Life with Aspergers

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...

Today I want to talk about a you tube video made by an aspie, Alex Olinkiewicz . Have a look at it, it's embedded below. It's insightful, the way it talks about aspergers as a kind of half-autism. There are several places in the video where Alex talks about a kind of "split-personality". Aspergers isn't schizophrenia and I don't think that Alex is suggesting that. He's simply making a point that sometimes we "switch gears" and act in quite different ways. He talks about having adult maturity combined with childlike behaviour. While it's a good analogy, I think that the childlike behaviour is probably more impulsiveness than anything else. I certainly don't seen any reason why a normal (NT) teenager couldn't or wouldn't watch cartoons like Spongebob. Of course, being obsessed with Spongebob would be different. Alex also talks about not fitting in, which is a major part of Aspergers. Most aspies don't feel like they fit in...

Social interaction is very difficult for people with aspergers for a number of reasons including; Difficulty Achieving and Maintaining Eye Contact Difficulty reading body-language and tone Problems using non-verbal gestures and tone Intrusions from the Special Interest (Disinterest in other topics) Difficulty keeping away from Detail Short Term Memory Issues Language Issues I've already covered eye contact in earlier posts, so I won't cover it again here. Body Language and Tone I don't think that the aspie has any trouble determining when someone is annoyed. That sort of body language and tone is usually strong enough. Most of the time, the problematic body language seems to come from humor or generalizations. For example; I have terrible problems when someone insults me with a smile on their face. I'm never sure if it's a genuine insult or "just mucking around". If I assume it's a genuine insult and retaliate, I could start a fight. If I assume t...

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...