Half a star.

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Some time ago I watched a movie about a woman and a girl in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. The woman was mentoring the girl on how to survive. Both the woman and the girl were half Jewish. All prisoners had to have the Star of David sewn on to their clothes, made from two triangles of cloth. At one point, the girl complains to the guards that both she and the older woman are only half Jewish, and that they deserve better treatment. This eventually leads that one of the triangles is removed from their prison garb. But it doesn’t change the fact that they are still in a concentration camp.

And this is how I feel about the so-called difference between Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome.

And what exactly is this suppose to mean, I don't know. But I keep having that movie pop into my head when I compare myself to people that are obviously Autistic. I am, but I am not.

I think that this is the problem with diagnosis of Asperger's in adults. The dx only has significance to the people who get the dx and the people who give it. But what does it mean in any larger sense? Not much.

What exactly are you asking?

Aspergers, and "high functioning autism", are both considered just that:'higher functioning' than regular autism.



Low functioning folks are more handicapped, but folks dont expect as much of them. you're higher functioning so the world expects more of you. So it evens out. So you get as much grief as the LFA's do I suppose. Is that what you mean?

I think the issue is that since aspies and HFAs often "appear" to be normal until you get to know them, people assume that we're just like NTs, and that we don't have any real problems. It's similar to the problems people often face when they suffer from anxiety, depression, and other "hidden" conditions.

It's like straddling a line between two very different worlds, in a way. Or at least appearing to.

This kind of reminds me of a thread I made a while ago about wanting to appear more stereotypically "aspie"... I honestly feel that if my problems were more obvious, and if I stood out more, then people wouldn't give me so much grief for being who I am.

Not asking anything. Just saying how I feel inside. Like a traitor at times. Like the girl in the movie.

I chopped a bunch off the post for fear of being pedantic.

The part I deleted was the part about a kid in church who clearly has signs of autism. He also, um, apparently eats his boogers in church - I didn't see it. I shook his hand during the hand shake of peace, and later on my middle daughter said, "Daddy, you shook the hands of the booger eater." And I said nothing.

Maybe I need to go for official diagnosis and remove that bit of uncertainty. But there you go, even fretting over it, that black and white cr@p comes creeping in again. Sigh.

We're all vulnerable to abuse, prejudice, and bad treatment in general. So, yeah, I think it's an apt analogy. The severely autistic kid gets beaten up by his ABA therapist during one of those infamous restraint sessions; the mildly autistic kid gets beaten up by his peers because the bullies think he makes a nice punching bag. The severely autistic kid tries to explain and gets ignored because he can't talk well; the mildly autistic kid gets told to toughen up, boys will be boys. Neither one gets any help.

We're in the same boat, really. The specific ways things play out can be different, but the more I think about it, the fewer real differences I see between the situations we face. The differences tend to be more in the details. The basic problem is the same for everybody--Because we're disabled, they think it's okay to treat us like crap.

Seems to me that people with obvious/severe autism might occasionally wish it were more subtle, so that their talents would be recognized. It's very similar to wanting to be more stereotypically autistic, if yours is milder, so that people will cut you a break when your autism makes things hard for you. Again, it's the same basic problem--people assume that disability means incapable, that obviously disabled people can't have talents and people who don't look disabled can't have deficits. Both sides fighting the same stereotype, pushing against the same problem. We really ought to work together more.