Adults with Aspergers Seem 'Normal' to Me

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Of course it is still a disability (to the world, at least). I may be able to "act normal" but it's exactly that, acting. It takes a lot of energy to do that, especially on a daily basis.

Just because I have learned to "act normal" does not mean that I don't think like an autistic person - of course I do. I have learned how NT's think for the major bits, but it does not come naturally to me and I have to focus and think it through in order to do so, that way I can accommodate their thoughts and behaviour.

I still have sensory issues. I still feel ridiculously uncomfortable with eye contact and around people. I still stim when I need to calm myself, they are just not noticeable stims that would draw attention. I still screw up occasionally socially, or occasionally I start to overload and have to excuse myself and calm myself down in the restroom.

I have to let the act go at home, be myself and engage in my obsessions, it's the only time I can recuperate to ensure I don't go bat-sh*t crazy. Keeping the act up 24/7 is too much for me. If you saw me at home, nobody could state that I don't have autism, the evidence is everywhere throughout my house, particularly in terms of my obsessions.

Just because you don't "see" all of this, does not mean that I don't struggle and put a lot of effort in on a daily basis.

People with very high IQs can often learn to fake it. Not everyone with Asperger's has a very high IQ...

I went to a conference today and there were a lot of adults with Asperger's who you could really tell when they spoke. And then, there was a psychologist who I assumed was there in a professional capacity, because her speech was perfect. Turns out, she also has Asperger's...

Point is, some of us can "pass" as NT. Some of us can't. But all of us have differences, whether we can hide them or not.

Look. She was probably too nervous or shy to tell people directly. So she told the instructor & then he told the group. So they know to look at her when talking, instead of looking else where.

I don't have a clue what has happened to society here. I bet its the chemical adverts of drugs & all in your head junk.

It started from, bulling - over & over again day after day - starts to rot away your esteem & confidence - you start getting depressed - you have flash backs or emotional panic attacks - you start questioning what’s wrong with you.

The people who have the problem is the ones turning the blind eye, narrow minded thinking, ignorance. Zero tolerance for bullying, that includes everyone & maybe they should send in the SAS to show them to change.

Anyone who feels they been outcast by society, should not stand alone. You heard of strength in numbers. Seriously if this is been ignored they is a tone of people who will come down on them like a tone of bricks. Because children are the future & those children, turn into adults. Who still hold a narrow minded view of difference.



And by the way, at that point you turn into one of them. THEY IS NO SUCH THING AS NORMAL, if you even tried to use that criteria, no one would be left on the normal side. They are lying to you, putting on a face, they feel threatened. You need to open your eyes & see tones of people are suffering behind closed doors.

Funny how humans are they own predators. Kinda makes you think, have we really evolved.

Adults with Aspergers are normal. It's just the set of personality traits associated with AS have become unpopular in today's dumbed-down hyper-social society. It's society telling intelligent introverts they don't fit basically. Instead of meekly letting themselves be saddled with the Asperger label like the lab rats we've been treated as by the DSM-IV, the people with these traits should have just told society to f-k off! Far healthier!

I've known schizophrenics that seem normal too. Until they don't. You can't judge from a video or just watching someone a little bit. Or even casually knowing them. Sometimes, the only way to be sure if someone is signifigantly impaired or not is to know all about how they're operating in all aspects of life, over a long period of time. Even some people with extremely severe impairments aren't always obvious.

Most people won't function at optimum level in certain situations though - it just depends on whether you want to term this an impairment or not.

A non-judgmental person will often see a schizophrenic person as 'normal' whereas a judgmental one will see them as 'mad' etc - it's all relative to the person and how open-minded they are to human variety.

People with adult diagnosis Asperger's still had the disorder to be diagnosed, so clearly it didn't just go away undiagnosed as they got older. I'd go so far as to say that, in my case, it's become more disabling as I've gotten older, as people seem to be more forgiving of social ineptness in the young.
I see Asperger's as an internal difference which (may be) noticed (by others) in the way the Aspie handles social situations. For me that is just a very tiny part of how Asperger's affects my life.
I hope psych students are being taught more than:
If you can't see the disorder just by looking at a person... it isn't there

Most psych students are pretty stupid - you are hoping for a miracle if you expect them to be able to help you. We are perfectly capable of helping ourselves. The Aspergers diagnosis encourages a passive victim mentality. The disorder is there if you want it to be; if you choose to see it as just a normal style of thinking and communicating, it isn't a disorder.

