our main difference is that I do have an easy time reading otherr people's facial expressions and body language and that as I've developed other close relationships, I've become better at interpreting mine and others' emotions. I've found that I sub-consciously befriend lots of male folks with Aspergers (is the word aspies cool for us NTs to use? I've never heard it in non-internet life, so I'd like to be sure) and I definitely connect with em on some level.
Anyway, I guess I'm making this post cause I'm curious if any of y'all have had similar experiences or if its a documented phenomenon or anything. I'm also really interested in talking about my role in supporting my brother and how far I should go before I get worried about overstepping his boundaries. I heard somewhere that there was a forum here for siblings and that would be real cool, but if there's not one, we could always use this thread or something else and share and compare our experiences.
One of the traits that separates aspies from normal people is aspies don't subconsciously mimic group norms. This may be what you're doing.
An anecdote should suffice to illustrate my point: It was easy to tell the people who hadn't been out of Navy boot camp long because they tended to walk together in lock step, just as if they were marching on a parade field.
Right out of boot camp, I was stationed in San Diego. One of my buddies was a local, and he invited me to go down to Tijuana with a couple of his civilian friends and Navy buddies. Before we came back from Tijuana, even the civilians were marching in lock step. We'd all been drinking, and when I commented on it, the civilians didn't believe me until I pointed it out to them.
Me? I've always marched to my own drummer, which made boot camp more than a little difficult for me.
There is another possibility though: You may have a very mild case of AS yourself; you could be borderline, or just have a few traits, as it obviously runs in your family. You might want to take one of these online AS tests and see how you score.
29 Dec 2011, 3:35 pm
