What are your superpowers?

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I'm new here, and was diagnosed with Asperger's in January. It has been quite a gift, as it has explained a bunch of things from my past that have looked like random unrelated nonsense. Now a TON of it makes sense.

I was just invited to a TEDx talk I signed up for around the topic of what it's like to be diagnosed with Asperger's at 65. I have 7 minutes to speak. I could go on for hours!

This condition has been with me since birth and I've had people describe me as "weird" or "different" since I was a kid. I realized that I've adopted lots of compensatory behaviors to avoid coming across that way to people, all to no effect. It explains why I prefer to be alone rather than with others; why I have fits about certain things and can get quite belligerent about stuff when others would just brush them aside; and why I often look at some things as if they're black-and-white while other things appear far more variegated than others see them. Never mind the discomfort looking in people's eyes.

One thing I've noticed about myself is that I tend to be a high-level thinker, since I naturally look at stuff from a 5,000 foot perspective as comfortably as at the ground-level, and everywhere in between. In fact, I get lost in really low-level details. I've always attributed this to be sort of a "mid-brain thinker" -- more balanced between left- and right-brain activities than others. This may be true, or maybe because of ASD. I've heard that this is a common trait for people with Asperger's.

Several times in my life I've been in classes with people who know me pretty well, and the teacher will start to talk about "thinking outside the box" and my friends will say, "Sheesh, David can't even FIND the box!" I realized that my mind definitely operates inside of a box, but it's about 25x larger than the tiny one everybody else works in! I can poke my head into their box for a few minutes, but I can't spend much time there. For them, it must be how a bird born in a cage lives life, vs. someone born to live in the wild open sky. They don't know any different, but I sure do! Unfortunately, they do NOT want to hear about it.

When I saw my first computer program at 14, I remember thinking that it looked very simple and obvious. I took to programming like a fish takes to water. It actually seemed like nothing but word games all day long! And when I discovered that companies pay a really great salary to sit around playing these word games, well ... that was my future life! And that's what has happened. Would you be surprised to hear that I scored in the 99th percentile for verbal thinking skills? Also, 95th percentile for spatial thinking, and an unknown measure for visual thinking because it's not a pure visual thinking test (but I do think in pictures).

However, I've found that most other programmers I've worked with are very heavily left-brained. I often have a hard time communicating with them. They want to discuss very concrete examples and I prefer more abstract discussions.

I got a review on a job right as I got my diagnosis this past January, and it was entirely about behavioral issues, like how nobody on the team likes working with me, how I was always going off on tangents and couldn't get really specific about things, stuff like that. It's all explained by the ASD diagnosis. Not one bit was about my technical skills. This has been a common theme throughout my career.

What that has led to over the years is bosses who want to squeeze me into a little box so I act more like a robot (how everybody else behaves) and focus more intently on the problems at hand.

I've come to realize that looking at things from a birds-eye view gives me a perspective on things that most others miss. The thing that has been most frustrating about it is that since nobody else around me sees things that way, the tendency is to dismiss what I say and relate to me like I'm untethered and can't focus. I'm a "systems thinker" and look at "the big picture".

Every technical project needs someone like this, but I've learned that they don't understand that, and they don't appreciate it.

With this diagnosis, I expected HR would do something to try to help me fit-in better, but everything ended up going south and I was pretty much tossed out with the garbage. I'm happy to be gone from there, but sad that this keeps happening.

I've never seen a job description that lists "high-level thinker" as one of the job requirements or even "good to have" skills, have you?

It took a while, but in my late 20's I finally realized that I really do think differently than most people. And one of my superpowers is this high-level thinking ability. Sadly, nobody seems to care.

Anyway, the reason for this post, beyond introducing myself, is that I don't know anybody offhand who has Aspergers and I'd like to learn some things that I can incorporate into my TEDx talk. More specifically, I'm curious what YOUR "super-powers" are.

