Originally posted by: RightIsWrong
I agree wholeheartedly that there are "designer diagnoses". I'm glad that you have been able to adapt and improve the quality of life for yourself also. But that does not discount those of us that deal with it either personally or through a family member on a daily basis.
With that said, in the case of my son, he was 3 when he was diagnosed. He really wasn't of the capacity to be able to fake it. The symptoms were/are there: inability to make eye contact, parallel playing instead of interactive playing, extremely pedantic speech patterns, advanced vocabulary, monotone, able to remember/recall facts verbatim, sensory overload when it comes to bright lights (natural or man-made) and loud sounds, desire to interact with objects instead of people (loved plying on the PC so much that I created shortcuts to PBS Kids and Nick Jr for him), etc.
Some of the things that I am listing might seem like I am speaking about a child a lot older than three (he is now 4 1/2) but each was true in his case. At this age, he is able read, count to well over 100 (by 1s, 5s and 10s), do simple math ( +, -, *, /), recite episodes of SpongeBob like he wrote the script, open up Firefox and navigate to a "Kids" bookmark folder, click on whatever link he wants to go to and then click through those to get to the games or stories that he wants at that point.
He is still all of the other things as well, but my wife has been a stay at home mom to help get him ready for school and the rest of the world. She has done a wonderful job of helping him adapt. She has helped him with reaching out to seek interaction with others and to share his emotions and feelings. Thankfully, she is the polar opposite of me and our son so that has helped us both tremendously.
Some of the stuff makes me wonder if I should have seen a psychologist when I was little. When I was learning to spell, I had a Texas Instruments thing that would say the letters and words typed into it. Ever see a kid type "C-A-T" into a machine for hours on end, day after day, over and over? I'd do that. C. A. T. Enter - electronic noise - "Cat." Music, too - if I find a song I like, I can listen to it in a continuous loop, sometimes for a few hours. I try to memorize so that the melodies stick, so I can "listen" later in my mind, but they never do, they're always muddled and mixed. Oh well.
Computer games - I'd play the same game over and over. Raptor....phew, I don't know how many times I played that game through to the end. I'd spend hours hunting around the borders of 3d games, looking for amusing little bugs in the software, missing textures, or AI quirks. Eventually I'd actually get through the game's main plot, too.
That bit about remembering TV shows verbatim, that didn't always help me out. I'd try to interact with people - they'd talk about movies, so I'd mention some quote of the movie, and after a bit, they'd say, "Jeff, what are you talking about?" I'd just say that it's a part of the movie, and they'd have no recollection of it, and so tell me that I was being stupid again or something to that effect, that I was just trying to be cool and didn't know what I was talking about. I hated that, I knew I was right, I knew when the lines were, I knew the tones, the backgrounds, the context, but I was somehow wrong. Negative reinforcement - once a stimulus (direct personal interaction) becomes unpleasant after nearly every attempt, well, continuing to do so starts to amount to sadism. You don't cut yourself with a knife every day thinking, "Well maybe today it won't hurt me."
Eye contact to this day makes me uncomfortable, I freaked out when there were thunderstorms until....I don't know how old. Even into middle and high school, they were still an adrenaline rush, and I hated it. Before I could speak properly, I'd assigned unique sounds to individual letters. By sometime before 4th grade, I'd memorized the names, orbital times, distances, # of moons, length of the day, composition, etc etc, of the major planets. Sports, normal children's toys, they seemed utterly useless to me. I saw the mind as important, and the body was just a container and transport vessel for it. Sports felt like a waste of time, catering to the otherwise obsolete vestigial body. So in my mind, they were assigned a value of almost nothing. I didn't get the obsession with them that so many people seemed to have. I didn't have many friends, as I preferred dealing with teachers and adults; they seemed so much smarter and more mature than anyone my age. My peers were of course, childish, as they were children. Inanimate things made more sense. They were predictable, they didn't talk back.
School.....damn nightmare. I saw an episode of South Park which actually provided enlightenment (years too late). Cartman keeps ripping on Kyle all the time, and the homeschooled kid doesn't get it. "If he's your friend, why do you keep making fun of him?"
Stan replies with, "We're guys, it's what we do." Or something to that effect. I've heard too from one friend who also knew others who "tormented" me throughout school. He said that people kept trying to include me, but that I never went along with it. I wonder how much of the tormenting was actually intended to be funny or sarcastic, but I didn't understand that sort of humor or behavior, and took it to be an insult. For example, I hear guys at college say things like, "Fuck you man, you're such a dick," and then they laugh. Not too many years ago, if someone would say that to me, I'd take it literally and assume that they don't like me the slightest bit. That sort of bonding behavior, or whatever the hell you call it, was just completely foreign to me. I figured that if you say something insulting to someone, you mean it.
That bit, "read between the lines" - well, look at what's between lines of text. There's nothing there. And that's what I always would perceive.
In public, I've gotten better. I'll catch myself starting to stare intently at something, like a flickering light, or some mechanism. I could do something like that for a few minutes at a time before snapping out of it, just quietly watching something to see how it behaves.
Social niceties still remain an irritation. Small talk - speaking for the sake of occupying silences - seems utterly useless. Greetings, also useless. If I'm going talk to you, I already understand that you exist, I don't see the need to add in the "hello" to hammer this point home.
I try to engage in such things, but it's wearing. Every day is another acting class, like lying to everyone I meet, a false face that society deems borderline acceptable. It's what made shared living really rough. Dorms, roommates - I had nowhere to go to get away from everyone. Even when my roommates would be away, there was always present the knowledge that any second, they'd be back, and that element of mild chaos would be reintroduced. I didn't feel a truly relaxed moment for a few months at a time. Now I'm in my own apartment, just me. It's serenity like I'd never known before.
I wish I would have had some foresight, or......insight maybe, much earlier in life to pursue this. But I was a direction-follower. Do what you're told. Trust the adults, they know what they're doing. Don't make waves. That sort of stuff. Skipping grades was never presented, so I never brought it up. Going to a counselor or psychologist was never suggested, so I never brought it up.
I also seem to have a habit of going on a long, rambly rant whenever anyone mentions this sort of topic.
Aspergers - no, it's not a myth. It's part of the autistic spectrum, and as you know from the electromagnetic spectrum, it can cover a wide range of frequencies, or severities. Some people literally cannot function on their own, and may spend their lives trapped inside their own minds, unable to articulate anything coherent to the outside world. Others function extremely well within a specific area of interest, but may exhibit some of the social disorders associated with autism. Some people are at the extreme ends of the spectrum, from almost fully-functional, to entirely nonfunctional, with the majority somewhere in the middle. Maybe some day we'll have some sort of brain prism that'll neatly identify people by where their spectral line falls, but that day is not today.
RightIsWrong: Kudos on getting the early diagnosis. I'm sure it'll help him out later in life now that it's been seen early.
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