Do you feel like you have advanced socially over time?

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I have always had a range of challenges that I've faced which could probably put me under the Asperger's classification. I'm 25 and until now had no idea this was anything more than my unique deficiencies.

I have been working for many years to over come specific social problems (which until now I thought was a combination of being a slow social learner, an a**hole, and having interests completely separate from what most other people were doing.)

I have practiced, taken notes, written lengthy progress journals, read books on body language and other social subjects, continually put myself in uncomfortable positions to force myself to learn, I even structured my life so that I could feel like I was making some kind of progress. That progress has been gradual, but over the course of a decade I feel I am substantially more adept than I would be had I not put the time and effort in to it.

Everything is still "forced", to some degree. If I stop trying I quickly revert to my default social behaviors.

So the question is, do you feel like you have become more balanced socially over time? I'm interested in responses from people who feel like they have put in a lot of effort as well as those who haven't.

When I first joined this site, I had the approximate "social age" of about 13. I'm now a very polite 15 (actual age 36). So it is possible to socially learn new things and grow, even with having AS.

I feel that I've gotten worse.

Throughout my years in school I always had a huge group of friends. I kept the same friends from elementary school through high school. After graduation, those friends all moved away or started families. Which leaves me with the one friend who didn't go away. I have one friend. Who I don't even really like that much. I just keep her around because I have no one else. Is that awful?

I've got a lot of acquaintances, but my awkwardness tends to prevent acquaintanceship from becoming friendship. It's like I don't know how to make friends anymore.

I've also found that my speech has gotten worse. I fumble words and have trouble controlling my volume, which I always had minor problems with, but now it's major. It seems to happen mainly when I over-think what I'm about to say, or I'm talking to certain people. Occasionally it happens for no reason.

I try to learn from bad social experiences, and try not to repeat them, but they seem to repeat themselves regardless of the effort I put forth. Hopefully I'll grow out of this super-duper-awkward stage.

I feel like I've gone backwards but it's hard to know for certain.

I had no friends as a child and then I became involved in a drug culture - marijuana, LSD, Grateful Dead concerts, Rainbow Family - and found a huge social circle. Making friends was easy and even though there were conflicts, we'd all smoke a joint and apologize and things would be okay again after a bit. I really resonated with the main character in "Ben X" when someone slipped him some ecstasy and he told his mother "I'm cured!" because that is exactly what my drug days were like for me (even though I didn't know about asperger's yet and didn't know there was something actually there other than me being a "bad person" because that's what everyone had told me about myself.)

When I quit all the drugs, my friends quietly slipped away. Now I'm back to having no friends again and being very awkward and not knowing how to make friends. Even when I wear my hippie clothes and hang out in hippie places, it's not the same anymore so I have to figure it was partially the drug culture accepting me and partially an actual change that takes place in me when I'm high on marijuana that makes me more approachable to others.

But I could lose my school money and everything I've been working toward if I smoked pot, so it's not an option for me to go back to that just so I can have friends again. So I'm struggling to figure out how to have friends while staying sober. It's not easy.

I was exactly like this. Drugs gave me confidence and I felt "normal" and accepted and the people around me accepted me. Then the drugs and booze got me in trouble so I lost a lot of confidence and all the social abilities I gained over the years disappeared and I'm back to the socially awkward hermit I was. I think I know more, but in terms of actually being able to use what I know, I lack the confidence to try

Do you guys use online groups to make "real life" friends? Basically all of mine are either from early childhood or came by meeting people from special interest/hobby forums online. Then kind of leapfrogging off of those people to make additional friends.

I think the thing that hit my hardest was when I realized what my level of functionality would be with out computers and the internet.

Yes. When I was 17, I felt around 12- emotionally that is. Now I'm 19 I feel 17. That's why I can talk to people more easily now I think.

Temple Grandin believes that she and other like her learn as they grow, and I tend to agree with her.

I used to do that from age 15 to about age 20. It was easier in the days of the BBS when just about everyone was local. We'd have meet-ups at pizza places and stuff like that. There were all ages, from teens to adults in their 40s and 50s, and many of the adults were very nurturing toward us young outcasts in a non-creepy way.

Once the era of the BBS came to an end, it was much harder to find groups of local people. People scattered according to their interests rather than their geography and so the social scene switched from searching for the rare person with a common interest among all the local people to searching for the rare local person among the people with common interests.

So far, I've only really made friends online with one local person and he's a Mormon retiree who's into photography and ham radio so the overlap of our interests is very limited and we've only met twice in meatspace: once accidentally running into one another at the grocery and he recognized me from an online photo and once when I wanted to get my driver's license but didn't have a car to take it in and he offered his (which was immeasurably kind!)

Of course: it's a developmental delay, not a developmental halt. We're late bloomers but we do eventually bloom, given enough time and proper soil conditions.

I feel I've made some advances:

- I'm now able to make eye contact with people for short amounts of time. This is a huge improvement, considering I used to not look at anyone at all.
- Tying in with the eye contact thing, I'm slowly but surely beginning to learn to decipher facial expressions.
- I try to remember to ask people questions about themselves and their lives, even if I'm genuinely not interested, because I appreciate it when other people do that for me.
- I dress somewhat more appropriately for my age now, rather than childishly like I did a few years ago.
- My special interests/obsessions are fairly socially appropriate. They provide great opportunities to start conversations with people, and they've actually led me to make new friends, things that never happened (in a positive way) with my old obsessions.

Eye contact. Ew.

I might have went backwards.

I think I have. Conversations come easier to me now than they ever have. There is no longer the awkward silence when I meet someone for the first time, good grief I hated that. People have the first impression that I'm a nice person, not that I'm rude or stuck up or that I don't like them. A lot of people have told me I've really come out of myself over the past few months, which I can also see. I just hope I can keep improving.

I'm better than I was in previous years, but I'll never be as good socially in this NT society as an NT.

I'm a lot better. I too put in a lot of time reading books on body language, and studying humans in general. But I feel that the biggest breakthroughs came with my Buddhist meditation practices.