Have you ever tried to be "normal"?

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Have you ever tried to act like you don't have AS? Are you a goth who ditched the Slipknot tee for American Eagle? A bookworm who took up basketball? I hope I'm not offending anyone by asking this question, I just want to know if anyone on here has ever had the "if you can't beat em, join em" mentality, and thus tried to make a drastic personality change. If so, what was your success rate? Discuss.

Yeah and I must say, lot of work. It's almost impossible to hide if you take things literal. Then it's really going to show when you have difficulty understanding people. You can come up with excuses for your AS like "I'm shy" "I just like to be alone" "I am not interested in going" "I'm just having a bad day" "Oh everyone does that."

I think the milder your AS is, the easier it is to hide it and the more valid your excuses are because you are so close to normal, you don't look any different or awkward. Instead people think other things of you like anti social, kept to yourself, shy, rude, uncaring. They might even think you're eccentric or weird or quirky.

Kids still knew I was different in school though when I tried to be normal. Even in high school I would try and join in conversations and kids didn't like it. I would stay on topic but I get told to mind my own business or to be quiet. If my annoying shrink were right, it could have been the social cues I missed to enter the conversation or I could have been too blunt or I was just annoying because I did take things literal and that is something you cannot hide. I was also argumentative then (I don't know if I still am) and I had difficulty understanding things. I talked to an NT online and she said it was hard at times talking to me during our chat because I take things literal and it be hard for her to explain things to me. She could even tell I thought different. So no way of really hiding it. People can just tell you see the world different than they do and think different.

There are things about me people can tell and they have no idea why I have these quirks. I don't even tell them I have AS. Back when I was meeting men, they could tell "what you see is what you get" from me and they thought I was direct and straight forward, very honest and my boss thought I was black and white. People also think I'm innocent. Some still think I'm naive.

So trying to be normal and be like everyone else didn't make me popular or be liked by lot of people. I'm just myself and don't care if people don't like me.

Yes, for about 2 years, from 1998 till 2000, I felt the need to be "normal" and fit in. I remember the worst experience during this period. I went to a house party in late 1999 with my Ph.D. supervisor, the person who held the party was the same age as me almost to the day - however he worked for the United Nations and had a beautiful girlfriend. He had fantastic social skills and all his friends were intelligent and seemed equally socially skilled.

I tired to be social like him and his many socialite friends, tried to be "normal" but all I could talk about was science facts and trivia. The more I talked the weirder I felt and more different I became from all the other people at the party. I had no ability for small talk at all. I felt like a fraud and a fake, like I was putting on some sort of act that people were seeing through.

I tried to drink some wine to calm my nerves, it was red wine, but choked on it and started wheezing and gasping for breath. I then hid in the kitchen for the rest of the party. I couldn't understand how I could be intelligent enough study for a PhD but have the social skills of a brick, at the same time.

But it got better, when I was diagnosed with AS in 2002 I didn't feel the need to be fake, I was once again happy with being me.

I gave up on that when I was 12 or 13. I figured I'd fail at it, so why try. It took my a whole lot longer to figure out that some people admire me for that. Not till college did I even begin to learn that, and not until my mid-30s did I really get it.

Thankfully, learning skills and such for developing myself and getting along with others is a lot more doable than trying to be normal.

My whole life (until last year) I thought I was normal.

Tried all that time to fit in with everyone else and failed miserably.

Yes, but I would be exhausted at the end of the day. I feel much better being myself.

I've always been taciturn.
But I noticed that people dislike people that don't talk, so when I was starting a new school, I tried to talk very much.
I was talking all the time. I tried to get the other to laugh, but my humour was not like their.
The whole thing failed, and now I'm quieter than ever before.

I tried really really hard in high school, but still managed to fail. I measure that failure by the fact that my nickname was "the chic from Mars" and the fact that I totally lost myself in the process not knowing who I was, what I liked. I had a real idenity crisis when I looked back on my high school years and realized that I wasted 4 years of my life trying to be someone that I am not. I worked real hard on finding who I am under all the burying myself that I did...and that I did well at. I also learned that when I truly accepted myself, autism, my gifts, my weaknesess, I do not care near as much what other people think of me. And the bizzare part of this is when I became more confident about who I am, ppl seem to like me more. Go figure.

Given that AS folks have a high capacity for memorization, some are able to mimic "normal" without really feeling it.

Be "normal" to the extent that you need to and then be happy.

Yeah I tried it, can't say I cared for it. I didn't like being fake.

I tried fitting in until about age 17, then I gave up and tried being a "class clown" for a while ... and now that (at age 59) I know my real deal, everybody else can either at least try to deal with my best effort at life or just forget about me, as most seem to do.

Despite being diagnosed in elementary school I didn't know that I had AS until about a year ago (though I knew I had been diagnosed with something), mostly because my dad just sees it as an excuse and thinks that I need to practice being "normal". Before then I tried and failed at being "normal" for years.

Jpeg,
Thats like asking a cat to be a dog. Becides normal is a dial on the washing machine, no one is "normal" and the ones who look and act really normal are the ones you really have to watch out for like my friend who has an obession with finding a "normal" man. Well she married a man who she thought was the most normal man she ever met. He turned out to be a serial child molester who marries women with kids so he can molest them. They had one child together and there is a nasty custody battle that went in favor of him regardless of some damning evidence she has on him. And all she says is, "But he seemed so normal"

So I think the questioning of the definition of normality is our greatest gift to humanity.

Jojo

What is normal? I just try to be honest. That is enough to deal with.

I have given up trying to pass as normal or fit in. It's quite liberating, really.
And believe me, you know what normal is when you're not it.