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

Sunday, August 16, 2015

My Own World, Understanding, Meeting Someone Else with Aspergers

The other day, I ran into another person with Aspergers. It's a rarity, living in this small town and me, being the good recluse I am, have very little interaction with people. I shook his hand...and I figured it out.
My friend's touch felt the same as mine, and the same as every other Autistic I had ever met.
My little cousin, only recently diagnosed, had hugged me for the first time when I saw him a few years ago. And it was different, and I didn't know why...then.
Now I see, my eyes are open, Aspies all have a...sincerity, a lack of an invisible, specific boundary...a hardness, a rim, an extra layer of skin, a thin indistinguishable armor, that non-autistics all wear.
I felt it. I feel it as I think back to the few Aspergians that I have touched or hugged. It's as if we are all branches of the exact same tree, regardless of gender or age.
It's like touching a whisper, an innocence, like we wear our souls on our sleeves. No wonder we are intense and so extra sensory.
Then I think of the extreme few non-autistics, the neuro-typicals that I have come in contact with...they all have that very same armor and hardness on their skin.
I have two sons, one Aspie and one NT...yes, very different. It's like when I hugged or touched my Aspie son, we melted, we understood without words. My NT son requires many words, kisses and hugs to feel how much I love him, as he has that barrier to get through.
Two Aspies can connect in a way that an Aspie and an NT just cannot.
Trying to find the words. This feels profound, like I discovered the magical elixir, the golden key, the solution to an ongoing riddle.
I've found out more about me, other Aspies and why we connect so easily. Why we are like, a separate species or race or culture onto ourselves. We are a subset. It's like our blood runs through each others veins...sorry if that sounds gross. It's not literal.
  Tonight, I watched the movie, The Giver...and it was like Aspies in an NT world played out on the screen.
My head is swimming with erratic, multi-finned thoughts, all gyrating at altering speeds.
Yeah, something clicked.
If I were to be honest, there will always be a part of me that dreams of living in a community where everyone is autistic, because, Let Me Tell You, it would be an extremely different environment.
People would talk less and more softly. Emotions would be freely expressed, shared and understood. There would be, not laws, but standards everyone agreed with. Outrageous attire would be highly tolerated.
God, it would be so less scary living.
The grocery store would be small, so you can run in and out. The hair dressers and shop keepers, heck everyone would abstain from small talk. There would be think tanks, committees and groups that catered to solving problems and improving conditions. There would be dozens of small, specialized groups where people could share their obscure fascinations and interests.
The library would be ginormous, as well as parks and playgrounds.
See, one of the weird things about Aspies is that we rarely lie, having a high sense of moral conduct and believing  in equality.
In this NT driven world, we get stepped on, nay, trampled due to our deep emotions and inherent naivety.
Maybe that's one thing that this blog accomplishes....letting others know how difficult life is, how regularly painful and upsetting every day is.
We are Autistic.
We are different.
We are great.
It's like we really are...all members of the same tribe.

Melatonin Works Hurts Harmful

I really need to realize that every single supplement can have positive or negative effects. I'd been hearing the testimonials of people who swear by melatonin and how harmless it was to take.....then I took one.
I took a 1.25 mg tablet. Yes, it definitely made it easier to fall asleep, but it gave me the strangest, scariest eye pain Ever. Throw in a little psychotic thinking and some idiopathic aggression. That is scary, scary shit!
I took 1mg the next night, thinking my body needed to get used to this new hormone. Nope, all the negative symptoms were twice as bad. I ended up taking anxiety medicine and talking myself down, don't ask, for most of the night.
I shall never take melatonin again. In part, it is a shame, because...within my body I felt such a peaceful calmness that I had never experienced before. Truly.
I don't know if it is a positive trait to be able to see both the bad and the good. I had to make a decision. It's in my best interest to never take it again...it brought me too close to the edge.