Asperger's Syndrome

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Oni Koneko Damien
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Re: Asperger's Syndrome

Post by Oni Koneko Damien »

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'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.

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.
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