Not really. It's an impairment if it interferes signifigantly with employment, personal life, etc. I mean if you're only impaired at a particular burger stand in Springfield, Ohio and nowhere else ever, then yeah, its not really an impairment. But in life the 'certain situations' are usually either unavoidable or avoiding them will severely restrict your ability to function normally in society.

So:

1) You don't observe differences in the way they interact with you in terms of speech.
2) You don't observe meltdowns and shutdowns.
3) You don't observe them struggling to handle stress, or displaying unusual sensitivity to sounds, light, etc.
4) You don't observe differences or difficulties in interacting with people other than yourself.
5) Because the symptoms aren't present, you think maybe that means that the condition is no longer present.

A certain amount of social interaction can be learned, in the same way that you learn a script for a play. There are certain set phrases, greetings, and other things which are used in so many situations that you have to be able to use them properly in order to hold a conversation, and there are also things you must not talk about except in very specific circumstances. If someone has been using and applying these tools for a long time, then obviously they are going to be able to put on a half decent show of it. Most of the time I don't have a problem holding a conversation, but that's because people don't tend to do things which are not accounted for in my personal rulebook. When they do, however, then I have to improvise and that's not always easy to handle. Also, not all aspies show the same symptoms, or to the same degree. I don't stim, for example, and never have. Nor have I ever had a meltdown. That doesn't stop me being on the spectrum, because I have other symptoms which are most definitely AS, and despite excellent special education, they persist into my adulthood.

I think what you don't realise is that it isn't just a question of "learning all the rules" about social interaction, or learning how to manage emotional and sensory overload. There's always going to be something that trips us up, because our brains don't work the same way. It's difficult to explain, but think of it like this: let's pretend you spend 20 years teaching a monkey to behave like a human in social situations. At the end of it, they are pretty darn good. They can talk the talk and walk the walk. Everyone is fooled. Then, one of the humans starts to subtly change the way they interact. At this point, the other humans will respond in an appropriately human way. The monkey, however, will respond in a monkey way, because at the end of the day he is STILL a monkey. I think the trouble you are having distinguishing an adult AS from an adult NT is caused by you not doing anything outside of their experience of social situations, so they already "had it covered," so to speak. Combine that with them being good at managing overload and knowing not to stim in public, and hey presto! You have yourself an NT look-alike.

Perhaps a clearer way of seeing it is the old joke of, "A white horse goes into a dark stable and the doors are shut. It's all dark inside and you can't see anything. What colour is the horse?" The answer, of course, is white. Similarly, a socially adept aspie is still an aspie.

It's society itself causing the 'impairment' though by becoming increasingly biased against people with this type of thinking and communication style

Aspergers wasn't 'discovered' again until the 1980s/90s because up until that point these traits weren't overtly disadvantaging people - they were generally accepted as within the realm of normality. Society was generally far more tolerant and valued the intellect far more.
Today's society is exceedingly narcissistic and brainless; it's no wonder intelligent, sensitive people are devalued - they are the very opposite of what the culture is pushing!

The tipping point came when society started to devalue these positive traits and value their opposite far more. We currently live in a society where being a loud, insensitive, extrovert idiot is considered to be far more socially advantageous than being a mild-mannered intelligent introvert. That is the crux of the matter and I resent having what I see as a perfectly normal, useful personality style trashed and medicalised as some kind of an abnormal 'disorder'. It is not. It is society itself that is grossly dysfunctional, not me!

The Aspergers label has severely undermined my confidence and disempowered me.
I have now rejected this useless label and feel a lot better - far more 'myself'.

Before my diagnosis (and especially after I moved back home), my parents (and to a certain degree, I) wondered why I was so irritable and quick to anger at home, while being known as one of the calmest, less aggressive people among my friends and acquaintances. At best, I get mildly irritable when "outside", and you'd have to know me well to notice. If you don't know me well, and notice I'm irritable, it probably equals a major meltdown. The reason is simple: After keeping my "shields" up all day, they go down at home. When suppressing meltdowns while among people, to look "normal", it even gets worse at home, since those feelings build up even if I suppress them. When I was a kid, I had meltdowns everywhere (people nicknamed me Mr. Linea, even). The fact that the meltdowns don't show, doesn't mean they're not there.

