This was originally supposed to be a reply to "Is it hard for you to articulate?" but I figured posting about having exact opposite difficulties in that thread would be too much of a derail. Here we go:
No, I find articulating myself to be quite easy. It's probably because I practice whenever I'm at home and no one else is around. I'll rehearse things I'm actually planning to say to people, and I'll also try to think of things to say that just might be useful in a conversation some day. I'll also do an acting exercise I read about in an old textbook where I talk into a cellphone with nobody on the other line. So I'll be creating dialogue for both characters, but only one gets voiced. I especially enjoy pretending to be in a passionate argument, in that exercise. Especially because I make sure the argument is always about something absurd. I've always felt I have somewhat of a gift for language, to be honest. I started speaking and reading within just a few months of eachother (rather early, I know that's atypical). That helped me build a pretty extensive verbal vocabulary, since I made sure to find out how to properly pronounce every word I learned, because I didn't want people to think I was stupid. I figured everyone taught themselves how to read well before they started preschool, so if I wanted to keep up with the other kids, I had to work harder than them. Being able to speak well is of limited utility though if you perceive the people around you to all be insane and who seemed to act without rhyme or reason. Two people shaking hands was to me as logical as a bear in a tutu on a bicycle, underwater, but the water is actually ocean themed prom decorations.
My difficulties traditionally have been much more about not understanding others, not understanding what is normal behavior, why it's that way, and why I should care, as well as finding other people to be extremely unpredictable, and not understanding why people did certain things, as well as a tendency to assume people hated me immediately upon meeting me for the first time (this made the world pretty scary until I got to be taller than the vast majority of people.) Adults, who can do whatever they want (I thought), hated me. For instance, in elementary school I got sent to the principal's office for throwing sand at a girl because she told me to, just so she could tell on me. I was sure the principal was going to execute me, because adults could do whatever they wanted, and children were property. She sure made a funny face when I asked her how she was going to kill me and whether I could call my parents to say goodbye before she did it.
I also for a time in kindergarten and first grade believed that I was mentally ret*d. I couldn't understand why people acted the way they did, and I would say things to adults that they wouldn't understand (I thought this meant I used a wrong word, not that I had used a word that wasn't in their vocabulary), I would say things I thought were perfectly normal, like "get out of my way" and "go away. I don't want to talk to you" and "I don't want to sit next to Billy because his father is in prison, so Billy might decide to kill me", and people would get angry at me, even though there was no specific rules about any of the things I said, so they must have been angry because my stupidity just made them rage, and they made me visit the counselor every day for reasons that I had not been told and so assumed was because they thought I was stupid and needed to have conversations about feelings which I had to pretend to understand because she kept using euphemisms and metaphors about conformity instead of being literal. I thought it was unfair that they put me, an obviously ret*d boy in a class full of geniuses. It was proof I was ret*d when I was diagnosed with dysgraphia. Everyone else could hold a pencil without their hand cramping up, and all the letters they wrote were the same size, and it took me ten times as long as them to write the same thing. I really wished my parents had brought me with them into the child psychiatrist's office (the second one only though) while he explained his findings, which at the time did not include AS because it wasn't something most doctors had heard of. Years later I found out the report basically said there was nothing wrong with me, and shockingly, it said I was very intelligent. It said I had ADD though, as though that was in any way a reasonable explanation for my weirdness.
Oh well, things are going well now anyways.
Anyone have or used to have similar difficulties? What helps or has helped you?
edit: I got less weird! It's safe to talk to me, I swear!
23 Sep 2012, 11:20 pm
