why do aspies look like like theyre on drugs?

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MemberSix
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22 Dec 2008, 7:03 am

I don't think accusations of 'being on drugs' are about physical attributes - or lack of eye contact (people on drugs don't have eye-contact issues).

I believe it's mostly about choice of off-beat conversational subject matter, lack of facial expressivity, perhaps atypical vocal expression - but as much as any of this, a simple means of saying 'you're weird' ... personally, I'd rather someone just told me I was weird than spread vicious rumours that I'm on narcotics - which raises all kinds of other issues.



BellaDonna
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22 Dec 2008, 8:00 am

Yes I agree.
Fortunately, I don't have that expression or it is not very noticable but I have heard other people remark "silly cow" to people who have that weird expression.
Perhaps some aspies do come across like they are prescription pill poppers but I have never noticed.



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22 Dec 2008, 4:43 pm

No, I don´t think I´ve ever been told that I look like I´m on drugs...even when I was on drugs! (Short phase, as a teenager. This was- ya know- the 70s).

I have been told on several occasions that I come across like a 60´s flower child, anti-war, "save the whales" type of personality. Does that count? :lol:


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22 Dec 2008, 8:34 pm

My nickname in high school among my friends was Stoner. I didn't do drugs of any sort. One of my friends gave me the nickname because I acted stoned. Best I recall (that was a while back), it was being not quite with it, off in my own world.



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22 Dec 2008, 9:05 pm

I suppose it's lack of coordination plus weird conversation topics and eye-contact. :?


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Hector
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22 Dec 2008, 9:25 pm

When out walking or sitting around on my own, my mind often wanders and I may suddenly laugh, flinch, squirm or talk to myself in public. I guess many people read that as being a bit strange so they draw their own conclusions. Either way, I've been mistaken for being on drugs before. Alternatively it might also or even just be the hippie stereotype, which has to do with my long hair rather than my demeanour.



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24 Dec 2008, 11:58 am

During my first years in college a friend of mine would ask me "What have you been smoking"... He would ask that cause I was very shy and couldn't socialize, like been in my own world. He would also say that cause I took a lot of time to answer the questions people asked me and couldn't engage in dynamic conversations like NT's do...
Also recently a friend of mine teached me some recipes and right after I had cooked the meal another friend of mine asked me which were the ingredients for that dish I had cooked and I couldn't remember then!! ! LOL!! !! This was cause of my bad short term memory! So my friend asked me if I had been smoking marijuana cause I forgot what the ingredients were in a really short time period !



ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo
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24 Dec 2008, 12:03 pm

I hung around one girl in high school who did drugs and liked the smoking area, even though that area scared me. I think by then I had PTSD and was avoiding certain areas because of certain people and I avoided the smoking area for sure.
But I had one friend who knew all the stoners in the smoking area and I couldn't figure out why she wanted to be my friend. She got a hall pass from the coach who taught the geography class and we would skip that class with the hall pass and go to Circle K and eat goodies while she talked about sueing Mcdonalds for not paying her when she worked. We always went in her car. At my high school, all the kids past the age of sixteen had cars, SUVs or trucks.



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24 Dec 2008, 2:12 pm

People used to think I was on drugs all the time, which kinda made me mad since I've never done drugs in my life. I used to have a lot of stoner friends at one point, and they couldn't believe that I never got high or anything, and once I convinced them that I didn't do drugs, some of them were determined to get me high. Which clearly never happened. I don't even drink!



millie
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24 Dec 2008, 2:13 pm

Quote:
Hector wrote:
When out walking or sitting around on my own, my mind often wanders and I may suddenly laugh, flinch, squirm or talk to myself in public. I guess many people read that as being a bit strange so they draw their own conclusions. Either way, I've been mistaken for being on drugs before. Alternatively it might also or even just be the hippie stereotype, which has to do with my long hair rather than my demeanour.


oh yes. i do that too. chat to myself. i think lots of NT people may do this as well. the difference is that they have a degree of self-consciousness around it - which is because they intuitively understand that others may find it a bit odd in public. and so they do it in private and at home - maybe to a lesser extent - but do it all the same. i spoke to a couple of NT people about it and that was their take on it. So, in public they maight follow the prevailing and unspoken social rules - which for me - do not even come into my cosnciousness in the same way. I just talk to myself if i need to talk to myself - wherever it may be. :D

as for being mistaken for a "stoner" as you people in america call it . we call it junkie or druggie in australia...
I wasn't mistaken for one. I was one.

not anymore though. those un-halcyon days are well ant truly over, thank goodness. :D
now i am just a tad odd.



ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo
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24 Dec 2008, 2:48 pm

The funny thing is, I was in such a state of rebellion, I didn't experiment with drugs in school. Many kids I went to school with smoked pot so to be unlike them, I stubbornly resisted it.
Later, when I started hanging out with a different crowd from the nearby state capitol I became the opposite, very impressionable. I smoked a small amount of pot at this time but never liked it. I met up with this one guy and he smoked cigarettes and I smoked to be like him. I haven't smoked a cigarette in years. I never got addicted to the nicoteen and as soon as I stopped hanging around smokers I quit. I made another friend who detested cigarettes and she had a major influence on me and the stale smoke odor began giving me headaches at that point.
She hated mayonnaise but nothing on earth comes between me and my mayo.



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24 Dec 2008, 2:53 pm

Quote:
ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo wrote:
The funny thing is, I was in such a state of rebellion, I didn't experiment with drugs in school. Many kids I went to school with smoked pot so to be unlike them, I stubbornly resisted it.
Later, when I started hanging out with a different crowd from the nearby state capitol I became the opposite, very impressionable. I smoked a small amount of pot at this time but never liked it. I met up with this one guy and he smoked cigarettes and I smoked to be like him. I haven't smoked a cigarette in years. I never got addicted to the nicoteen and as soon as I stopped hanging around smokers I quit. I made another friend who detested cigarettes and she had a major influence on me and the stale smoke odor began giving me headaches at that point.
She hated mayonnaise but nothing on earth comes between me and my mayo.


yeah, that is interesting. you see, i really do know i fell into drugs partially because it offered escape from home issues which were just awful and also because it offered me a very secure identity that actually took most of the guesswork out of the social world for me. there was also the self-medication of sensory issues and stuff. But i remember clearly gravitating towards it because i was so impressionable and naive )yet brainy) and also because the script was easy, predictable and it gave me kudos at school. I was in the creative gang.....the weirdo's. and the drug subculture is about as predictable as they come....(and entirely frigging boring.) :D



ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo
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24 Dec 2008, 3:03 pm

Maybe there were three creative students in the entire school. Everyone else copied. Art students made copies and marvelled at their ability to copy someone else's art. Can you believe it? It was funny. They copied artwork from The Wall and thought they were great artists because of that. Wow.
Sounds like you were surrounded by more creativity, Millie. The kids in art at my high school were heavy pot smokers without much imagination, sadly. I know pot helps some people express their individuality in art but it seemed to make certain kids at my school kinda slow and out of it and dampened their drive to be unique.
Honestly, seeing how pot affected them, I became very disenchanted with marijuana. It seemed to make them into these brain dead zombies. At least, that was the impression I got.



millie
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24 Dec 2008, 3:16 pm

Quote:
ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo wrote:
Maybe there were three creative students in the entire school. Everyone else copied. Art students made copies and marvelled at their ability to copy someone else's art. Can you believe it? It was funny. They copied artwork from The Wall and thought they were great artists because of that. Wow.
Sounds like you were surrounded by more creativity, Millie. The kids in art at my high school were heavy pot smokers without much imagination, sadly. I know pot helps some people express their individuality in art but it seemed to make certain kids at my school kinda slow and out of it and dampened their drive to be unique.
Honestly, seeing how pot affected them, I became very disenchanted with marijuana. It seemed to make them into these brain dead zombies. At least, that was the impression I got.


yes. i think i had some luck in the midst of an appalling home life. We were financially very poor (mum dad left my mum to fend for 8 kids on her own, and i suspect she is an aspie whose meltdowns were just terrible.she acknowledges her traits but won;t id as AS. ) BUt i went to a state school in an area that was blessed with heaps of alternative people and really interesting kids. A lot of very unusal kids too who went on to do quite amazing thing with their lives. the art teacher was phenomenal. and then, the blessing of my home life was that reading, art, music, social justice issues and politics and greeni issues and all things creative were initially encouraged - (later that got lost and my parents actually dissuaded me from trying to become an artist) BUt, there were good things and a strong appreciation of art and while i was very troubled - very very troubled, i think that was my saving grace.

