I'm one of those types. My brain simply cannot process the connection between someone's body movement and/or facial expression, and the ideas they're trying to express. I spend an awful lot of time saying "What?" to someone who just said something clearly because I wasn't initially listening. Mostly people can still get what was being said even if they weren't directly listening, because the words are supplemented by the speaker's body-language. I don't get that benefit, thus I have to either devote full attention to listen to what someone's saying, or I simply do not register the noise they make as meaningful language.Big Orange wrote:They say Asperger's Syndrome not only induces awkward social skills and hard to suppress fixations, but make sufferers hard to read facial expressions ...
I was diagnosed with severe autism when I was, I think, three or four. This was about the same time I had to have surgery for, I think, some sort of cranial-based meningitis. The autism faded over the years to what was diagnosed in my mid-teens as Asperger's. My mother tried to get me on all sorts of drugs for it. I was on a bit of a vegan binge at the time, and one of the few positive side-effects of that is that I refused to have anything to do with those drugs.
I don't hold any illusions about it, my asperger's is a liability. I am socially awkward to the point where I simply avoid most social situations. I stress out a great deal over not disappointing people mostly because I simply do not know how to deal with people being anything less than content with me. On the other hand, through sustained effort I've managed to find a reasonably large number of people who are incredibly caring and supportive.
It sucks, but it is something you can learn to live with. I have a supportive social network, and I can hold down a steady job.