Confused

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How do I understand the world?

To the neurotypical, despite a few confusing moments here and there, it makes sense for the most part. To me, it is vastly complicated and I am very slow to learn. Not to mention forgetful.

How am I supposed to understand the world? I am often stressed, anxious, overwhelmed, drained of energy, etc. Learning life stories from people, remembering what I’ve learnt in school, reading up on the news... I feel like, no matter how much I learn, I’m still lost. Am I then supposed to just accept my disability? Or just keep trying? I know this is broad or vague, but give me what you’ve got.

The best thing you can do as an aspie is to understand that everything has chaos to it. You asked something vague, I'll respond with a vague answer. Everything you see is chaos, but ordered together by a universal order. Music, particles, people, continents, etc. Living organisms find patterns to survive. Humans just happen to be the best at spotting them. Thinking in black and white is good for weeding out truth and information, but you cannot see the whole picture that way. My special interest is mainly history, so to understand the whole picture of something so complicated yet short such as one year in history, I had to build a foundation of predictable events, common things, and then went up politically and geographically to generalize even further into something that resembles chaos. X was common in y period, but z is possible from x2 or z3, which depends on x or x from another state.

Vague. The world is vague.

NTs are much better at taking their experiences and compositing them into an average from which an approximation can be used to interact with others. Aspergers often leads people to keep their experiences as discrete events and without averaging can cause anxiety and difficulty in knowing how to act or respond.

As we gain experiences, we can experiment to learn how to cope better. For example, asking questions of others can be easier that trying to talk about yourself and risk talking to much.

No one understands "the world". Most people barely understand that little speck of it that they live in.
Ask any person why they do what they do and few, if any, will know the answer.

Because of the work I do, I often ask people why they have gutters on the eaves of their roof. They don't know. They buy them, pay to have them installed, and yet don't know why or if it was done correctly or incorrectly.

Likewise, I ask why they rake their leaves, bag them up, and set them out to the curb for pick-up instead of composting them or mulching them into the grass. They don't know why. They're imitating their neighbours. All the neighbours are imitating each other.

very thoughtful and interesting to think of.
my nice brother is also obsessed with history, and now i wonder how he would think of your words. now he is making a career of writing about history, i can never understand his explanations. seems like gibberish to me.
same with his twitter account - he posts mainly historical facts and observations based on history---
. the equations are too complex, i guess, for those uneducated in it.

my ( not that nice ) brother is obsessed with all kinds of things including history- mainly turkish-
but keeps it to himself..he does not transfer it into something but when there is chaos, as you put it, he can take from what he knows and apply it to figure out some sense.


the chaos idea is interesting, extracting patterns and sense from it - how to distinguish the most adept from everyone else i suppose - based on how well they can do that.

which is why ppl disabled most by developmental delays need the most assistance because to thenm everything is confusion and chaos.. like coordinating enough to know what steps to do the most simple things like chewing food, or linking rushing cars to danger = stay away, etc, is difficult or impossible for them to maintain consistently (them means some ive observed) --
so they need someone there ALWAYS not even a moment without care is possibl;e. or they die or injure themselves accidentally or other dire situation from which they cannot extricate themselves even if the seeming solution is simple to observers - to that persons mind it is confusion and chaos the whole way through.
and now thanks to brain scans we have evidence as to why that is (it is not brain injury or something fixable much - it is that their different spheres of brain are underdevloped- -the cells themselves are squished and compact and so the brain is naturally at that level .. it is not something they did on purpose or out of preventable ignorance)

A lot of NTs will confess to being baffled and confused inside, just putting on a successful act to get through the day.

Is it our penchant for honesty, do you think, that allows us to admit to being confused?
While the NT will spend their whole life pretending they know exactly what they're doing?

The average NT is part of a social community that promises stability and interdependence, even when it actually does not. It is still a far cry from guaranteeing a full understanding of the world around them.

Yes, keep trying. You have the ability to learn to interact with the world in a positive way. You may not live the same life as everyone around you, but that is not wrong. Wise people respect the effort that other people put forth, not the results that they create.

You can do it!

IR