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, March 23, 2012

Aspergers and Super Powers

It really isn't far fetched in the least, to consider the abilities of Aspergians to be super. Think about it. I have superb hearing due to my oversensitivity, excess neurons, and can hear a pencil drop from, not just across the room, but from another room in my house. I have detected engine noises that have thoroughly surprised my auto mechanic because most NTs do not notice such subtle change in engine sound and vibration.

One of the reasons that I am an excellent massage therapist, is that I hear high pitched sound when I come to an area of the body that is injured. I detect old and new injuries alike. I can tell when appliances are "acting up", need repair or are on the verge of calling it quits, all with hearing alone.
Until I needed glasses for reading, I had exemplary eyesight, both direct and peripheral, detecting subtle movement even out of the corner of my eye. I have a photographic memory which gives me the super ability to recall rooms and places, in great detail, years later. I need only read a page of a book once and I immediately absorb the information...if it is a subject I am interested in. My focus is very narrow and I can easily observe the minute path of an ant that crosses my path as well as veering the car, ever so slightly, as to avoid running over wooly bear caterpillars meandering through the middle of the road.

As an artist, I have the ability to look at a color, even a complex one with many different shades, and replicate it. It's as if I see and my brain can pull apart and separate out each individual color. I can look at a small child under five and know exactly what age the little person is in months. This one isn't 100%, but I am sure I average 75% or more.
My touch receptors are always in high gear. I can pick up a piece of clothing at a second-hand store and feel the....characteristics and age of the previous owner. I don't look at is as psychic mumbo-jumbo, rather I simply have double the usual sensory interceptors and feel much, much more than most.
On the down side, I get a little insect bite and my whole body overreacts. A pinprick sometimes feels like a small stab wound. Back to the positives, hugs from loved ones are one of the greatest gifts as I feel them throughout my entire body, almost to my core. Another psychic sensation of premeditation would be when I come down with a cold or flu, I feel those little, minute physical changes hours or days before I even look sick.

My overly zealous sense of smell allows me to smell the coming of a rainstorm and tell exactly what is cooking at the neighbors house, if their window is open. Standing in a crowd, it's easy to figure out who is wearing the perfume, baby powder and heavy sweat. Figuring out when the garbage needs to be taken out, when the bird cage needs cleaning or if something has "died" and gone bad in the refrigerator needn't be done by sight alone.
Ahh, the smell of Spring, Summer , all the seasons herald the changing of the seasons with ease. I can walk through the neighborhood and pick out individual flower species. Lilac, alyssum, lily and rose all beckon me with their sweetest of scents.
Looking at the relatively average abilities of someone with Aspergers, one can...most easily say, Aspies have Super Powers!