female aspies with perfect eye contact and body language?

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i do the hand-flapping thing......mostly in private but to excess. i also move my head in a upwards bizarre fashion ......many times over.....but do that just about exclusively in private OR when i think no-one is watching

it has a calming, tranquilizing effect on me.

i hate myself for doing it.. sad but true.

Like others, in the process of growing up I became very good at mimicry. Furthermore, I grew up in a family setting where abnormal behaviour wasn't tolerated. I learned to dress myself, tie my shoes, take showers and maintain eye contact because if I didn't you'd better believe there was a beating heading my way. But all of those things were consciously learned behaviors that never came to me naturally. Instead I've become very good at automatically mimicking the people around me in social situations.

As for whether it's possible to have an example of an Aspie whose 'unspoken social language' is naturally 'perfect', I would be surprised.

I do have eye contact and body language, but I have problems mostly with eye contact.

I feel like people can pretty much tell from a mile away that there's something 'off' about me....sometimes this is a good thing because people I can relate to sense it and start talking to me. Otherwise though it kinda sucks because it's really hard to do anything in public when I feel like a total outsider.

I feel like that about my ADHD (diagnosed as ADD), I avoided many of the negative behaviours associated with it to evade trouble, I'm actually sure I would have been murdered if I showed too much of it. But I still intrinsically know what I am.

(Oh geez this turned into a novella. I'm sorry in advance!)
(edited once to correct spelling)
(...make that "twice")
(OK, three times. I'm a little OCD about proofreading. Let's consider it a 'case in point')

I am a lady in my mid-to-late 20s who was recently self diagnosed. And I had a healthy degree of skepticism about the whole thing from the start, so please don't think I'm some kind of trend-hopper...my mom was the one who first voiced the idea, more than a year ago. I dismissed it at first, because she has a tendency to latch onto ideas she hears about from daytime TV "doctors".

Long story short, I ended up coming across information on AS later, due to problems in an entirely different area of my life (surprise, romance!). That was a couple months ago and I have been reading up on it avidly ever since. I am 99.9% positive that it's something I'm affected by. I'd like to say '100%', but I always like to take things with the proverbial grain of salt.

At this point in my life, I do (and have for years) come off as smoothly functioning in a social context. However, this was not always the case. In retrospect I realize that I was experiencing the world in a way that was significantly different from those around me. At the time, I had no idea--I had no real understanding of what was going on in other people's heads, or how they worked. I spent most of my time wandering around outside, hanging out with animals (yay for growing up on a farm!), reading books like crazy. I continually failed classes in school and ended up dropping out at the age of 16 because I refused to participate in anything I wasn't directly motivated by, in favor of reading. Seriously, it was like chain-smoking with books.

I'm going to gloss over a lot of detail here, though I'll be glad to bring it up later in the discussion if people need more anecdotal evidence in support of my self-diagnosis.

Over the space of the last decade, I have been lucky enough to be exposed to increasingly stimulating social settings in gradual increments. I am very fortunate in that the expansive, cohesive group of peers that I stumbled upon are (generally speaking) non-judgmental, patient, and most importantly, action-oriented. I think that might be why we all get along so well without there having been any pressure for me to perform, socially.

That said, simply by being around and not necessarily participating in a conversational sense, I began to unconsciously absorb bits and pieces about the socialization that was going on around me. I became more and more comfortable with the setting, I think because this is a group of people whose social life revolves around activities that occur on a repeating basis--ie Mondays = hanging out in a park, Tuesdays = a particular bar, Wednesdays = craft night, Thursdays = art night in the downtown, Fridays = rotating monthly bike rides, etc, etc, etc.

Anyway, as time went on I basically picked up on more and more little things to parrot. I wasn't aware of this while it was happening, as far as I was concerned I was just settling in.

I think a common mistake in these conversations re: gender and Asperger's is the interpretation and use of the term 'mimicry'. Typically when you hear the term, you picture someone repeating another's actions and/or words verbatim. It's simplistic and elementary and easy to see through. However, it can mean something so much more complex. After much thought I have come to view my social (inter)action as a very complex amalgamation of behaviors that I have been exposed to and internalized on a superficial level. This includes posturing, conversational diction/cadence/inflection, and facial expression (although I was very blank in terms of expression for most of my life, I have a very animated facial structure when I choose to use it).

I have always had an innate capability for spot on mimicry, though it's something I can't do on command--only when the inspiration strikes me. It's sort of like a tic. I made the connection between this ability and my current conversational M.O. after having spent a few years feeling troubled because I have this weird tendency, when talking to people, to subconsciously adopt their manner of speaking and carrying themselves while we're talking. I've felt weird about it because it changes immediately depending on who I'm talking to, and after we're done interacting it fades away. It's not me consciously 'faking' it...but it did cause me a bit of an existential crisis for a bit because when I tried to figure out exactly how I act or seem naturally, I thought that there was nothing there! Kind of like feeling like you don't exist.

After much thought I concluded that the only feelings that come to me consistently and utterly naturally are those of despair (usually an inevitable result of overanalyzing EVERYTHING all the time!), and all-encompassing sudden excitement (ie when I see a dog, when I realize someone has an interest in common with me ("you like Star Trek, too?!?"), or having someone be really nice to me (it's a little embarrassing but I practically hand-flap when strange old people are nice to me on the street)).



Anyway, my biggest point being. I'm pretty new to this whole idea or scene, but once I had read enough about it I felt like I had FINALLY FOUND WHAT WAS WRONG WITH ME. I'm sorry for the caps, but jesus h. christ, it was a huge turning point in my life and my understanding of myself. It's taken a lot of reading between the lines with some information since, yes, in my estimation it is most definitely gender-skewed (accidentally, but nonetheless). But I understand myself (and subsequently, other people--weird how that works) so much more than I ever have in my entire life, which has felt very long and tiresome for a lot of these reasons.

I feel pretty sure that if I had sought out a professional opinion, the idea of AS would have been dismissed pretty quickly by most practitioners because I know how to look people in the eye and do the dance that is social interaction. I'm very thankful that this is not how the cards fell for me, because I would have missed what I feel is the only accurate interpretation of myself and my relation to the world at large.

It pains me to think that many other women out there are missing this opportunity because people are hesitant to let go of certain facets of what they've become accustomed to. Please listen to what different people have to say, and truly consider them as possibilities.

Usually, I'm pretty good with eye contact and body language. However, clumsiness is another thing. I'm such a klutz.

I do eye contact and all the appropriate realtime stuff, and I realised it's because I somehow internalised my favourite characters from films growing up. When I pull off a particularly slick piece of interaction and think about it afterwards it was usually John Cusack or Bill Murray or someone. I can flick a switch and be outright charming. Mimicry appears very common among aspies who felt pressure to learn it, which you can guess would be many girls and some boys. Interestingly, it proves we have no mechanical deficit in reading people - the problem is a lack of common ground or, for those who didn't need to learn, a lack of interest.



Or they're really good at faking it. I agree that it's either one or the other.