What part of ASD do you think is most caustic?

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Just asking, from your own experience and observation, which traits and manifestation get the most 'bang for the buck' in terms of the most added challenge for the minimum? I've got a few ideas of my own but I'd like to hear what other people have to say or are experiencing first.

The hardest part of ASD for me is the lack of social skills. Trying to do everything almost entirely on your own is difficult and something that I'm still learning how to do. Social skills are necessary to be able to function in society and not being born with social skills can is a difficult. I've had to learn all the social skills that most people are naturally born with or in general, pick up more quickly.

Lack of social awareness, skills notwithstanding.

It's like having all the right tools, but not knowing which tool to use in what context.

I pick the sensory overloads and shutdowns/meltdowns caused by them. These get in the way of functioning in all areas.

Not being able to read people.

Social. It's SOOOO hard to connect with people, I have no idea what to say a lot of the time, they all talk of seemingly trifleing things to me I get bullied a lot cuz of my lackin social skills, because I act like a freak. And it's not like I can control it. I think it's often difficult when people make jokes and I don't understand them, then have to pretend I do. Worst of all is when you want to tell your friends about it, but are scared if they'll think of you differently (I've only told my best friend). My health class was talking about aspurgers once, the entire class thought that all the students with aspurgers were in Special Ed, and we're basically stupid. No one believed the teacher when he said we were often quite smart, or that it's thought people like Newton had it. ( at this one classmate called out, "so Newton was ret....ed?" and I had to sit there and pretend I was indifferent and didn't want to punch his face in. That's the hardest part.

I'm kind of surprised no one's mentioned mine yet.

My biggest liability - which I've been carrying with me all of my life - is that people can't read me accurately and, when they cant it mostly veers negative. That puts me also in the uncomfortable position of socially knowing what I need to do but also knowing that I personally am not allowed to do it because it won't register right - hence I'm caught in an eternal catch-22. No matter what I improve about myself, change about myself, learn, improve in awareness, I'm still coming off as something very much other than NT. There's really nothing I can do about it, I have close friends, can hold a good job so long as the people I work for are more concerned about character and performance than rote social skills, but my social skills fall apart not from lack of knowledge but because I simply cannot do what the next person does and expect the same reaction or outcome.

The best way I can explain it: on one side my facial expressions ring weird and hollow, on another - there are literally things I cannot do behaviorally, no matter how well I understand them in others.

I'll have to see what other answers this post gets. I suppose mine might perhaps do the most in the 'traditional lifestyle' damage category (ie. I'm pretty sure - no matter how normal I fundamentally am I'll never be married, never have kids, may never have a relationship longer than a month) but doesn't do a wild amount of damage to hireablility or friendships so perhaps each of those categories will get hit harder by a different ASD trait. Should be interesting.

Hi techstepgenr8tion,

For me, with informal social situations, my description of Asperger's impact on me is much described as in your sentence "My biggest liability - which I've been carrying with me all of my life - is that people can't read me accurately and, when they cant it mostly veers negative."

As distinct from my lifetime of experiences, I gathered observations over about a 10 year period. During this 10 year period (1983-1993), Asperger's Syndrome was not measurably detectable in any medium other than speech. Statistical analysis and experiments revealed that all other mediums manifesting impairments of social communication received caustic reviews through prejudice from assumptions made from manifestations of Asperger's Syndrome in speech (to be more precise, my oral verbal behaviour, with many factors often having no measurable direct impact (such as content words of what's said)). The over-all Asperger's Syndrome effect on my oral verbal behaviour in informal oral employment interviews resulted in my performance being ranked in the bottom 3% of oral evaluations (more than 2 standard deviations below the mean). Explanations for the basis for the results from employers' evaluations proved not to be true. Formal oral social interactions were not influenced by my Asperger's Syndrome (some federal judges told me I could be a lawyer, and hence, I couldn't be regarded as disabled under the Rehab Act or ADA involving employment, despite no job offerings after about 1,000 applications).

My other impairments could often be hidden in all short-term social situations (temporal lobe epilepsy & Asperger's distinct Geschwind Syndrome). My then "traits" from Geschwind Syndrome were changed to "factors" of Geschwind Syndrome co-morbid with the then labeled Asperger's Syndrome in the mid-1990's.

Tadzio

Social kills/awareness.

I have a tendency to call things as I see them, which annoys people to no end.

I'm directly aware of sensory overload, shutdowns, and various kinds of mental overload and confusion that are hard to overcome.

Inertia has long been a point of frustration for me.

It's hard for me to maintain an awareness of my social skills and social awareness, so it usually feels like much less of a problem than it actually is. Many of the things I may be missing or missing out on, I don't care much about, so it doesn't really sting so much, if at all.

My take:

The impaired ability to speak spontaneously and the impaired ability to display authentic/correct non-verbal signals.

Gets me in trouble with and causes lots of misunderstandings with even the most ASD-savvy persons.

I've never liked the word 'disorder'.