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, September 24, 2023

Talking and Public Speaking

I was watching this lecture series on tv. It was unusual in that it was a full 50 minutes of one person speaking the entire time without a break.
Carefully I studied each lecture to see if I could detect breaks wherein the camera stopped, the speaker took a break, and then the filming resumed.
A few of the lectures, I could detect zero breaks which brings me to my query:
Can a person speak, non-stop, for 50 minutes and not be completely and utterly exhausted?
Even at the end of the talk, the speaker did not appear tired. Their speeches did not start to slow down or trail off near the end.
My question:
How????
I am stymied by this. Especially given that, say, a college professor may give more than one lecture in a day. I think about grade and high school teachers who spend the majority of their working day talking, day after day.
Clearly, this is an accomplishable feat, for many people.
Aspie me has difficulty managing a ten-minute conversation. The idea of speaking aloud for an hour perplexes, intruiges, and enrages me.
Why them and not me?
The normal, everyday sundries of verbalizations are like stars dotting the nighttime sky. They exist. They are real but just completely out of my reach. A mystery, yet I marvel at them.
Speaking and Autism are uneasy friends in the world of all things on the spectrum.
This is yet another shining example where the everyday and mundane of the neurotypical, is nothing short of a small miracle fraught with extreme effort for the Autistic.