Asperger's = Learning most things the hard way

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Does anyone else feel like this applies to you? Obviously it doesn't apply to everyone on the spectrum, but I feel it does to me. I know there are things what most people have to learn the hard way, but what I'm saying is having to learn things the hard way what most NTs take for granted or learn in earlier childhood.

There are things what I have done that are so Aspie, what my NT peers would know better not to do, like when I literally followed a group of girls around at school in the hope that they will accept me into their group, and they got freaked out by it and went and told on me, which made me feel very patronised. I was only 14 at the time, but most people of that age kind of know about how social cliques work and that picking a group of people at random and following them around the school is not a very wise way of making friends (might work if you are popular, which I wasn't. Then again, anything's acceptable when you're popular *sigh*).

There are other things too that I only learned through ridicule or humiliation. It's probably because of the social immaturity what causes the lack of friends, and because I didn't really have friends when I was at school (especially High School), I had to learn most of the social standards on my own, which obviously most had to be learned through trial and error. I suppose it worked a bit, I do have better social skills now and I don't feel I have to learn things the hard way any more, but as a teenager I had to.

This does not apply to intellectual knowledge, I'm talking more about social knowledge.

/\ Could not agree more.
Substitute girl for boy and I could have written this word for word. I'm only now catching onto things that most people figure out by the time they finished College or University. No wonder people think I am younger than I am! I'm doing well now but boy did I have a rough time growing up. It was like being blind: I had to run into many walls before I was able to find my way around.

I'm still making faux pas at age 30 and learning the mistakes I'm making, I appreciate it when people tell me "goddamn it TheSperg you're messing up like this" than just internally laughing at me and rolling their eyes.

One of the painful realities that us aspie's have to deal with everyday.

I´m 60, and I have actually been clearing things like that away within the last couple of years. It has taken me that long to realize myself, that some of my habits were faux passes and why they pissed people off. (embarrassed).

Isn't that just the truth! I'm still groping my way around social skills at my age. My personal life is fairly stable, and as much as I'd like to have a close friend who lives nearby, I can live with things the way they are if nothing changes.

One of the things I can't seem to work out is dealing with women in the workplace. I NEVER have any problems getting along with men in the workplace, no matter what position I hold relative to them. I don't have any problem with women who are several steps below me, lateral to me, or anywhere above me in the organizational chain, but if they are very close to, but below, me in the hierarchy, I always seem to offend them. From my perspective, all I'm expecting is that they do their job, but they always seem to resent me and try to backstab me - maybe they resent the fact that I am accepted as one of the guys? Whatever it is, it utterly baffles me.

Oh boy..... When I think about the things i did in my younger years I feel like such an idiot and want to shoot myself. When I was 15 or 16 (cant remember exactly when) i told a girl that i liked that i masturbated to her facebook picture everynight... As you can probably imagine that didnt work out too well.

Oh boy..... When I think about the things i did in my younger years I feel like such an idiot and want to shoot myself. When I was 15 or 16 (cant remember exactly when) i told a girl that i liked that i masturbated to her facebook picture everynight... As you can probably imagine that didnt work out too well.

I did something pretty goofy today and was a little embarrassed, but to tell you the truth, I just more and more am really seeing that all people have problems and even worse, many of them are malicious which I am not. I tend to forgive myself much easier now, partially because I care a lot less about impressing people.

I think it would be incredibly rare for someone with AS to find someone they trust who could tell them "that thing you're doing? Yeah, stop that."
They'll never learn it by watching other people's reactions, I sure didn't.

I can partially relate. My first thought when I saw your post though was, "Well, we tend to learn our special interests with ease. So we've got that going for us which is nice."

Oh yes! It took me a long time to learn that in job interviews you don't answer questions honestly, you are meant to say the "right" answer, ie the one that they want to hear.

It didn't occur to me how much game playing was expected of me and I didn't have any idea how to play those games. I worked in offices and got into trouble because I had no idea about office politics and how NTs play them. I learned the hard way that when people asked me what I thought they weren't asking for my viewpoint, they were seeking my support or agreement or something else they wanted from me.

My honesty and naive belief that truth is the best policy made a fool of me so many times. Honesty was very unsafe for me and yes I have learned that the hard way.

Oh that is so me... I don't know how many times people have commented say when I was working and somewhere else that I tend to do stuff the hard way. Like I worked at a daycare and the kids made a mess in the sensory bin put sand in it and I had to clean it out and it took forever. I kept going back and forth with water and trying to clean it out, and the staff is like you know you could have just filled up the one bucket with water and dump it in and let it drain, but of course I didn't think of that I had to do it the hard way. Well the thing is I did notice the bucket but the sink was to small but I didn't think to look for another sink that it would have been able to fit into.

Other time I was out and people are like watch out for the puddle and what do I do walk right through the middle of the puddle.

People get annoyed at me when I sweep the floor because I tend to miss stuff or not sweep properly. If I'm not told what to do directly I struggle with it and it makes it hard to get stuff done and I usually end up doing it some way which is not normal and takes more time.

I've also learned from seeing how others react to each other.
Like there was this commercial I once saw, I think for a health care clinic.
Guy walks into a diner and sits down.
Cook asks him how he's doing.
Guy says that he's got a wicked itch that he can't seem to scratch, borrows a fork.
Cook looks puzzled.
Narrator says "you don't tell a stranger how you're really doing, but you can tell us at..." and so on.
It never answered the question of why people ask such a question in the first place, but at least I could give a proper response instead of the truth.