Life with Aspergers

My memory is different, there's no doubt about it. On the one hand, it seems amazing. I can remember "whole conversations" which took place years ago, I can quote from literally thousands of films but ask me what someone's name is or ask me to get some things from the shops and I'll draw a blank. In fact, face to face conversations with me at work quite often involve me subconsciously using my hands to do gestures of long hair, or glasses simply because I've forgotten the name of the person I'm trying to describe.  It's also a common sight at our local shops to see me standing around counting my fingers. I know that I've got to get five things at the shop but I can only remember three of them. Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay Repetition I think that a lot of my memory is based on repetition. That's no revelation really, rote learning has been around for years and despite the claims that rote learning provides only lists, not concepts, it...

I don't know if it's just me, just aspies or everyone but it seems that most of the deep one-on-one social and philosophical conversations I have these days are about living with excess emotional baggage. It's perhaps an "age" thing because I really don't remember my friends talking about these issues when we were younger. Strangely enough though, even my conversations with today's youth are picking up these angsty traits. There are two good reasons why I'm beginning to suspect that its a trait that is stronger in aspies than in NTs. The first is that my "meaningful" conversations are increasingly being held with other aspies and the concept of emotional baggage seems to be increasing proportionately. My other reason is that when I examine my life and my present day actions, I'm relying on some aspie traits which I know aren't as strong in the average NT. Chief amongst these is the vivid long term memory, The Influence of the Past Th...

John Elder Robison (author of "Look me in the Eye") has I've already covered part one and the first half of part two of this article but my OCD dictates that I need to finish the rest. If you haven't read it, the article is on John Elder Robison's excellent blog; Part II of the Female’s View of Asperger’s guest post http://jerobison.blogspot.com/2009/09/part-ii-of-females-view-of-aspergers.html Since this post, like the previous two, is a reaction to the article, you probably should have read the originals first. Continuing on from Part 1 and Part 2a . Expression I love the term "hunted animal expression". I've often had people come up to me and ask "are you alright" when I've been perfectly alright and just thinking. I guess that when I'm deep-thinking, my facial muscles relax into whatever is my normal aspie expression - it must be scary. Deborah, the writer, talks about a difference between the male and female expression sug...

John Elder Robison (author of " Look me in the Eye ") has posted part one of a story about a female with aspergers on his blog . I was quite interested to read it because the female aspie is something of a mystery. Under-diagnosed and under documented, there are undoubtedly fewer female aspies than males. I'm still not convinced that they're as rare as they seem though. Anyway, I'd encourage you to read and respond to his article; Life as an Aspergian female - a story I had to share http://jerobison.blogspot.com/2009/09/life-as-aspergian-female-story-i-had-to.html My Take Personally, I felt somewhat miffed by the article. It's probably my OCD/Pedantism rebelling against the generalisations in it but I'll try to outline my reasons in more detail; The Bad Empathy It would take several blog posts to even begin to break the surface on the whole empathy thing. I have big problems with the whole definition of empathy and still ha...

I'd like to draw your attention to yet another aspergers article; How was your day? on Asperger Square 8 http://aspergersquare8.blogspot.com/2008/11/how-was-your-day.html I can really relate to this one. It's the bane of my existence. My wife and I have discussed this question over and over. It's the subject of a lot of pain for us - and silent resistance. Problems with the Question There are a lot of problems with this question. For a start, how do you describe a day. It wasn't my day... it was everyone's day. We all shared it. Then of course, there's the problem of " what answer could actually fit the question? ". The best one word answer I can find is; "Good." The problem with this answer is that it often provokes further open-ended questions; "oh..., what was good about it" or even worse, it encourages the initial "how was your day?" question to be asked several more times during the course of the afternoo...

We often hear about aspie awkwardness in social situations but the diagnostic criteria doesn't give parents and supporters much to go on. I've decided to give you a very simple example; The Setup Yesterday was Melbourne cup day. For overseas people, Melbourne cup day is the day in which the entire of Australia stops to celebrate a horse race in Melbourne. For the people of Melbourne, it is actually a holiday however the other States in Australia simply get a break around time the race is run and perhaps a few other celebrations. At my workplace, we celebrate by wearing silly hats to a luncheon and then watching the race on TV together. This year, although I was looking very hard for a propeller hat, I ended up wearing a London bobby helmet. Being in IT, I am always late to these functions due to last-minute helpdesk calls etc. This usually means that I end up sitting next to the CEO who is often also late. On this occasion, the CEO wore a pointed wizards hat. A few other...

A reader highlighted this problem in a comment on my recent "Letter Writing in Relationships" articles. At the time, the comment was aimed mainly at letters but I feel that it applies in a lot of other areas of aspie communication. Note: As is often the case, my initial writing of this particular blog went off-topic and instead spends most of it's time exploring a completely different aspie trait. I've decided to leave it intact though as I think it provides some interesting reading. Its a well known fact that aspies miss quite a lot of the nuances of non-verbal communication such as tone, expression, body language and innuendo. What is often less documented is that these things can often be determined by aspies with good coping mechanisms, though not without significant delay. Event Recording as a Coping Mechanism One of the most effective coping mechanisms I employ is "conversation recording" where I attempt to remember an event in its entirety for lat...

