Ever become terrified you're not the "real deal"?

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Superb point.

Wikepidea wrote that Hyperlexia can be "viewed as a sort of super ability." Oh dear. So you can pronounce words you can't readily comprehend, make omisions/reversals ec and on top of light senstivity, see bright river patterns and blur your page out. But its not Dyslexia. Joy, rapture.
If educators ec are not dealing with an inability, or perceived incompitence (Dyslexia means they can't read, we must aid them ) assistance is down to the individual. Educators need to shed the connotations and get to the science, one decodes, one doesn't, one comprehends the text, the other needs a little more guidance through it. Both may experience distortion, lets get overlays on the NHS.

Some on here also believe heitened intellegence would be beneficial. In some respects of course, though more inspired thoughts firing off in your mind, with a hindered ability to translate them tangably can be further isolating and extremely frustrating. I think labelling me during school would have made me feel patronised and angry, though I understand that having done so, I may have learnt a lot more.

Last edited by Jenk on 05 Sep 2008, 1:02 pm, edited 7 times in total.

if the label is a big problem with telling to some people,why not describe the autism related impairments that have got instead of giving labels,because they may be able to denie the name of someones exact disability or condition-but no one can say are not experiencing those impairments.

They would do it for attention, for some sick reason.. wouldn't put it past anyone to pull something like that, or even worse.

it has been done-and very publically sometimes,am remember [last year maybe] a person who was found in the UK,he refused to speak,and he was acting autistic,they said he was savant autistic,the national autistic society got involved and campaigned for him-got him care,support,assessment etc,it turned out he was a non autist from another country pretending to be autistic-think he had done it to make sure he didnt get sent back as well as getting a home,care etc.

I worry about this sometimes because I don't have official diagnosis and don't know how to get one/whether I want one (especially the latter). And I fear that I'm "making it up" even though reading/researching/talking about/visiting this website on AS has been like seeing my reflection in a mirror for the first ever time. But I have told friends as a "fact" and fear them saying "No you haven't, you liar/fake/attention seeker". Though why would friends say that? In fact all friends have said "Oh" including one with husband with AS and who has made academic studies of AS/autism. Her reply was something like "Oh yeah! so you do!" Am still very new to the whole thing despite my advanced age so had put these fears down to part of adjustment process. But maybe not. Am fighting urge to say "Does that make sense?" My students tell me I say this several times every lesson about things I've said.Hmmm. That may tell its own story.

Actually as I'm writing I recall that when I was expecting my daughter I was always waiting for doctors/nurses/"mums" etc to say "You're not really pregnant, not like normal pregnant people, you fantasising weirdo." Again, why would that happen? But I though it a lot.

By the way guys thanks so much for your responses so far, it's nice to know that I'm not the only one who's ever felt this way

I have definitely had worries that maybe I was faking it or that I was nuts. At these times I just stuff my baby videos in the VCR and watch them. Boy was I a weird baby! I often worry that people think that my Tourette symptoms are just faked too and that gets me down...

lol i really think thats horrible if they get the attention i think they should get the horrible depressions and the suicide feelings to teach people a lesson

You shouldn't be so upset with people who 'fake it' for attention. Surely if someone was desperate enough for attention that they would do that means that they are mentally ill in some way. The only people who are genuine freaks and deserve punishment are those who don't have AS or mental health problems but use it as an excuse for criminal acts.

Good Point! I have to agree with you on that!

By the way, there is a wonderful description of some of this feeling in a FAQ about Tourette's syndrome.

Here is the FAQ

Here is the relevant quote from it, which is the section "Living with Tourette Syndrome". I have bolded especially-relevant parts, although one bolded part is just a section title, and that one I have underlined to make it obviously different.

I was in a similar position with stimming. I thought it was a bad and shameful habit. I did not realize that it helped me to process information and deal with overload, and I did not understand that the strong sense of "I have to do this I really have to do this" was anything other than some weird unconscious emotion, or even like there was someone else in my head who took over and did that (a suggestion encouraged by other people actually, I didn't come up with that one out of nowhere). I literally felt like I was at war with something inside of me.

This utterly tied my brain in knots in ways nobody's brain should be tied in knots, ever.

And for a person as insecure, self-hating, and utterly confused about the true neurological basis for my actions as I was... the constant speculation about who's real and who's not made the autistic community seem like a really bad place for awhile, it took me longer than usual to settle down and feel comfortable. Some people around me seemed almost obsessed with weeding out anyone with even a semblance of not being autistic, of being taken over by what I once read described as "map-reading autistics" (i.e. people who said "I'm interested in maps so I must be autistic"), of blurring the distinction between autistic people and "cousins" or "autistic-like" people, etc.

