Asperger
Foundation
R0ADKILL
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Posted - 2007.09.17 14:03:00 -
[1]
Given this character name I'm sure it's not hard to guess that I'm involved with AS.
There are lots of people who mistakenly equate having Asperger's syndrome with being a geek with a bad social life. Impaired social life and having an obsession does not mean people have AS, but people who have AS most likely have these sympthoms. AS has a large set of sympthoms and there isn't a person who has all of them. It is always just a subset. Anyway, I don't use medication and I don't have regular "therapy" or similar sessions about this, although I'm diagnosed "officially". I'm also off the charts in the online AS tests, although they can be misleading, so if someone suspects that he or she has AS, he/she shouldn't rely on it.
I've known that I have AS for the past few years and knowing about it helped immensely. Before, I didn't know why I can't interact well with others, but since then with practice I'm doing a conscious substitute for what others do quite naturally. For example I know not to keep constant staring eye contact, but to break eye contact some of the time and I pay attention to my body language in order not to give out the wrong signals, like signaling that I'm in a bad mood and that I prefer to be left alone. Smiling sometimes, not folding my arms around my chest all the time and a few other things help in interacting with others.
I hate waiting, it is excrutiating pain for me to be idle, especially when it comes to public transport. I have to have something in my hand, otherwise I don't know what to do with my arms when standing.
Trying to keep up a conversation is difficult because I'm much slower at judging the intent of others when having a live conversation. I reply too quickly and it often ends up being nonsensical, a filler so I end up correcting myself a lot of the time with what I'd really ment to say.
Intelligence doesn't have much to do with Asperger's syndrome, except to exclude Autistic people from being diagnosed with AS. However, it would be misleading to say that it doesn't affect the way someone thinks.
I'm very lucky because the thing I'm interested in happens to be practical in real life. I'm very good in IT and I solve problems for a living. I often apply unique approaches in order to accomplish something and it's not the matter of intelligence, but just "thinking differently" (TM).
I'm interested in science, be it physics, mathematics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, psychology etecera. I will never stop learning, trying to know more. I believe in trying to avoid being an idiot, in the original greek meaning (quoting wikipedia: "Idiot" was originally created to refer to people who were overly concerned with their own self-interest and ignored the needs of the community. Declining to take part in public life, such as democratic government of the polis (city state), such as the Athenian democracy, was considered dishonorable. "Idiots" were seen as having bad judgment in public and political matters.").
I guess people could describe me as being very rational, as I believe in trying to know things, trying to follow the scientific method in understanding things.
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