Manual impairment greater than social impairment?

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I've been finding that when my confidence is high, my social impairment is low. When it is low, it creeps up unless it is cratered which can lead to exaggerated impairment.

However, my manual/dexterity/task impairment is always constant. Not able to do this or that for some unknown reason other than... well, I have AS.

Does this ring true for anyone else?

Riding the seesaw topic

I am dyspraxic, not Tourettes, but I find that when I am superconfident I am more assertive, probably due to age. I know myself and I will not take crap from others. I am mostly nonsocial.

I am sorry this happens to you. My brother is Tourettes, and his movements are more pronounced when he is anxious. he is actually very social but many people are afraid of his tics.

Sometimes when a person is more self-conscious he or she will make more manual movements and appear to be less "graceful".

MY tourette's is something else. I'm talking about learning things that are manual. I'm not so sure that I have dyspraxia as I am not that clumsy. It just takes me a long time to learn manual things - like learning how to open jars or how to put something together.

I have improved in social issues, but I still can't tie my shoes.

I wear shoes with Velcro.

It definitely rings true for me.

I also notice that I stutter a lot more conspicuously when my social confidence is low or I'm stressed out.

I remember what that was like. I managed to learn to tie my shoes eventually.

I was 9 when I learned to tie my shoes. It was extremely hard. I do it with two loops instead of one, since I never could learn the other way.

An occupational therapist diagnosed me with dyspraxia, lack of coordination.

So, I know a bit of what you're going through!

I have SEVERE problems with dexterity, and very poor motor skills across the board. Although my social skills are limited, I've learned enough at this stage to "fake it" somewhat successfully -- on a good day, anyway. When I'm under a great deal of stress -- overloaded with noise, in an especially hectic environment, and trying to process a great deal of information a once, I tend to temporarily forget the social skills I very belatedly managed to pick up. Even so, I am able to behave in a relatively socially normal manner some of the time. My dexterity, and other related motor skills are significantly below par all of the time.
I'm extremely clumsy, frequently dropping things, spilling things, knocking things over, tripping over things, and bumping into things and people as well. I'm useless in pretty much all sports, except for swimming. I did eventually learn to swim, albeit poorly, and without any real technique. Other than that, I have an aversion to all sports, playing them or watching them. I never really learned how to ride a bike with any proficiency, either. My walk is somewhat awkward, and I've noticed that other people tend to walk more quickly than me.
My graphomotor skills and fine motor skills are very poor, too. I basically don't write in script, except to sign my name. Otherwise, I print. My printing is sloppy, and somewhat childlike, but it can be legible, provided the paper is lined, and I don't need to write letters that are too large or too small. I can't learn to knit, sew or work with tools at all. scissors give me all kinds of trouble. I can't even buy canned food, because I can't figure out how to operate a can opener. I learned how to sort of tie my shoes at seven, with a lot of help, using the two loop method. I don't wear shoes with laces. I wor with preschoolers, however, and it seems that whenever I tie their shoelaces, the laces are out again after just a few minutes. If I double knot, it's more likely to hold, but it still doesn't look right, and I tend to forget to make that second know when I'm in a hurry, and there's a lot going on around me. It can be really embarrassing.
I could go on, but I'm already in danger of killing this thread. I apologize if this is somewhat incoherent. It's been a rough week, and I'm not functioning very well at the moment.

Not really; I'm more graceful when relaxed and better at socializing when relaxed. Most of my skills go up and down related to stress level (which is what NTs experience too; only theirs don't dip down below usable levels near as often!). I wonder if this is related to specific social anxiety, because when I have problems with anxiety, it's general, not specific to socializing; and a lot of what you guys are talking about seems to be anxiety that's specific not general...

Is it possible you have NVLD over AS? That's generally, more severe motor/spatial orientation problems, and less severe social ones.

The motor problems in AS are fairly mundane and mild compared to the social difficulties.

I have AS and TS. The TS was diagnosed much earlier, because of the more visible presentation of symptoms. Fortunately, my TS is relatively benign--the spasms are localized (though they vary considerably in severity and frequency).

Tourette's often includes touching compulsions. As I child I fiddled with things incessantly. Since my AS diagnosis, however, it is harder to pin down what the true source is, or whether some element of the comorbidity influences it.

