Thinking like an Aspie

[primeideal]

ysabetwordsmith has expanded her very cool poetry collections to include a military science fiction series about the autistic secession in space. Very cool premise.

As part of that, I was going to leave a comment about the way I (as a person on the autism spectrum) see the world (cosmos, in this case) but I just started putting down random, rambly thoughts and it ballooned into deserving-its-own-post size, so here it is for ysabet and anyone else who finds it useful.

The operative word in the title is an. As the saying goes, "if you've met one person on the spectrum...you've met one person on the spectrum," and I make no guarantees about how this generalizes. I brought up a couple things that seemed to be relevant to the military setting, but if anyone wants to know more about something in specific (on this list or not), please do let me know--I love to blather on about myself. ;)

For reference, I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome aged about 6 or 7. High-functioning autism would also seem appropriate, the latter label reflecting that I had some non-standard language patterns before age 2, but I guess with the new system coming out it doesn't really matter. I had fairly mainstreamed education, but was pulled out of the normal schoolday for special education (such as articulation therapy) through age 13, and have had ongoing anxiety concerns since then. Today I do not need any educational or workplace accommodations and do not consider myself "disabled."

Things that matter a lot to me:
-being fair.
-feeling like I'm expected to live up to some objective moral standard. treating everyone equally. no matter where they are in the galaxy. this can often lead to "I am too greedy to give all my money away to the suffering orphans of Betelgeuse, therefore, I am a failure. Everyone else can do empathy better than me, they don't have a problem with this. but I am not good enough. must keep trying."
-being 100% sure. mathematical proof. not just "eh, close enough," or "we can assume," but being sure. never giving up or being complacent in victory until it's set in stone. (I'm not sure if you follow sports, but I like the "no-clockness" of baseball better than the "run out the clockness" of, say, basketball or gridiron football. this probably has little or nothing to do with autism, but a lot to do with being primeideal. :) )
-when actually doing math, which is one of my stronger skills, trusting to flashes of intuition when I get them.
-thinking abstractly. following rules, finding patterns. I've been complimented on my Spanish pronunciation skills, when I struggled for /years/ to get my English (native) articulation up to speed--Spanish just has five vowels and once you learn them, you can just follow the rules, where as English consonants are tricky. I've heard that many people on the spectrum find this math/language thing extremely difficult and prefer thinking in visual images. This couldn't be less the case for me.
-It's hard for me to jump to conclusions. I don't like open endings or poetry that I have to really guess at or read between the lines. When the choir director said "you must follow my instructions exactly...okay, stand up for this song..." and we stood up, but she didn't say "sit down" at the end, I would keep standing even though everyone else "knew" to sit down. (this is aged about 7, 8, 9). it was awkward but I was so afraid of not following her instructions. in the military structure, I would need clear directions about when, /exactly/, to do things, and when to /stop/ doing them. Or, riding the bus, if Google Maps tells me to "get off at State and Adams," and I'm riding on State Street and the stop says "Adams" (rather than "State and Adams" /even though I'm on State/), I'll tweak out and be confused.
-I can eat the same thing for the same meal for months or years on end without getting bored, which might be a plus military-wise.
-I'll also get locked into some goofy habits, like touching the staircase a certain way before I go down it. I don't think about this in terms of it bringing luck or that something bad will happen to me if I don't do it, just a repetitive quirk.
-but on the other hand, i can be a little more superstitious/irrational in terms of "if I avoid some cheap thrills here, it'll pay off down the line in terms of more fulfilling pleasure, but if I indulge myself now, I'll find myself regretting it." I know that this is irrational but it's hard to break the habit.
-sort of related to an earlier point, I can tend to feel like I'm being blamed for things (being part of a specific ethnicity, religion, country, generation, anything), even when people claim that wasn't their intention. This would be important in a case like this, because identifying as a person on the spectrum is a lot more meaningful to me than most other demographic considerations (and identifying with my home country is /not/, largely because of these guilt feelings). But then if I thought I was being blamed for the military stuff...that would probably make me really uncomfortable.
-something I'm bad at: drawing conclusions and picking up on the signals of my body. (am I hungry? what and when should I eat? does my head hurt? how badly? which medicine should I try? am I going to throw up?) This could be a problem.
-sensorywise, I prefer familiar textures, so it's not always pleasant to shower, wash my hands, etc. digging through alien goop would be a struggle for me, specifically. On the other hand, I don't have a problem with audio or visual stimuli. (This is something that would be very specific to my experience and other people would have all sorts of strengths and limitations).
-I have a quick eye for detail and will pounce on, say, obvious typos from people who should know better. I can also, yes, use sarcasm appropriately when mocking these typos.