The same goes for all of it - I seem to understand metaphors, but that's because I've memorized them. If I encounter a new one, I rarely get it intuitively, and have to look it up. Since English is my second language, I can't even count the number of times I've googled a metaphor while chatting online or in-game, when I encounter new ones. If I don't have the Web available (as in when around people), I tend to pretend I understand, and come off as a fool if it gets apparent that I don't. In my native language, it's better, but I do have to look metaphors up from time to time even then. When I try to use metaphors (which is just as important if you want to seem "normal"), they sometimes get mixed up hilariously. But hey, presidents and prime ministers do that too. The fact that I'm able to look metaphors up, and memorize them, doesn't mean I understand them! On the contrary.

I've also learned how to simulate eye contact (or rather conceal the lack of it), by sweeping my eyes around, meeting the other person's eyes just often enough for him/her not to notice. You'll have to speak with me for a long time to really start notice that I rarely ever meet your eyes. Does that mean I don't have problems with eye contact? No, it means I've learned how to camouflage my problem. The neuropsychologist who assessed me, noticed immediately. Normal people without knowledge of autism usually don't. If I have to speak to someone for a long time, it gets more noticeable though. After a while, in one on one talks, I tend to look at the person's mouth most of the time, since I lip read (I'm not hearing disabled, but I did seasonal work as a stage technician for a few years...). Problem is, with women, that can be interpreted as staring at certain body parts. Since I know for a fact I've been misinterpreted that way earlier, I can get paranoid and think I'm being interpreted that way, when the woman probably just wonders if I'm paying attention. Then my gaze starts bouncing around the room, and my "problem" really gets noticeable. In any case, people are probably most often wondering if I'm actually paying attention, whether I'm staring at their mouth or somewhere else. Which is why I remember to meet their eyes occasionally in shorter conversations, but forget (or decide not to, since it takes up too much of my attention) if it turns into a longer one.

One of the things I don't manage to hide, is my inability to know when to speak. If I'm with one person, it might not show that much. If I'm in a group of five, however, I get interrupted even before I get a word out all the time, since I never catch the signals that indicate someone is about to speak (which they are all the time, since they seem to signal before the other is done talking). If I'm not in the mood to say anything, I just zone out. If I really have something important to say, or get annoyed from being interrupted all the time, I inelegantly interrupt whoever is speaking. At home, I might have a meltdown at that point, since my family should know better. So perhaps I'd seem normal if speaking to one person, and even more if speaking to a camera. Put me in a group, however, and I come off as odd, at best. Which is why being in a group exhausts me - trying to keep the "normal" facade up takes up too much resources in those settings (and often fails), and leaves me without energy.

Oh, and a fun fact: I pass those tests where you analyze people's faces, video clips and so on perfectly, often better than NTs. Simple reason: I've studied and analyzed body language and facial expressions my whole life. In a "lab setting", I'm rather good at it. Problem is, since it's a conscious process, not intuitive, it often fails in a real setting, where I'll miss what a person is saying if I spend that much of my attention on analyzing their mimics. If they made a test where you were to analyze expressions AND make an account for what was being said and what happened in a video, I'd probably fail horribly. Which is what I often do in real life.

Some may go out of their way to be horrible to people who are different, but on the whole I don't think that is true. I think it's mostly a function of being different people. Even NTs have arguments and face rejection, and NTs sometimes form whole cliques amongst themselves.

I don't think it's a matter of high IQ. I have a high tested IQ and I can't fake it. I think there's at least two others on this forum I can think of offhand who are gifted and can't fake it.

Maybe to a degree. I think I would've had an easier time being an adult in the era when I was a child (1970s) or before. But, I'm not convinced I'd be able to function at a normal level even so.



It's not like there were no people being pushed to the margins back then, either. Perhaps the standards were different, and perhaps, you wouldn't have been one of them under different conditions. Perhaps. Or perhaps not.

Most people aren't horrible, but his statement doesn't only relate to bullying and so on. During the opening week of the electrical engineering program I'm attending, there was a series of lectures on the requirements of engineers in today's society. It was all about being socially intelligent. If you're not able to build networks and be successful in groups, you have no place in modern business. Social ability is more important than professional knowledge. The most important part of being an engineer takes place in social settings. Blah, blah, blah. I felt like quitting the program immediately. We live in the most autism-hostile society (and that's global, it seems) ever. Perhaps there's more awareness when it comes to bullying in schools and so on, but in universities and professional life, the description of someone who'll fail horribly in any kind of job because of the requirement of "modern workplaces", sounds suspiciously similar to autism.