Are your flaws exaggerated despite improvement?

Post Reply New Topic

Despite getting my Aspergers diagnosis 12 years ago, which was largely motivated by pressure from those harshly criticizing me, I have still endured criticism and harassment up to the present day despite making great strides and mitigating my deficits. They say everyone exhibits Asperger-like traits to some degree, which I agree with. But I still get exaggerated criticism like "you never listen" or "you take everything literally" or "I noticed that you almost always don't prioritize which tasks are most important", etc. Whereas in actuality, I will practice active listening, and ask people things like "do I have that right, you prefer it this way as opposed to that" or "so what you're saying is..." and more often than not, I will get an enthused "yes, exactly" response. Maybe it's around 70-75% of the time that I get it right.

Having said that...
Sometimes I wonder if there's some sort of "passmark" for a threshold of acceptable behaviours, and if I'm consistently hovering just below that no matter how much I consciously think about applied behaviours. Clearly, this is not something that can be quantified easily. Just take for example the "up to 90% of communication is unspoken" rule that's the bane of our existence, maybe for me it's about 70%, but to others it has the exaggerated effect of being less than that i.e. >30% of the time I'll misinterpret a nuance, and that's enough to appear weird. It's like there's some kind of law that once you reach a certain level below "the passmark", they think your "score" is lower than it really is b/c it's low enough to be noticeable - creates kind of a distorted effect and perception, as it were.

My wife (NT) actually agreed with this theory when I told her about it. I'm sure many of you can relate!

I feel like that too. I feel like no matter what I do or try I never measure up.

I was thinking about something similar to this just today. I haven't been "officially" diagnosed, although two medical professionals and two teachers who has experience with ASD have said I very likely do have AS. But it's pretty well accepted in my crowd that I'm an Aspie. The problem with that is that now any issue that can be blamed on my AS is blamed on it. It's almost given my family carte blanche to use my AS as a scapegoat for anything that goes wrong. Most of the time I'm OK with my Asperger's, but sometimes I wish I had never heard of it.

agreed. feels like no matter what i do, it will never meet the standard.

I feel like everyone on the spectrum "measures up" at different levels, and I have often found that people with the same diagnosis can vary widely in how they come across to others. Some people have either more traits than others, or a harder time fitting into NT society than others.

I know people on the spectrum who are able to "pass" as NT and others who, despite working on their traits, stand out very obviously and may never get to the point where they will "pass". The advice I would give to those people is to not push yourself too hard to fit in, but focus on the things that you can do well and that you can offer to others.