It is not Asperger's that makes me who I am

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It is not my shoes that make me who I am. My dirty shoes are not me.
It is not my body who makes me who I am. My ugliness or beauty is not a reflection of my personality.
It is not any of my phisical features that make me who I am. If I have a big nose - this is not what I have chosen.
It is not my neuro system that makes me who I am. I did not chose it either.
It is NOT my Aperger's that makes me who I am.

These are my thoughts that make me who I am.
These are my deeds that make me who I am.
These are my personal efforts that makes me who I am.
These are my interests that make me who I am.

If I choose to be kind - it makes me generous, If I choose to be short-tempered and cruel - it makes me evil. This will be what I am, this is what makes me different and reveals my personality. Because I can chose to be cruel or kind. I can chose to be lazy or industrious. Asperger's is not something that I chose. This is something I HAVE to live with. This is not WHO I am.

I am having hard time with my Asperger's features, such as difficulty switching attention, difficulty in multitasking and difficulty with self-organizing, difficulty when interacting with others.
But it is not those difficulty that make me who I am. These is my desire to lessen those difficulty that makes me who I am. This is my desire to succeed in some ways that makes me who I am.
I have difficulty switching from one field of interest to another. And being an Aspie I have obsessibe interest in some fields. But this is I who select those interest. Those interest tell s omething about me. but Asperger's syndrom is not ME.

Why I am telling this? I am so damn tired of people saying that théy are so damn interesting and unique and do damn better than the rest of the world.... beause they are Aspies... And that Aspies - is who they are.

I am not just a damn Aspie. I am individual in the first place. I have some problems in life. Some of them are associated with my asperger's traits. And a lot of them are associated with my other personal traits. This is not entirely Asperger's that defines everything about my personality.

Yes,it's better that everyone treats each other in the first instance as individuals and keeps
an open mind.
It's not only generalisations about Aspies/NTs that make me feel uncomfortable at times
but also the way people have stereotypes about nationalities or appearances.We've probably all been guilty at some stage of prejudging people unfairly on that basis.

Hello, Albert Camus. I thought you died in that car accident.

Open mind is good. But here I wanted to have people to open their mind towards themselves in the first place.
I do not know where the idea comes from, but a lot of Aspies on this forum think that Aspie - is what they are. That Asperger's traits constitute their intelligence and make them interesting people.
My point is it is not Apserger's that makes you an interesting person. It is your individual quality. Aspergers people can be interesting, but they can be very dull too. They can be intelligent and they can be stupid.
What really makes you who you are is the choices that you make every day. It is very admirable that people with Asperger's strugle and work hard to get the most and even more of what the nature endowed them with. Still some of them do work hard and some choose not to. Just because you are an Aspie - does not make you an admirable person. But your choice to succeed makes you an admirable person.
Yes, I read and wrote and spoke at an early age and had the reputation of being "gifted". Who the hell cares about it now? Yes, I am doing very well at school, still there are a lot of NTs who do a lot better than me and with much lesser effort. Yes, I have an obsessive interest in math. Still there are a lot of NTs who do better than I in this field even WITHOUT having all that obsession....This is my will not to give up that makes me who I am. This is not my Asperger's that makes me interesting and such.

AS may not be who I am, but it is definitly a large part of it. I don't want to be known as my AS, but rather as someone living with those traits. They are a large part of me that I won't deny, but to say they are me is to say that I am a sick. AS is not an illness, but rather a the exact opposite, it is a form of wellness that most people cannot understand. I also want to be recognized as being AS by the general community because it is a strong part of who I am. It is like my pride of being Canadian, I am not JUST a Canadian, I am Padium, the aspie Canadian, who is a fan of Sonic, and absolutly loves Firefly/Serenity, and so on.

You're right, a person shouldn't be defined by their physical or even neurological traits.

It is however rather helpful to be able to identify AS (or any unusual neuropathy) as a cause for particular habits or behavior. It's easier for others on the outside to understand our need to stim for example, when we can explain that it's a result of our altered neuropathy and that it is in fact not unique to us as an individual.

But while each of us understands that our neuropathy doesn't define us, those on the outside who experience the world as it is commonly experienced (by NTs) still need to be able to create a mental picture of us and who we are that is generated from the outside. And given that their picture must come from outside of us, it's generally going to include those traits they find unusual like stimming. So from their perspective, autism will always contribute to the definition of us as individuals although we hope it's not the only thing they see.

Although there's nothing inherently wrong with "unusual", it seems to be part of the standard set of neurological wiring to believe that "unusual is BAAAD". Which leads to the need for education to familiarize people with what is currently unusual. Once the culture is more acclimated to it, then it ceases to be unusual (for the most part) and will become accepted.

In the interim it's difficult to keep the head straight and not fall into the trap of allowing our own emotional needs to turn us into egotists. It's easy to be bitter about past experiences (I know I have been) and that bitterness encourages us to latch on to the idea of higher IQ and the like and simply start claiming superiority. Of course it's not true - we're not superior, we merely have a very different set of strengths. It's just easy to fall into that trap because the notion of superiority is so comforting after having experienced years of abuse.

Bravo bravo.

This is something my mother has been telling me since my teens.

This is an interesting question.

On an intellectual level, I would definitely agree that I am more than the sum of my neurological differences. I am not just an Aspie.

But the rest of me is saying "Yes, being an Aspie defines me." And it feels like more and more of a positive every day. I've only been diagnosed recently, so this may account for why it feels so important to me. I've never found a label before that really fit. It *really* helps me understand why I handle things in certain ways, and why certain things feel difficult for me. And more than that, I can take the label and apply it to practically everything that's ever happened in my 50 years of life, and suddently, it all makes sense. It's kind of like finding my personal Rosetta stone.

So, yeah, I like calling myself an Aspie. Early and often.

But as others have said, we're all individuals. This is what is working for me right now. Whatever works for others, is cool with me.

I half agree and half don't, because we can choose what we do and yes we have freewill and we can think etc. but Asperger's makes us think differently and do some different things than NTs do.