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, October 23, 2015

Shhh, secret fears that I feel silly about

You will rarely find me talking about the half dozen or so, secret fears that keep me awake at night. Saying them out loud...well, they sound far-fetched and ridiculous, even though they are quite real to me. Maybe I'm a little worried of my image, being laughed at or the look of "are you crazy?", that I've seen on people's face at times.
  I worry that I will do something stupid, something wrong that will get me thrown in jail, locked up or embarrassed for life. It's like...I'm not aware of unspoken rules and boundaries that NT's instinctively know. As an example, I thought it was okay to surprise a friend by looking up her family tree. Turns out that this was invasive and I was completely clueless. One friendship down. Or what if I'm driving 55mph but I'm not aware that I'm in a 35 mph residential zone? I'm overly cautious because I have this constant fear of accidentally committing a crime or egregious error.
  Those few who know me are well aware I don't have a mean, criminal, evil bone in my body...but being autistic, I make hellatious mistakes that haunt me for years. Yet another reason I tend to be hesitant to speak or act.
I think I've only spoken of this to one close friend. I treasure those friends who understand my autism and inherent harmless nature.
Just wanted to share. I don't know if anyone else shares this secret fear.