"Unofficial" German Aspie

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Hi everyone!

I just joined this community and I'd like to introduce myself. My mother tongue is German, but I hope that my English is good enough to make you understand what I want to tell you.

I wrote that I am an "unofficial" Aspie, because I have not had a doctor or another qualified person tell me that it's indeed Asperger's. But I have been living with the symptoms for almost thirty years now and when I stumbled on a Wikipedia article about AS, I just thought "Yes, this is it, now I finally have a name for it!" It was quite some relief.

Funny thing is, my parents have put me through a lot of things when I was little. I went through a logopaedic therapy to sort out my problems with pronouncing certain sounds correctly, They always were told by my teachers that I behaved "oddly" and that the other children in my class didn't accept me. All our neighbours and relatives always went on about how I used lots of difficult words that I ought to have been too young to even understand. I even spent four or five years of my childhood talking about nothing but dinosaurs. But obviously they still didn't figure out that I was widely different from other kids or even from my own sister (who is odd herself but not in the AS kind of way).

Despite being an Aspie, I am still intellectually gifted and I guess that helped mask that there was something (else) funny going on in my head. I reckon my parents just expected me to figure out the whole "dealing-with-people-thing" on my own like I figured out a lot of other complicated things.

The bad news is, I didn't. Most of the time I'm still totally baffled at what people do and why they do it. I know how to react in most contexts, I have even learned to use my hands to help me talk, but by and large I learned it by reading books and figuring out what I did differently in real life. Sometimes I still get very confused when I'm talking to people, especially on the phone, when I can't see their faces. But I can largely deal with the emotional puzzlement and react to others in an (mostly) appropiate way, even though I just act out the scripts that have been helpfull in the past.

I know that I have very few friends and social contacts for someone my age, but I'm mostly okay with this. The Internet of course helps with that. Wikipedia for example is a great site where I can spend hours digging up information that I will never seriously need in my life.

At the moment I'm studying chemical engineering, which is not as boring as it sounds. In fact I love most of the stuff we do at the uni. But I am taking much too long already to complete my studies. I should have been working for some years already.

Oh, and about my nick: there is a fluffy dog in my real life. He's a poodle mutt with a very loveable character who belongs to my parents. But as I'm currently living with them, I spend a lot of time with that dog and he helps me with my emotional issues. I tend to get depressive, when the weather is too rainy, which it is a lot around here, especially this time of year. Bartosh (the dog) is always there when I need someone to cuddle. He means a lot to me. That's why I chose this nick. To have Bartosh around on this forum whenever I need someone to guide me.

I hope to find a lot of interesting topics to talk about in this community and to learn how to better handle the emotional challenges of AS. It would be nice to have a place (even a virtual one) where I know that people will understand why I'm behaving oddly, even if they may not understand my particular quirks. *friendly smile*

Welcome! There is a lot to see here.

Nice to meet you, FluffyDog - and welcome greetings to the Wrong Planet community.

Welcome!

A very special Welkome to WrongPlanet, with a K.

The WP Kink

Welcome, FluffyDog.

I can relate to many things you talk about in your introduction: I, too, am undiagnosed; I was the proverbial smart kid whose social awkwardness was thought to be a phase; I did everything I could to stay in school where I had structure; I love to collect useless knowledge and Wikipedia is my best buddy in the effort.

I hope you will find WrongPlanet useful to you.