...To Show It What It Can Be

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Hi all,

I have (FINALLY) been referred on to St George's in Sheffield for confirmation that I am an aspie.

I imagine most of you have had the same experiences I have: being marginalised and "bouncing off" the world; not receiving any support in school or college or work; feeling like every full time day I work lasts eighteen hours; being burned out by sensory overload; not understanding why people of the opposite sex lie, cheat and waste time when all you want is an honest relationship.

Not to mention the problems with avolition and dysthymia, which are often wrongly mistaken for laziness or full-on depression. Nothing like a bit of "I WANT to do something but I can't MAKE myself do it!" to round the week off.

But you know what? The more I learn about myself and the way aspergers works, the more I think that there is a purpose behind it. Maybe people like us were designed to be the lookouts and the knowledge keepers back in the day when humans lived in tribes - not everybody could be out hunting or looking after the kids, and someone's got to make sure the neurotypicals don't get themselves killed off or lose all trace of civilisation.

The world is confusing and frightening. It's full of liars, cheats and cowards, people who don't say what they mean and don't care if their actions hurt others.

But maybe that's why there's us.

Well that was one of the best intros I have ever seen on here. Best of luck with your confirmation. Getting my formal diagnosis was the best thing I have ever done for myself. I want o say it gets better but that would be lie. Rather I would say, it stays the same but at least you can make sense of it all.

Welcome to WP!

Poet, welcome to you. I really like that thought, and you know, that may well be true.

Maybe there's a genetic mechanism for that. Maybe the reason why the ASD rate is way up at 1 in 88 now is because the world has become so treacherous that more of us are needed than ever to help stabilize it.

I wouldn't put it past anything.

Anyways, we are here, let's do what we can.

Autistic people used to be very rare, which makes sense since a lot of Autistic children (at least the lower functioning ones) probably would have died in ancient times. I would have died too--but it would've been because of my hip dysplasia. But if that hadn't killed me, my lack of fear for things like spiders, snakes, etc. or my difficulty feeling pain or forming good social relationships would have probably done it. But as technology and learning began to be more important, we start seeing Autistic people in the past--Newton, Mendel, Darwin, Einstein, Mozart, Van Gogh, Thomas Jefferson, Lewis Carrol, Thomas Edison, and MANY, many more--and technology and learning began to explode.

We may have our difficulties, but we ARE responsible for the vast majority of discoveries, technology, and art we have today. Neurotypicals wouldn't be s**t without us.

...but that doesn't necessarily make them worse than us. They have advantages too.