I've been lucky enough to actually have and draw friends who are social butterflies, definitely more on the intelligent and reflective side of that schema but social butterflies nonetheless. That much has at least blessed me with, when I was 20, having ten or fifteen people hanging out over my place most days of the week during the summer or, for the past four or five years almost every weekend going downtown to the club district, knowing the right people, going to house parties on a regular basis and being in the right crowd - believe it or not I still have huge social hindrances mainly that yes, there are certain types of people who will see me superficially and not want anything to do with me but beyond the fact that I have no expectation for all or even most people to like me anymore it also occurs to me....don't most people, regardless of social skills, end up in that spot? My problem with communication these days is largely that I can even try to dumb it down to third or fourth grade vocabulary and no matter what, there's always someone complaining that they can't understand a word coming out of my mouth - it only gets scary if that happens to be employers or clients where yes, it could be a matter of going concern with employment.
I think for the most part you'll likely see most of the people here dealing with the most angst in their teens and especially the first half of their 20's. The problem with early 20's - anything is possible, for people who think like I did their AS symptoms (for those with at least more internal social gearing) are exactly what other people around them have always accused it of being - pure laziness, weakness, ie. when your that age you can conceptualize the idea that you may not have a disability at all and maybe you just have no idea what *real* trying is. A lot of times its the perfectionism and self-induced beatings that one puts themselves through at that age in their race for perfection, largely to have their needs for external respect as their own respect gratified to the fullest extent available. Some angles, through just pounding on yourself till you throw up over a social faux pa made earlier, do get better - many don't and particular when anxiety starts becoming the biggest killer and cause of external appearances of weakness or, better said - when anxiety becomes your biggest ongoing social faux pa, that's where you usually learn that you have to reconcile the difference between what you can help and what you can't much more seriously.
While I can argue that many people aren't quite *that* hard on themselves (I wish I would have had other emotional alternatives or other routes - unfortunately I didn't) its still there to a greater or lesser extent. If your talking to late teens or early-mid 20 somethings you'll see a lot of fire, a lot of urgency, its mainly because they're struggling to assert themselves to themselves and to other people, at an age where admitting that something can't be helped - to ones self even - is the absolute of what's 'not ok'. I think that's when natural law propulsion and life or death urgency of self-actualization is at its strongest. I could be wrong, but being the age balloon that's phasing through just by diagnosis it even seems like the general age bubble of diagnoses, as it widens out past teens and 20's, much less social Darwinism among members regardless of the variety of ideologies put out there.
01 Sep 2009, 3:45 am