For reference: my previous comments.

Also, I will probably keep editing in more, so watch for updates here at the bottom:
1/14: related to some of the above things, I have a hard time understanding why people would voluntarily enjoy unhappiness (seeking out movies with sad endings, reading the news when it's unpleasant). Sometimes I try to spare people unhappiness (if I hate it, so will everyone else) and bottle up my sad emotions, not wanting to dump them on other people.
 

Comments

[cahn]

Oh, hey, this is very interesting to me!

If you don't mind me asking, do you know what prompted your parents to get you tested? Were there signs that they saw fairly far back? --I guess you said non-standard language patterns; what specifically?

What do you think about having had a more mainstreamed education? Would you have preferred anything special?

Do you approach social settings with "rules," like, okay, when I see someone the rule is that we say hi to each other, and then a) if I know something about their life I should ask about them, if not, b) one of four kinds of general questions about their life... etc.

(full disclosure: I have a 3-year-old who displays some tendencies towards being slower in social development, so this is personally relevant -- although I am pretty sure she would not actually fall into ASD, and she reminds me very much of both my husband and me; neither of us are ASD. However, I do think of social situations as something to be figured out through rules -- I never figured out how to do them "naturally" -- and I've found, interestingly, that I'm starting to teach my kid the same way, and that she responds to it better than other, perhaps more "naturalistic," methods.)

[primeideal]

Sure, yeah! Even from the first few weeks (10 days), I was very quiet and tended not to cry, so that my aunt would tease my mom about "this doesn't count as raising a baby, it should be a lot harder." I spoke very little between the ages of 1 and 2, although I learned a few new words and seemed generally attentive--I would point and grunt to get my parents' attention (fixating on, say, the page numbers in a book rather than the narrative), and seemed to be communicating enough that they didn't worry. At 20 months I knew my alphabet letters and at 22 months was spelling out my name with refrigerator magnets (the same aunt pointed this out, my parents were skeptical, hahaha). Then at 23/24 months I started talking at a normal pace.

I'd have to check with them for more memories of the 3-6 year range. Another uncle, a psychologist, had suggested that this might be a possible diagnosis based on not a lot of interaction with me, so it was apparently pretty clear to him.

I appreciated the mainstream education; to a certain extent, by the end, I was a little arrogant and thought some of the strategies were "dumb" and my fellow students had different challenges than me. I was ahead of schedule as far as math and stuff went, so I really appreciated the other tweaks to my schedule that let me skip ahead there. I had just an incredibly fantastic elementary school full of people who understood me and were willing to work with me.

I know I tried to learn "social stories" to script interactions, they seemed rather low-level and unhelpful at the time though they might have been more useful than I recognize. I think these days I'm guided more by my own generalizations, which might themselves be too simplistic but are a decent enough approximation.

Hope this helps, feel free to let me know if there's anything more (though I might not be very useful). :)

[cahn]

Wow, this is super awesome. (I also went to look at the Australian Scale, and... let's say... I think we might be getting her tested when she turns 3.) Thanks very much! :) I might be bugging you more at some point, if you don't mind ;)

Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith]

I really appreciate you taking the time to make this list. It's exactly the kind of material I need to build plausible, engaging characters. I've added the link to my resources post.

Re: Thank you!

[primeideal]

Thanks! I'll keep updating it if I think of other things so check back to the "live" version whenever it'd be useful.

Re: Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith]

Cool! I'll try to remember this.

Re: Thank you!

[primeideal]

I'm not sure how often that would be, just warning you in case.