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

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Appointments and Phone Calls

If I could keep appointments to 1 a day, every other day, I'd have the opportunity to destress enough that I could have a quasi normal life without having to spend too much time analyzing, debriefing, playing the conversations over and over to make sure I didn't miss anything and recovering from tiring talk.
Again this week there is one appointment or event every single day, sometimes two. Doctor visits, therapy, someone coming to the apartment, not one but two different people two different times (yes, it is very uncomfortable to even contemplate) and my college course. No wonder I've wanted to do nothing but drive to the beach in solitude every weekend.
I've been able to hear myself talk at interviews and appointments. I don't know why I could never hear myself before now but it just is. I'll blame it on effective therapy for now. Listening to myself...it's like I have no confidence and I'm a bird landing on one hot wire just to fly off and land on a different hot wire.
Conversations, especially with new people, are challenging because I don't know the rules or boundries. As an example, yesterday I met with my housing worker. After we'd finished the necessary paper work she started small talk. I didn't know if there was a time limit, like the appointment needs to end in 5 minutes or 50...so I limited myself to answering or asking questions that required short responses. I need to know when I'll be leaving so that I don't get started on a subject and get shown the door before I've made my points. I didn't want her to think me long winded and boring. I didn't want to bore her with my life stuff...but being at the community mental health offices maybe part of her job was to hear me..communicate, listen..I just don't know.
So I spent the small talk part in utter confusion and short, pat answers. I didn't feel right about asking any questions that would have eased my befuddlement like "how long is this appointment?" "Is subject matter limited strictly to housing?"  Or "are you part counselor?" Questions that were bouncing around my brain, never to be asked...ah, like so many before.
Confusion seems to be part of daily life..living Aspie