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

Monday, July 4, 2011

I Don't Hear so Good...verbal processing, aspergers, autism

Today was spent sequestered...walking around in last nights jammies, head in the clouds, the fog, the myth. Once again, I am startled into the submissive realization that I am different...I am autistic.
I have been playing and replaying the Lord of the Rings movies. I enjoyed them and decided to turn on the written subtitles. I...was astounded. I obviously have a serious hearing processing deficit as most of the written subtitles, the vast majority of the dialog and the real names of all the characters save Frodo and the indistinguishable Merry and Pip were all very new to me. I would wager about 90% of the words were new...even though I had seen each movie half a dozen times.
I continue to be rather, no make that very, stunned by this awareness. I'm not you...I'm nothing like you. An Alien Moment, again.
Thoughts rumble and tumble, shift and twirl by the censors. Just say it.
I don't know why I belong here amongst such a strange breed. I don't know why I bother with conversation or verbalizations.
Listening and verbal processing never came natural to me. It was a tough-fought learned mannerism.
When someone talks to me, here is how it goes. In person, I hear muted sound of various intensity...if I can watch a persons lips move I am given Huge clues as to what the actual words are. The lips give the sounds body and form. Then the sounds travel to my ears, bounce off one wall, where they become even more solid and formed, then they bounce off another, becoming clearer and finally, the words go round and round, a circular room inside my head, where they slow down to the point that I can read them. I read verbal speech in order to comprehend what is being said to me.
Phone calls, well...that's a challenge as I have no lip clues and I stress out and fly by the seat of my pants in trying to understand what is said.
I...store information from people that I talk with. When my Partner talks...well, this is usual what she says, how she says it and what it usually means. 17 years is a good amount of time in order to learn someone's speech patterns and rhythms. Family and friends are the same way...I draw upon the remembrances, the mental files in my possession to engage conversation appropriately.
Now, give me a brand new person, whom I have never met before and the whole ballgame changes. I become supremely focused on this one person and watch their lips, mannerisms, play and replay each word, phrase, sentence so I can figure it out.
I avoid new people, go figure, too damn much work. Work and effort equals stress. Stress is tension. I don't care for tension.
As I sat and talked for three hours with my friend from years ago, it struck me how unstressed I was. We understood each others patterns with comfort. I didn't need to work or strain...our conversation simply flowed.
I'm learning. When I am with someone and come home and feel the need to destress or I'm physically and mentally exhausted...well, that's really not someone that is healthy for me.
Each day is different. Today was a zero processing day whereby I wasn't up to processing any conversations at all. I engaged no one, played no wordy lyrics...I needed just to be down. Other days, I seek people out. It varies.
If my movie watching skills are any indication, I miss at least half of what is said to me...at least. Why bother? I have always thought talking was overrated. If I cannot capture the words, it's like ping pong balls rolling around and bouncing...just obnoxious, frustrating noise.
I frequently ask people to repeat things and spell new words for me. Frustrating. Back to my old adage of shut up, take a step back and take it easy...this daily stuff is just a bitch.
Enough already. I admire non-moving lips. I enjoy the absence of stress of nonVerbalism...it is a religion onto itself. You wouldn't understand. I am nothing like you