This is something about you that occurs to others as a "problem" they have with you that needs to be "fixed". You may have spent a lot of time trying to fix it, but eventually realized: (1) it's NOT a "problem"; (2) it cannot be "fixed"; and (3) it's really a GIFT that you wish you could figure out how to leverage so it benefits others in the world.

In my talk, I'd like to highlight this issue and start a conversation for how to encourage managers to be SELFISHLY INTERESTED in LEVERAGING these gifts rather than trying to make them disappear.

Welcome to WP, Digloo. I am a self identifying Aspie that never fit into the average mindset. I have been quite odd my entire life. Even within my science community, I am much different than my coworkers. My special skills involve being an extreme visual thinker (I can think in higher dimensions), massive data absorber, pattern identifier and creativity builder. All of those skills come into use while I teach at the university. Many of my students are surprised that I can teach them creativity in science. They often assume that they just need to memorize the material, but what fun would that be? Science needs creative minds to be able to advance.

Unfortunately having the above skills does not translate to success at work when the powers that be are all social creatures. They do not respect what I can do and only see me as a worker bee for them to abuse. I have had to deal with bullying issues and near constant discrimination because I do not fit into their click. That may change soon as I am working on publishing some research that I did with my collaborator. I need that to be able to move up the ladder somewhere else away from them.

When I first started this job, I thought that there might be a coworker that can think at my level. Sadly that is just not the case. Most of them do not want to create new research ideas because that involves work on their part. They mentally stagnate on doing the same thing that they did in graduate school. To them, that is their thinking box. I do not have those restrictions. I would rather challenge myself to do something no one else has thought to do. Why would you want to be limited when you have the choice to not be?

This has led to issues with my coworkers. There was an invited speaker from a national lab that visited our university to talk about their solar cell research two years ago. I asked about their progress on one part and the speaker was stunned that I knew what they were trying to do for their future work on the project. I also asked about another part and I stumped him on his response. (I was respectful while doing this.) It just seemed like common sense things to me, but all of my coworkers were lost in the translation. They never spent the time to read the literature and see the patterns that have developed in that area. My coworkers later chastised me for making them look bad, as they were clueless at what I was saying to the speaker. I was told by them to not ask any more questions of speakers, so I stopped going to the lectures all together.

I was diagnosed at 56. I too am a systemic thinking (and it is difficult for others to understand). I also have excellent visual-spatial cognition.

The way that I'm able to focus on my hobbies and interests for a very long period of time.

Hi digloo,

Sounds like the basis for a great talk. If it gets published online you should post a link to it here too (just check with the mods first so it won't come off as self-promotion).

In school I was "odd but smart". I grew up in a group-oriented community where individualism and independence weren't much valued. If you couldn't fit your square self into the round hole, you were seen as unwanted. While it did make me depressed at certain points, I slowly learned to be independent and nurture my own world instead. As I got older I was criticised for not socialising, not working together, and not asking for help, which led to ostracism. Hopefully people in the States can in some ways be admired for going their own way, but where I've lived it's looked down upon.

Would love to hear how that could be possible. My worth is currently determined by how well I fit into society. I think I gave up offering ideas in, say, meetings several years ago, because the more I conform the better. For my own life, it's alright, but for the autistic community I think it does more harm than good.

Thanks for reminding me that I seem to be above average at recognizing patterns quicker than most.


Yeah, that's what I'm trying to uncover.

I think an awesome job role for an Aspie would be working for an IT / security company charged with tracking down security threats (hackers trying to break into a system), discovering how they got in (when they do), and designing code to watch for that stuff to happen. These are REAL JOBS! I have no idea how they find people to fill them, tho.

There are a lot of roles like this that would be an excellent fit for Aspies. Forensic accounting comes to mind as well.

This is why I asked this question. By all accounts, and even legal distinctions, this is a "disability". But it's NOT! The fact that most people can't relate to us well does not make this a disability! Especially when there are specific jobs that, by their nature, could be done far better by people with this so-called "disability" than others.

Would it even be legal for a company to run an ad for a job that says, "people with Asperger's encouraged to apply!"?

