#aspie brain

[thenarator]

me: is there anything you want me to do before i sit down so you don't get mad at me for not doing a thing you thought was obvious but isn't always obvious to me?

my sister: no! god! i only get mad when it's something obvious!

me: *sits down*

my sister: why didn't you turn the radio off?!?

[qthewetsprocket]

So having recently read a post that explained how autistic brains process information details-first / big-picture-second (which I’m not entirely sure I agree with 100%, but boy howdy can I ever focus in on tiny little details that no one else notices), I”m starting to wonder if that’s the reason why I’ve always been able to recognize people when there’s something slightly different about them.

Like, if I’ve seen an actor in a another role but they look totally different, chances are probably 95% I’ll know it’s them anyway. Or if I’ve seen them in a role when they were a certain age and then I see them younger or older, I can still tell.

Traditional ‘wisdom’ is that most folks on the spectrum have trouble with facial recognition because of the difficulty-reading-social-cues thing. But I think this is a false dichotomy. I think we’re dealing with two different issues entirely here, and that one is totally unrelated to the other. (Or maybe that’s one way that male Aspies present that doesn’t apply to females? I don’t know.)

It’s like how medical professionals said for years that autistic people couldn’t experience empathy, and now over-empathizing is one of the officially-recognized symptoms of autism.

And yes, I did get started on thinking about this because John Simm just returned to Doctor Who and I instantly knew it was him from several million miles off.

[just-an-aspi-going-crazy]

Is it still confusion if i'm confused by confusion itself or does it cancels itself?

[qthewetsprocket]

dwellerinthelibrary replied to your photo: Is there a link to this? I can’t find the original...

fwiw, looks like the image comes from a 60 Minutes program (Google “Temple Grandin’s unique brain” to find a clip, though it doesn’t include this image).

Ah, cheers. (Maybe whoever made the macro used that picture with an unrelated quote of ShanEda Lumb's?)

[qthewetsprocket]

That "15 things never to say to an Autistic" thing was highlee edumacational for me. (My mind went straight to #12, but at least I had enough clue to figure out that if the noun "Autistics" was in the !!title of the posting!! then it was probably OK.)

The one that resonates the most for me is #2 (most of the other entries on the list are just variations of #2, really). I’ve had very kind, very well meaning people say that to me (”I never would have guessed you were autistic!”) in the full belief that they were giving me a compliment, but all it did was make me want to scream, “Yes…and that’s EXACTLY the problem!”

Women and girls on the spectrum are so staggeringly, epidemically underdiagnosed (and present so differently from men and boys) that their symptoms are still invisible to most trained medical doctors, let alone the general public.

No, I don’t present as classically autistic…if your definition of ‘autistic’ comes largely from the movie Rainman. (Which AFAICT portrayed Kanner’s autism, not Asperger’s; there is a vast difference between the two). But the very fact of my ability to “pass” as neurotypical - barely - is the reason why I went undiagnosed for forty years, and why I spent my whole life believing what the uneducated neurotypical people around me told me every day of my life in a million little ways: that I was oversensitive and selfish and wrong and defective.

So when you tell an autistic woman that you’d never guess she was autistic, it’s not so much a compliment to her as it is a condemnation of society’s overwhelming ignorance.

*finishes rant and drags soapbox back into the garage*

(As for “person first” language - I’m not sure I feel all that strongly about it, but my gut feeling is that calling someone “an Autistic” should be treated like a slur reclaimed by a marginalised group: ie, the people within that group can use it, but everyone else should proceed with caution.)

[silenceisover]

i want to scream

I AM A TRANSGENDER GUY WITH ASPERGERS. WE EXIST. WE HAVE FEELINGS. WE DESERVE LOVE AND HAPPINESS AND A CHANCE TO LIVE AS OUR AUTHENTIC SELVES.

but i cant. because I HAVE ASPERGERS, i cant. one of my "aspie traits" is emotional mutism, or losing my words when i get emotional. so even though i want to scream it from the rooftops, i cant. i cant.

[qthewetsprocket]

The creative team talk about bringing the novel to the stage in this short documentary for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.