How an Individual Education Plan (IEP) is Structured An IEP is designed to be a "flow-on" document where the issues are identified up-front and the remainder of the document covers methods of dealing with them. The IEP will start with a bit of information about the child, the diagnosis, who is present at the meeting, etc. I'm not going to cover this bit as it's simply box-ticking on the form. The first part of the IEP will attempt to ask and answer two questions; 1. What are the child's strengths and interests? 2. What are the perceived weaknesses of the child? It is important to get these questions properly answered as the entire remainder of the IEP will reference them. This post will attempt to provide some background on the sorts of things that should be in these areas with particular emphasis on their relevance to the aspergers condition. Keep in mind though that aspergers manifests itself differently from one individual to another and that all c...

Aspies have a lot of trouble with food. I've already covered parts of this as part of the "under-eating in children" section of How the Whole Asperger's thing can be detrimental to your Health but now it's time for more detail and a few real-world examples. Why don't aspie children eat? Texture Memory Distraction Medication Taste Texture Texture plays a very important in aspie eating habits. For example, I have problems eating peaches because of the feel of their skin and because of the "powdery" taste of the fruit within. I also have a lot of problems relating to sultanas which I believe began with texture issues. For a long time I could eat sultanas in biscuits because they were dried out but not when they were in cakes. now I can't eat them no matter where they are. Possible Solution: if you have a texture issue, you can get around it by mashing or blending the ingredients. Just make sure that there is no skin left on the object before you ...

Assuming that Other People are Mind Readers is commonly described as an aspie trait though I don't think it's the result of aspie assumptions. Instead I think it's an NT interpretation of their behaviour. Behaviour 1: Sudden changes of topic in mid-conversation This stems from the aspies difficulty with small-talk. Aspies won't stand around discussing the weather but tend to discuss and resolve a single topic, then quickly move onto the next. NT conversation is quite different and they will tend to move to a neutral topic before starting on something completely different. There is nothing wrong with either approach but NTs talking to aspies often get lost at this point and think that the aspie has found something new to add to the original topic. Behaviour 2: Expecting People to have a Shared Memory A lot of things come back to the aspie memory. Aspies often have very clear memories of events and quotations. In conversation, they may drop a remark which links back...

Please note: This post has some deeper adult concepts in it and may be unsuitable for children. Continuing the discussion on depression (how depressing)... Difficulty reading other people's body language expressions and tone I think that I have already covered this one in other posts but I'll just go over a few important points to be sure. Conversation is a lot more than words. It includes hand gestures, body movements and facial expressions. It includes a variety of different vocal tones and it includes a lot of metaphors, colloquialisms, polite rephrasing and nonsense words and phrases. To interpret the full meaning of somebody's conversation you need to be able to read and process all of these cues at the same time. You also need to be able to understand how these cues inter-relate with each other. Aspies are well known for being very "single process" orientated in conversation. It seems that although we do take everything in, we are unable to process it all...

Continuing the discussion about how Asperger's traits can directly cause depression, I'll be working through the list from the end of my last post. Very good long Term Memory How can a having a good long-term memory be responsible for depression? The key to understanding this is to approach it from the point of view of an NT. Most of the time, it seems to me that detailed memories just aren't available for NTs without external assistance. By external assistance, I mean the use of video cameras or photo albums. In the movie One Hour Photo , Robin William's character says, while looking at birthday snaps, " Nobody takes a picture of something they want to forget ". I think that this is particularly relevant to the issue because it means that NT's tend only to remember the good things in any detail. The Aspie however, with their long term memory often has perfect recall of past events and conversations. They will spend hours analyzing a conversation that ...

In my last post, I introduced the idea of depression in Asperger's, made a few lists and cited a little bit of research. My apologies if I became a bit clinical. To the people who have told me to keep this blog personal rather then following established research, I am listening. In this post, I will be explaining some of the entries in the lists of the previous post. Social Troubles related to fitting in. This should be fairly self explanatory. Despite the appearance of being loners, Aspies often suffer from loneliness. Their poor conversational skills often make it more difficult for them to make and keep friends and to have a social life in general. This leads to loneliness and loneliness leads to depression. Guilt or Regret over Past Actions There is some truth to the phrase "this is going to hurt me more than it will hurt you". When an Aspie is stirred to the point of outburst and/or meltdown, they can temporarily lose control. When this happens, invariably somet...

One of the defining traits of aspergers syndrome is the "photographic-memory" whereby aspies can recall with precision events and conversations that are years old and forgotten by the other participants. As with all aspie traits, they differ from one person to another. Indeed some aspies claim to not have this memory - this could be true or it could be the result of misleading information in the Asperger's books which don't really describe the condition well. The Filmographic, not Photographic Memory First of all, I want to redefine the terminology. It is more correct to say that the aspie has a filmographic rather than photographic memory. This means that the memory is more like watching a film than recounting items in a picture. I'm not convinced that an aspie would do especially well in those psychological tests where they remove objects behind a screen. In fact, because we're talking about short term memory there, I think an aspie would do considerab...