I read something recently that said an HR VP at BofA, of all stodgy old stick-in-the-mud companies on can think of, said they set up some kind of program to attempt to attract more "neuro-diverse employees". You have to wonder if that's some kind of wink-and-a-nod about folks with Asperger's, or just anybody on the spectrum that will get them Federal tax credits if they hire them.

**************

I'm tired of being fired simply for not "fitting-in"!

I got fired from a job once where I was under-worked, and when I'd ask my boss what to do with my spare time, he said, "Oh, just go through the code, learn what it does, see what you can find." So I did. It got me fired. In case anybody cares, here's what happened...

One day I noticed a bit of code that just looked odd. I stared at it, and the code around it, and it dawned on me that while it was syntactically correct, it was WRONG! The fact that it worked most of the time was pure luck, and gave rise to random failures that were not reproducible because they were data-sensitive. The same guy wrote most of this original code, and I instantly understood what he did given what I knew about his background. (He transliterated an expression from another language into this one, and it just happened to compile and run -- most of the time without errors. The problem was the errors.)

Once I understood what his thought process was that led to that "error", I started looking around and found five more similar yet distinct places where he made that same kind of mistake. He had a habit of being a "copy-and-paste" type of coder, and there were 400+ instances of this specific chunk of code that were basically copies of previous code with slight tweaks here and there, so the same errors got propagated all over the place.

I went in and fixed most of them, and then posted an updated version of the app for people to test, without mentioning it to anybody. (Which can be hazardous sometimes...)

One of our support people happened to post a message like, "Is it just me, or does the latest update seem to be running faster?" At that point I mentioned it to my boss and he said, "Oh, wow! That's GREAT!" So I asked how I should handle submitting all of the changes, since we needed bug reports for everything. He said to write up a summary on one single bug ticket and that should be fine. Done!

A couple of days later it got rejected. I called my boss, who was unaware of this, and we talked about it. He emailed me later and said to submit individual bug reports for each one. Ugh. Ok. So I wrote up about 20 and submitted them, just to test the waters.

They got rejected as well. Called the boss... he was puzzled. Then I got an email from the VP of Engineering who CC'd my boss reminding us that, "Bug reports can ONLY be submitted by the CUSTOMER!" Never mind that what I found would close out dozens of reports the customer had already submitted that were determined to be "transient" and "irreproducible". I could show them exactly WHY! They didn't want to hear it. I was told to remove all of the changes and push out a new update, so I did. And the next day the Support people commented that it was running much more slowly. And, BTW, none of the intermittent bugs they had been seeing had shown up in the past couple of weeks since it was running faster. Within an hour of them working with this old code, they ran into one of those irreproducible bugs.

I kept pressing it after a new batch of bugs were submitted by the Customer that could not be reproduced, and upper management was getting upset that we couldn't track them down. But s**t happens, and the Customer accepted it.

A week later I got fired.

When I was packing up my stuff, I stumbled into a random email I'd printed out and it had a note on it that mentioned that this software was being represented to the customer as "100% bug-free", and that the Company would fix any bugs they reported along with sufficient details to allow us to reproduce them, within one week.

SUMMARY: I identified an errant coding pattern that led to the discovery of 400+ bugs and they basically didn't want the customer to know, presumably because it would put the deal in jeopardy.

The problem is, I rub people the wrong way. They don't like dealing with me. They don't like when I'm right about solutions to problems they can't figure out. And I can only assume they see me as more of a threat than someone they can trust. (This is a common theme at most jobs I've had throughout my life.)

If I had known I had Asperger's at that time, I would have filed a whistle-blower lawsuit because the customer was a Federal Agency. But as it was, I was just an annoying guy nobody liked who was making a bunch of noise about something that could cost the company millions of dollars if anybody took my 'noise' seriously.

I mean not sure I would consider it a superpower....but I can feel when its stormy outside, hard to explain how it feels but I always know when a lightning storm is coming because I feel like I like feel the energy from it or something.