And I happen to think the autistic community ought to, at least in part, be a place autistic people can come to without being judged for how similar or different we seem to be from some other autistic person. I read a book once by a woman who views rocking much like I used to as a kid, as some kind of addiction, almost shameful, but something that she can't help doing but feels 'drawn' to in a way. It's one way people conceptualize this stuff, and even though it's different from people who have a clearer view of their neurology than others might have, it doesn't mean the person isn't autistic just because their self-conception is very different from most online autistic people. (After all, a person can have a single experience and describe it in two almost opposite ways depending on their perspective on that experience changing over time.)

I was even judged once because I rocked in a different position from someone else. WTF, seriously WTF. (Never mind I once went to a conference of people with developmental disabilities in general -- which is a community much less hung up on diagnostics and far more interested in getting real results for real people -- and saw about five other people rocking, every single one in the same way that had been, in me, deemed "not typical enough" by the stim-police. All of which convinces me that the people who try to act as stim-police haven't actually spent huge amounts of time around huge numbers of autistic people, because if they had, they'd know that just about every possible variation is done by someone somewhere. A lot of people think if they see somewhere between 1 and 50 autistic people they've "seen it all" and are capable of judging others by comparing them to the ones they've seen, And it's just not true, wouldn't even be true if they'd seen a hundred.)

And... yeah. I think we have some responsibility to make a serious effort to avoid making things an utterly hostile environment to those who are already terrified about whether a label fits or not. (Many of whom, like me, have had their every attempt at defining who they were, even outside a label, completely and systematically squashed by professionals, parents, or other people, well-meaning or otherwise. I was actually taught piece by piece and explicitly not to trust my own memory, not to trust my own senses, not to trust my own thoughts, and not to trust my own feelings. In the words of a friend of mine they did their darndest to "manufacture an unperson" out of me, and got at least some outward success for a long time.)

Not to mention, anyone who can pass, by their own traits or by the assumptions of others... I've seen people get flack for looking obviously autistic sometimes and not others. The assumption is that the autistic part is the act. People don't consider it might be the other way around, that the 'NT thing' is the act and 'looking autistic' happens whenever they let their guard down for a second.

Anyway... all these situations... the attempts to pin down exactly who is autistic, who is not, etc., in most cases they completely undermine some basic aspects of a community, and they harm more people than would be harmed by a community with a few 'fakes' in it. And the "If I don't like this other person I'll raise suspicions about them not really being autistic" thing is not only wrong but cowardly as well, it deflects responsibility in a major way.

Cal Montgomery wrote a paper called Tangled in the Invisibility Cloak. And I'm going to quote that, too, again bolding the most relevant parts. She's talking about the two most common (but not only) approaches to disability -- viewing it as an innate medical problem vs. treating it as a problem of certain kinds of bodies/minds getting shut out systematically by a society that enables other kinds of bodies/minds:



And... yeah. None of us are qualified to make that call about someone else, and the toe-wiggling stuff is just silly (yes, even some quadriplegics can wiggle their own toes). And the gossip is destructive, for the reasons outlined at the end. I hate that people are made to question themselves this way, as I used to do it all the time myself and understand how this stuff affects people. (Oops, I have empathy. Someone must need to take away my autie license. )

Anbuend...I find myself stunned by your insight. *bows*

Thanks for all that information. It was very interesting.

i still think they should burn in hell

I have empathy too. Oh well! There it goes.

When people think I get "advantages" from society for being disabled, I always want to tell them, "Take all the 'advantages' away from me if you want. Just please also take, along with them, the pain, exhaustion, overload, being treated as a second- or third-class citizen or even as not human at all, the fact that "getting out of" having to do various difficult things also involves not being able to do many fun things (or the fact that I for that matter have enough of a work ethic it was very difficult for me to adjust to not being able to, it's not something I see myself as "getting to" not do, it's something I tried very hard at whenever I did have a job), the having to run myself into the ground to avoid being treated like I'm not doing enough (while still not accomplishing as much as most people would with less of their total energy expended), all the day-by-day and hour-by-hour crud, etc.

I mean, not that I'm generally into whining about being disabled, but good grief, people who think it just means getting "special privileges" without a serious cost obviously don't have to live it.

I do think that if someone needs attention that badly they've got something going on. And in some cases might actually be autistic. I know of a guy whose autistic kid believed that people "more autistic" than him were happy because they didn't know they were different. The kid decided at midnight he was going to become "that kind of autistic person", and went on to try very hard to be. So I'm not going to be hugely judgmental if that ever does happen. The only time I was upset was when a reporter went undercover as an autistic person once to get a story.