ME understanding myself

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This whole thing with autism has been bothering me a whole lot. When the counsoler at child and adolescent services told me about it it really made me slightly excited, and made me hopeful that i would someday not see myself as a monster "I dont exactly feel for other people often, and i sometimes wonder what would happen if they just dissapeared" one of my friends at karate has aspergers, and an airtight diagnosis, and his mom said i was very much like him, but she said she didnt want to yell him because she said "if you give someone a label they will live up to it" i dont know if i am autistic because i was told i was, or not. It seems logical, but my mind just feels like scrambled eggs when i think about it too much. I get like that a lot i obsess to the point where nothing else matters, and i have done it since i was about four, but before that i was a perfectly typical child. I have a hard time seeing the reactions to my actions, and i spend most of my time in an altered reality. is this schitzophrenia?
do autistic people imagine new worlds? more importantly how do i get people to see that i am asking for help? It seems as if i just cant connect with neurotypical people
can anyone help me to stop keeping everyone at arms length?

I kinda disagree with the "if you give someone a label, they'll live up to it" thing.. It's true in a way, but that's why you shouldn't give someone a label until they've already lived up to it. A diagnosis should be an explanation of what already is, in order to plan ways to adjust for it. Usually before someone receives a diagnosis (whatever that diagnosis may be) or when they receive a poor diagnosis, there's a lot of confusion and blame. "Why am I like this?" "What's wrong with me?" "Am I just bad?" A diagnosis should explain the problems that someone is having, things that have already caused significant impairment. It should explain why attempted treatments in the past didn't work. (For example, when someone feels socially inept, many mental health professionals will want to work on their self-esteem. For an aspie to have confidence in their ability to read people is a lot like drunken confidence. Having confidence that you know what someone means when you don't just doesn't work. There's a big difference between knowing your weaknesses and poor self-esteem.) A correct diagnosis, I think, should feel like a revelation. "Oh! So THAT'S what's wrong with me! I have problems with ________, ________, and ________, but ________ isn't my problem." It should demonstrate not only what is wrong, but what isn't wrong, and allow someone to work on their strengths. There's some element of working on your weaknesses, too, but in a different way.. more of a using strengths to compensate for weaknesses. Asperger's is rare enough and difficult enough to diagnose that almost anyone getting the diagnosis will have go through lots of inaccurate diagnoses first, and will have been told that they have problems that they didn't actually have, so getting the diagnosis is, I think, unlikely to tell someone about many weaknesses they didn't already know they had, it's more likely to explain why they have problems with certain things. Does that make sense?

Yes, but my mind puts concrete meanings on things. I have been diagnosed many times with other things like ODD because they mistook my confusion for defiance, and ADD because they didnt realise that the proplem wasnt paying attention, it was paying attention to THEM.
and im starting to deal with being an aspie, its just that my mind puts definitive steriotypes on things "like friday is the day i see my best friend, so my best friend, and friday are like one thing now" and it is hard for me to understand something so dynamic
. what I am tryind to say is that I am taken aback by how much it does make sense, and now I feel like it is odd that I would accept Autism as my internal norm for so long. I never realised anyone thought any different... and it is a relief to know that I am the way I am, and that others are too

You should keept them at arm length's distance. They will just attempt to devour you. They could nose up weakness, and they will try to hurt or kill you physically or mentally.

I do agree with that, most of the people that I have trusted where people I had misread, and who would eventually betray me... Except for my best friend, and he is autistic as well, so he is supposed to be one of the good guys

I always knew I was different, but never in a million years did I ever imagine that I was autistic when I was growing up. It's very startling, but it's also fascinating and somewhat relieving to have an explanation of sorts.

Yea, I know what you mean.. Nobody liked me, I couldn't understand them, I knew there was something wrong with me.. Even the times that I wanted help, my mom said that there were people who could teach me social skills and how not to be hated.. of course, she never bothered to find those people, if there were any.
I thought I was just, like, a geek who wasn't smart. And who was very, very depressed and anxious. There were so many things that I didn't know weren't normal experiences, though. Like the "nervous habits," that funky thing I always did with my mouth, like pushing air out between my back teeth.. The wondering what it would be like if I were somebody else, but at the same time realizing that if I "became" someone else, if it were still me, it would turn out to still be me, still be different. The "faraway" thing that was just MORE than ADD.. How I never knew what I was supposed to DO when I talked to someone, like people who could relate to each other were some kind of secret club I hadn't been initiated to.
I remember kids at school telling me that the ones who were nice to me weren't really my friends, they just felt sorry for me. When I said "it's the same thing" they laughed, said it wasn't. But to me, if someone thought I was a human being worth feeling sorry for, that I didn't deserve to be tortured.. it's not like I was going to get closer to friendship than that.

I know what you mean, school can be like that, it makes us even more consumed in our own worlds than ever before