symptoms

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Hi all,
My wife said on and off over the years that I should look into AS as I may have some tendencies (she says this in a loving way, not an ostracizing way). She is a strings teacher and is familiar with some people that she teaches and has met over the years that have AS and is speaking from that perspective.

Is it possible to have some of the traits and not others and still be AS?

-Fascination with interests at the expense of other things...
A friend of mine once said that when I get into something that's all there is. Damned everything else. As I look over my life, I see this happens quite a bit.
-Computer Crazed
-Tried to memorize the Constitution, then lost interest about halfway through the second article.
-Ballroom dancing (buying videos, taking lessons 4-5 nights per week), then after a year of going nuts over it, dropping it like it never happened and moving on to the next thing.
-ROTC Drill Team: I was on the "b" team at first due to not being as good, when I first started as a freshman, but put so much time into practicing and learning how to drill with a rifle that I passed everyone of my peers became THE drill team commander faster than any prior commander at the school ever had. Then my senior year I just lost interest, and quit ROTC all together as if it had never happened.
Lifting weights, building up to a 350lbs bench, going to the gym at 11pm at night, or leaving work early, then seemingly dropping the interest as though it never happened.
Gardening - watering the veggies before work, coming home after work and it's the first thing I attend to before even going in to greet my wife, etc. All the while my wife is joking about what my next interest will be in a few months when I stop gardening.

-Difficulty starting up conversations - How painful. Most of the time I do not even care to be in a conversation with a stranger even. Though I do have a small circle that I do get into details with.
Importance of Precision In fact I relate very much to the thread about .99999999 vs 1, and also to the person in there that mentioned the price of gas.
-Good at, or Fascination with numbers - good at math, calculus was a religious experience for me. A
Innovation at work - in fact whenever we win a new contract I am turned to as the guy that comes up with and executes the computer "innovations" that take the clients to a higher level.
-Strong attention to details.
-Sometimes coming across rude, or too much to the point.
-Repetition: I sometimes have short verbal patterns that I make me feel good to go through. As a kid I remember humming shave and a haircut 2 bits incessantly to the point of making people want to slap me into stopping. I remember I also had this thing about making sure everything was even on both sides of my body. For example, if I scratched my left leg I would want to scratch my right leg in the same place to even the feeling out. Thank god, these 2 things are not much a part of me as they were when I was a kid, but they are a part of my life nevertheless and I still do have a few, albeit more socially acceptable, verbal patterns that will fascinate me at any given time.
-get angry over certain things and lose my cool when other people around me might not lose their cool. I wish I was more easy going.


*HOWEVER*, other supposed traits like not empathizing with others, and not being able to read body language are not so much in my domain. I very much can and have been described as being very perceptive in this regard.

So I guess what I'm asking is it possible to have some of the symptoms:
-Precision
-Compulsive Interests
-Numbers
-Awkward social interaction, if not just plain disinterest in interacting in some interests
-some verbal repetition
-a little too much to the point

and not the others
-inability to read body language
-inability to empathize

and still be AS?

Also for the clumsiness thing, I have one foot on both sides of this fence. Yes I can be clumsy at first (as in the ballroom dancing or the ROTC drill team), but the thing is that once whatever it is that I am doing gets locked in as an interest, I go nuts with it making it the only thing that I do and think about eventually surpassing the performance of the NTs that have been doing it for the same amount of time.

My next question will be how well do AS folks excel into management where you have to play the networking and political games, but I will probably post that in the work thread.

My main interest here though as this is my first post and as I am just now starting to look into this having been told by my wife that I have some AS tendencies is understanding if an absence of a couple symptoms means you are not AS? Actually if I was AS it might be a relief and explain to some degree why I perform better in many things than others I work with in spite of what to me is my aggravating lack of social skills, and some degree of atypical behavior, that I often exhibit.

I would say it was definitely possible.

You DO sound AS. Heck, a lot of that mirrors MY life!! !! !! It is SCARY! Here's how I might have written that about MY life!! !!

-Fascination with interests at the expense of other things...
A friend of mine once said that when I get into something that's all there is. Damned everything else. As I look over my life, I see this happens quite a bit.
-Computer Crazed
-Tried to learn various exhaustive lists, then lost interest about halfway through.
-ROTC Drill Team: I was laughed at at first due to not being as good, when I first started as a junior, but learned how to drill with a rifle that I was laughed at for being to precise. Then my senior year I just lost interest, and quit ROTC all together as if it had never happened.
Lifting weights, building up to a 350lbs bench, going to the gym every other day, or leaving work early, then seemingly dropping the interest as though it never happened.
Gardening - got into it twice, and became something of an expert in some vegetables/flowers/etc..., All the while my mother was joking about what my next interest would be in a few months when I stopped gardening.

-Difficulty starting up conversations - How painful. Most of the time I do not even care to be in a conversation with a stranger even. Though I do have a small circle that I do get into details with.
--Importance of Precision was such that people would laugh at my trying not to round to the nearest 5.
-Strong attention to details.
-Sometimes coming across rude, or too much to the point.
-Repetition: I sometimes have short verbal patterns that I make me feel good to go through. As a kid I remember humming things to the point of making people want to slap me into stopping.
-get angry over certain things and lose my cool when other people around me might not lose their cool. I wish I was more easy going.

It's a shame that my aorta is blown, so I can't push myself like I once did. 8-(

As for empathizing, many here feel the same way. As for body language, you may still qualify.

pavers,

I wouldn't consider myself the medical expert that could give you a straight answer but in your post, I do see reflections of myself in many ways, including the physical clumsiness.

I too have a history of having pursued various interests and hobbies, only to drop them abruptly once I've learned all that could be learned of it, my only three exceptions I know of are that I'm still avidly into angling (since age 9), gardening (since my mid-20's) and beer-brewing (since age 19).

