Prepare to enter the wild and wooly world of an adult with Aspergers Syndrome, a form of autism characterized by intellignce, quirks, social difficulties and downright strange and oddish behaviours.

People with Aspergers generally are high functioning in everyday life but have great difficulty connecting with others due to the inability to read faces, body language and subtle verbal clues. They also tend to take words literally and have a hard time multi-tasking.

Oversensitivity to touch (clothing has to be soft and often the tags removed), light (do not leave home without the sunglasses), sound (loud noises and noisey places are avoided), taste (many Aspies have quite a limited diet and are frequently very picky eaters) and smells makes the everyday existence more of a challenge.

Fasten your seatbelts and come on in...
To find out more about what Aspergers is..please check out my earliest blog entries

Friday, May 22, 2015

Autistics Riding in Cars, Old, New & Stressful

I've never been comfortable with someone else behind the wheel. Maybe it's an issue of trust, or I relish being the driver of my own destiny, or maybe roads are scary, fast, unpredictable venues.
It takes a good deal of courage, a heavy dose of trust and feeling like taking a risk to be a passenger in someone else's car.
There is no control. There are dozens of decisions to be made and a hundred moving objects to watch out for. Driving is, simply put, stressful.
So my friend picked up a new car. I kept eyeing it, checking it out whenever I could. Everything about it was foreign, new, scary. The color, door handles, seats, controls...yikes. My first ride as a passenger was a sensory overload. I couldn't reckon the new seat. Every cell in my body was on alert, deciphering.
The sounds, engine, tires, brakes, alarm indicators all unfamiliar and sources of puzzlement. The way the car moved, the height from the ground, new fangled lights and sensors made me positively dizzy.
  I couldn't locate, find anything familiar to hold onto. No anchor, solace, familiar hum or vibration. All the muscles in my body tensing, teasing, way overdone.
It was a short ride but I kinda lost my mind. It felt like a cross-country airplane jaunt where I continually worked to orientate myself, whisper that I was safe and calm the internal alarms.
Riding in cars...few people probably ever give it a second thought...but, they aren't Aspie.