I mean it is a good feeling when I feel the storm coming, so not complaining but yeah even my boyfriend think's its weird I can feel that because he doesn't feel that at all. But yeah it is hard to explain like I just get a very specific feeling when a storm is coming and it is hard to describe but its like I somehow just feel the energy from the storm like noticablly. I could be in a building with no windows and still feel if there is a storm outside when there is one even if I have been inside all day and have not even taken a peek out a window. I mean I have never been able to totally test that I suppose but in my own experience that seems to be the case. but yeah it is a very specific feeling when there is a storm coming and like I like the feeling.....but for sure most people have no idea what I am even talking about when I try to mention this to them.

But yeah its like I can just sense storms but idk why or how, I just can feel it somehow but seems most people cannot feel or perceive the thing I feel from the stormy weather. I mean idk I just figured it was fairly normal to feel weather on that level..and so I just kinda figured everyone had that same experience with it but I guess that is not the case.

I guess my superpower is my patience. I can explain things again and again without getting mad.

Very interesting. I suspect that all the "big picture thinking" jobs are owned, not salaried. The hired help for that have more political skill than technical savvy, and will sabotage any research "not invented here." Are you familiar with the Dunning-Kruger syndrome? The people who need your help can't tell that they need it.
I am cursed with broad perspective as well. In the social sciences, I never seem to get past people dismissing me for not agreeing on a detail that I see as a product of illusion. In engineering, I demonstrated a major simplification in design but it was not adopted. I send out ideas for companies to save millions of dollars with what seems an obvious explanation to me, and get ignored. In my last paid job, I specialized in rejecting perpetual motion machines in a technical contest.
So, one superpower would be the ability to "see" flows of energy, along with seeing wasted material in a structure.

I concur that our talents could be much better used. Hans Asperger kept us alive, but suitable employment remains elusive. All my childhood heroes recommended finding a business partner, but I never attracted a good one. All I hear about special education seems focussed on sacrificing any talents to produce a simulation of normality, instead of working on how to manage and direct a talent. There should also be courses for NTs on how to work with us.
"The essence of modern management is to make individual strengths productive, and individual weaknesses irrelevant."
- Peter Drucker

I have a lot of empat--

...oh, wait, Aspies can't have empathy, as you've got to be really malicious to have empathy.

OK, I don't have any superpowers.

Hyperfocus (when I'm not ADHD)
Parenting
Loving my pets
Research
Writing academic drivel and other assorted rubbish

AMEN!

I have a better memory than most people for things that interest me.
My brain is a balance of left and right. I have a lot of the stereotypical interests of both and a lot of the dichotomies that people divide that world into seem weird and counterintuitive to me. There's also not much of a correlation between my confidence level in a belief and its popularity.
I don't have the conscientiousness or social skills for my intellectual strengths to become superpowers.

I ain't got none....

See my signature

I'm getting the sense that a lot of people with Asperger’s have been dealing with such consistent and recurring focus from others on their annoying behavioral traits throughout their lives that their "gifts" are either buried, avoided, or just ignored.

Researchers looking into what causes autism have found one common trait that may be relevant: there may be some small region of the brain that developed a little bit more slowly for whatever reason than the rest of the brain, and as a result, a neighboring region of the brain expanded to take up the space that the other part wasn't using. It's the expanded part of the brain that is most likely the source of whatever "gifts" or "super-powers" or what-have-you are rooted in.

Does it concern anybody that we were diagnosed with a "disability"? I mean, it says so right on the paper.

"The "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM-5) is the handbook widely used by clinicians and psychiatrists in the United States to diagnose psychiatric illnesses."

Do you think anybody anywhere cares about diagnosing "Mental Gifts"?

If you have been diagnosed with Asperger's and think you don't have any "gifts", the joke may be on you. Whatever "deficit" may be present because of your brain development, it's highly likely that there are one or more parts of the brain that have evolved to present you with abilities far beyond "normal". (Yes, this is just a hypothesis that many researchers have, but just consider it.)