Everyone needs a saving grace. The worst years for me were when my parents (divorced ) tried to force me from my special interest which was art. that was like cutting off a limb and i ended up misdiagnosed and in a psych ward. not to mention the delightful beatings when young.

but all in the past now.

have a great xmas OooOooanaoOoOoO. :D (we will settle on couch today and watch david attenbrough;s box set of life on land - should be cool and just the way i like it. tv screen and no talking!)



ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo
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24 Dec 2008, 3:27 pm

I would like to think that an alternative school would have helped. When I was in Youth Crisis group therapy sessions I got along well with everyone there and sorta bonded with the coordinator which was something for me. I literaly went to school for years without as much as a few words to my teachers and that is no exaggeration. I didn't realize how odd it was at the time, to be so distant. I resented when students I knew tried to get close to the teachers. To me, teachers were bad and were to be avoided. I was really scared of them. Even the ones I liked I stayed away from, for the most part. It was really strange, I admit. I can't explain the anxiety. Just know it is intense enough to cause problems communicating with authority figures, I guess you'd call them. I wasn't really troubled. In fact, I was so quiet and did so well on mandatory testing I didn't qualify for anything and didn't get in trouble. I might have been better off getting in trouble because I am sure I might have ended up in an alternative school with no extra curicular activities and shorter days. I think that would have kept me from getting so overwhelmed.
I was really behind in every class when I dropped out. Instead of being noisy and disruptive, I was quiet and unnoticed until, eventually, I didn't bother showing up.
It sounds like a cool xmas. In Australia it's already tomorrow, right? Still Christmas eve here. Anyway, have a Merry Christmas and enjoy your dvds, Millie:)



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24 Dec 2008, 3:48 pm

Quote:
ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo wrote:
I would like to think that an alternative school would have helped. When I was in Youth Crisis group therapy sessions I got along well with everyone there and sorta bonded with the coordinator which was something for me. I literaly went to school for years without as much as a few words to my teachers and that is no exaggeration. I didn't realize how odd it was at the time, to be so distant. I resented when students I knew tried to get close to the teachers. To me, teachers were bad and were to be avoided. I was really scared of them. Even the ones I liked I stayed away from, for the most part. It was really strange, I admit. I can't explain the anxiety. Just know it is intense enough to cause problems communicating with authority figures, I guess you'd call them. I wasn't really troubled. In fact, I was so quiet and did so well on mandatory testing I didn't qualify for anything and didn't get in trouble. I might have been better off getting in trouble because I am sure I might have ended up in an alternative school with no extra curicular activities and shorter days. I think that would have kept me from getting so overwhelmed.
I was really behind in every class when I dropped out. Instead of being noisy and disruptive, I was quiet and unnoticed until, eventually, I didn't bother showing up.
It sounds like a cool xmas. In Australia it's already tomorrow, right? Still Christmas eve here. Anyway, have a Merry Christmas and enjoy your dvds, Millie:)



oh - i didn't go to an alternative school - but a regualr school that was very unusual. maybe an alternative school would have been good.
i was also very distant from teachers - hardly talked with them and blushed if they singled me out back in those days. my recess and lunchtimes were in the smoking area and addicts' area - but i usually wandered off to the art room on my own - where there was quiet and peace. the cool teacher i mention (who is not so cool now, but i thought so then...) used to turn a blind eye to me smoking in there. so i just hung out on my own a lot and hardly said much to the teachers really.


it is xmas morning already oOoOanaOoOoOo.. i am on the computer. my son has been palying his new pokemoin ds game and is now watching spongebob, and his dad is back to sleep in his own bedroom. where i live is great. small country town not far from byron bay - which is very altenrative and touristie - hippie trippie centre of OZ in the seventies. now commercialised but lots of weirdo's.
it is hot and sunny already and we shall splash in the pool today. water is good for us aspies. You are invited for a virtual swim today!!

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