From a sensory perspective, I am heavily touch dominant. For example, if I open a drawer in my kitchen to find something, I may not notice it visually, but if I reach in, I can invariable connect with it. Also, I "understand" an object much more through touch than through vision.

Still, I am clumsy, and frequently drop things. My fine motor control though, seems to have been improved through the constant fiddling. I can't juggle to save my life, but tying my shoes is not a problem.

Not unless NVLD also includes transition problems, obsessions, stims, prosopagnosia, difficulty reading non-verbal language, and odd speech... Some of the specific weaknesses of NVLD aren't there; I'm good at handcrafts and small repairs (it's the gross motor skills that really suck) and haven't had much trouble with figurative language once I learned what it was; plus I can picture things in my head pretty well.

I really think NVLD is pretty much identical to Asperger's, in any case; it's just the neurological viewpoint on AS.

What I'm looking at is probably some kind of autism without anxiety pointed specifically at socializing. I embarrass myself on a regular basis, but in general, I've learned not to take myself all that seriously--if I do my best to learn taboos and still mess up, it's not like it's my fault that I've made yet another honest mistake, and I can always apologize. Besides, if the psychiatrist who caught on to the autism thing is right, you only have to meet me to think "autism"--if you know what autism looks like anyway.

We're all different, really. Just because most of my anxiety comes from the fact that I'm going to die (humans are mortal, and that freaks me out) or the fear of messing up and not getting through school, doesn't mean I can't have the same diagnosis as the person who's scared they're going to say the wrong thing and hurt somebody they like.

The thing I can really relate to in the first post, though, is having stress-responsive skill levels. It seems like, if I'm relaxed and rested, I can do most things that most people can do and, in my area of talent, completely blow anything out of the water. Whereas, if I'm stressed, I'm lucky to get access to things I ostensibly mastered ten years ago, and can't even organize well enough to use my talents in the first place.

My social impairments are noticeable, just that I feel that they are less of an issue because they go from good days to bad days. think that's because when I'm confident and all that, I use all my defenses and people are less likely to notice any quibbles but when the confidence goes down, I use less of those defenses and thus am more clumsier. The confident times are outnumbered by the unconfident, obviously. I'm just saying I have glimmers of hope in the social impairment and they bring hope.

The physical side or task oriented stuff is constant. It's just a slow process to learn the things.

My diagnosis was just a few months ago and all that, done by a neuropsychologist.

Callista,

I was meaning the OP.

The social impairment of AS is just as unwavering as the physical one. From his further [and original] posting, it seems that anxiety may be playing a part ("confidence"), and the days he's not as anxious, the better he'd feel when he does interact (even though he'd be interacting in the same way that his ASD defines him in that situation, barring of course the binds that anxiety can place on someone, whether they have AS or not).

What kind of manual impairment do you mean?
I'm kind of clumsy, but i think it's usually due to my mind wandering. I walk into things all the time, drop stuff, all of that. I always have stratches and bruises and whatnot, but i've never had any kind of severe injury. My handwriting is also very poor(even though i can draw). Yet, my balance is pretty good, i used to be good at climbing things as a kid, i always had a good "catching myself" reflex when i would fall, i can catch things, i walked early, i learned to ride a bike(i did fall quite a few times though), i can fix small things, and i even cut my own hair. I just have a kind of general awkwardness with a lot of my movements, though. My hands are usually kind of shaky, my movements when walking can be really stiff, my posture isn't good at all, and my "self-awareness" isn't always so great.. But when i think through doing a certain task, i can usually do it(if it's more complex, i just might need to get used to it first). When it's something where i can't really concentrate carefully on my movements is when that clumsiness shows. I can catch a ball, for example, but when i need to put a bunch of things together into actually playing a sport it's not going to go so well because i can't concentrate on doing each thing it involves, there's just too much going on. And my hands might be pretty shaky in general, but i can take that into account when i do something like cut my hair and think through how to go about it, and it turns out fine. So i'd say i'm definitely awkward, but not dyspraxic. So, yeah, i'm kind of curious about the sort of motor-skill impairments different people here have.

Doing tasks mainly. Like learning how to tie the shoes as was discussed with Tim. Took me forever to learn that, until I was 12. Other things like learning how to operate machinery or how to work cameras I have an absolute hard time learning to do.