I too took Latino dance lessons for some time but could never memorize the sequences as well as many of the dance moves; I tripped and fumbled at times. As an athlete I could never play in team sports or anything that needed hand-eye co-ordination, so I specialized in endurance sports, namely marathon-running, cross-country skiing, and bicycling. I still enjoy riding my mountain bike at times.

Any conversation with strangers was also a challenge for me, but my training at the speaker's club that I'm part of has made a huge difference in my favor. As for the body language part, I still have to rely entirely on my intuition.

My feeling now is that if you were to get formally DX'ed, the verdict would be a yes for AS.

Thanks for your replies....I got a 35 on the Wired AQ test for what it's worth. The one guy that had the same experiences made me think he was mocking me at first, but I see you actually did have those same experiences! That's creepy weird.

Well I guess if it is true, it might explain a lot. These attributes, AS-based or not, are what I attribute much of my success to over my NT counterparts (the best at innovation in my workplace, ability to look at things differently, precision, single-minded dedication to a given endeavor, the highest producer when I was putting myself through college working in a factory), but also many of the things that I hate about myself, cause me difficulties, and make me wish I could change these (frustration and losing cool when people don't see things the way I see, complete disinterest in randomly socializing w/o a specific purpose, complete inability to do idle small talk, didn't move out of the house till I was 28 in spite of making pretty good money, etc). I would like to be better at not losing cool (though it has gotten better as I've gotten older and wiser), and be better able to play this small talk game that everyone uses to build relationships at work to increase the influence of their ideas and thinking (which often are just stupid ideas and thinking but get accepted nevertheless because of all their great NT relationships)

If you don't mind, I feel a bit at home reading others experiences and whether I am AS or not, I might hang out and try to learn how others are dealing with and improving these social shortcomings.

Hello pavers. I can't diagnose you but just hang around and find out. You sound as though you may be.

Also, let's eliminate some stereotypes. First of all, empathy can be a learned trait. Some people develop it more as they grow older. Others don't. Here's my thing. I had difficulty expressing my needs and wants or if someone did something that upset me. People relied way too much on what my face did not show and to them what it supposedly showed.

Aspergers just makes your life more of a challenge. Sure you probably won't make a good athlete but in return that athlete probably can't do the things you are good at.

The difference between a normal person's interests and someone with aspergers is that normal people have little knowledge with a wide range of topics and people with aspergers have alot of knowledge with a small range of topics.

I'm studying social structures and how normal people and aspergers relate and don't relate. Even though there are differences, if you think about it, in the end there are alot of alikes but what really sets us apart from the normal world are just unconventional approaches. Who defined those rules and approaches? Normal people of course. It's always been about the majority. When the majority is the majority they want to keep it that way.

There was a time when it was a-okay to kill crazy people before psychiatry or just lock them away forever. There's always this selectiveness in play when it comes to people. They'll weed out using your race, your gender, your disabilities and not alot has changed. People still can't see how and why this world would not actually function well without different people with different abilities.

Everyone has limited interests. I'm just putting it that way from mimicking the phrase "limited interests" I personally find that phrase insultive. How would a shopping and salon expert like it if I told them they had limited interests? Sports players, they have limited interests too. Models, limited interests.

Basically it's just a play on words. Their limited interests are considered broad interests because it's what mainstream accepts and find comfortable talking about. Our interests are limited and others will feel threatened by your brain. Is there a syndrome for that?

I get a 35 or around there on the AS test too. And yeah, it sounds like you can have a variety of symptoms and not others. I keep worrying myself as to whether I have it or not since I'm normal in a lot of ways (not clumsy and some other stuff).

I didn't notice you mention anything about phones, are you a phone person or can you NOT stand phones, answering them, hearing them, being in earshot of other people's conversations etc. Do you ever unplug the phone so as not to be triggered by the ring?

I'm overly wordy, but to sum it all up, I'm trying to figure out the same thing, though part of me says that almost nothing follows the rules absolutely, I sort of wish they did, but they don't

Well it's funny you mention that, but my wife can't stand that I sometimes never answer the phone or let the battery die and don't bother to recharge. In fact my cell has had an issue for about 3 weeks and I've not bothered to deal with it, because I'm not really feeling like I'm missing anything by not getting calls on my cell.

I will not say it's universal that I do not like phones though. There are times that they come in handy and that I enjoy receiving calls from from certain people, and when I used to date could talk for a several hours with the object of my "interest". I'm not sure what is meant by triggering, but I just don't particularly enjoy the phone interrupting me (particularly at work) which is another one of the quirks that I don't like because from looking at others around me in order to take things to the highest levels in my career (ie moving into management, and making things happen in the company) I will need to be able to be a good phone jockey. Another example, is that a few years ago the folks in Headquarters contacted my manager and were going to shut down my phone because I hadn't checked my voice mail in a month, and the telecom folks thought that perhaps I had left the company.

So yes, unfortunately getting interrupted by phone calls (particularly at work) is something that I don't take to very well, but not sure what the specific meaning of triggering is. Didn't always used to be like that though, that's something that's happened in the past 15 years or so (I'm 37).

You have many of the symptoms, but if it's a diagnosis you seek you should meet with a mental-health professional.

Also, sometimes people, like myself, are just "the way we are." I have most of the symptoms you have (even a tad bit more extreme) but I am not diagnosed with an ASD, nor am I seeking one. Depending on how broad you decide to see the autism spectrum, what's separating a person who is quirky, introverted and with intense interests that a person with an ASD? Exactly how broad is the spectrum and when do they stop being character traits and become a diagnosable syndrome?

I like to refer to myself as a low-functioning NT. It works.