1. Constant fear of losing my belongings like keys, which leads me to check what's in my pocket every minute or two while I'm walking.
2. Overly obsessive about following a particular "ritual" for everyday stuff like washing my car or cleaning the house. Every small spot needs to be covered every time, even if it was previously clean. Otherwise I feel uneasy for completely irrational reasons.
3. Great confusion and anxiety when things in my job or everyday life cannot be done according to my carefully crafted plan.
Number 3 may be as well; I'm not that familiar with OCD.
That's important though... you can feel like you have something but actually have something pretty different. I understand that it must be pretty annoying for you if you are actually diagnosed but sadly, believing an internet diagnostic is too often a pretty bad decision.
I recognise your symptoms as Obsessively Compulsive.
I'm one of those people who has to hide his symptoms from everyone all the time and disguise them as "oops I think I dropped my keys, I need to go in an out of this doorway 12 times whilst checking it". I waste at least an hour of my life in my OCD rituals, and I'm all too aware of how I come across, to other people as well.
Your love for quantum mechanics might just be that, your love for QM.
I wouldn't characterize being into sports as a "normal" thing -- I have friends diagnosed on the spectrum who are utterly obsessed with sports. If you ever want a rabbit hole of statistics and details to dive into, baseball is a cornucopia.
Then I forced myself to travel, take lots of hallucinogens and empathogens, and do projects that involve working directly with multiple people throughout the day. It was a very painful process, but by the time I was 35 I don't think I had many symptoms left.
I do think some minor cases are highly treatable if not curable if the sufferer takes matters into their own hands.
The literature that I was given during my diagnosis was very clear that even if all the symptoms disappeared in adulthood, you still "had it". (And of course, the doctors were all trying to give the parents hope, so, "oh, yes, it's very likely your child will have a normal adult life".)
(I'm still not 100% sure whether this also applies to the revised DSM-V definition.)
It felt like most people have a social automatic pilot while I was flying entirely manually. Once I developed some models and internalised them it was as if I'd built my own approximation. It still takes a little effort to keep things level, but much less than it used to.
Hallucinogens and empathogens showed me these blind spots, making me a more rounded and open person. It was sometimes extremely pleasant and sometimes so hellish I wished to leave this world. But the hellish experiences were maybe the most effective at getting me to let go of old obsessions and compulsions. I liken it to the difficult coming of age rituals that many tribal cultures subject their teenage boys to to transition them to adulthood.
A. You asserted that you had Asperger's and then proceeded to explain why you believe that. Forgive me for then expecting your explanation to actually have something to do with Asperger's and not be a list of generic personality traits. Read your other comments--I'm obviously not the only one who thought so.
B. Your "pain and anguish" is not relevant to the fact of whether or not you have Asperger's. Social anxiety causes pain and anguish.
C. People "do something" about social anxiety all the time, as they should. Good for them and good for you. Really. I still don't see what that has to do with Asperger's syndrome.
D. Pointing out that a common personality trait is not a brain disorder is not "quibbling over terminology".
E. No offense was intended.
Perhaps you should write this down as a concise theory with falsifiable predictions of what kind of social behavior people really expect.
1. Smiling and making eye contact are both HUGE levers (but you have to be careful not to overdo it). (And an interesting thing about smiling is that it has a reverse-feedback effect: if you smile, it actually makes you feel happier.)
2. What you wear matters. It shouldn't, but it does. Read "Dress for success."
3. Spend more time listening than talking. Ask more questions than you answer, even if you know all the answers. The object of the game is not to show off how much you know, it is to provide others with opportunities to show off how much they know.
4. Help with the grunt work even when you think it is beneath you.
5. Con't complain. Ever. About anything. (This is just a first-order approximation. There are situations under which it's OK to complain, but that's an advanced course :-) And this is one of the few situations where erring on one extreme will not get you into trouble. To the contrary, if you cement a reputation as someone who never complains even when you have good cause to, people will like you more. I'm personally still working on this one.)
One thing I learned only post-diagnosis is that all the stuff I thought I did to figure out how to fit in, in hindsight, was extremely scattershot and not very rational. A lot of the lessons I never learned as well as I thought I did.
These days I try to be more methodical (keeping logs, lists of lessons, etc), in part because I'm allowing myself to lean more into my 'nature', and it's already proven effective.
It is not completely obvious to me what kind of elaboration you desire. So if my longer explanation here misses the point this is probably the reason. :-)
In your trial to find out the strange rules of society you surely made unwillingly lots of accidental experiments that often went wrong. At the end you probably developed some kind of theory of how humans seem to behave, where each rule that you developed is backed up by evidence from an accidental experiment.
If you are interested in history of physics, you surely are aware that developing even what is called "classical mechanics" (I don't even want to start with electromagnetism, relativity or quantum physics) was a lifetime work of many generations of scientists. What a waste of time would it have been if everyone of them had to start from point 0.
So you accidentally have developed something that might be a start of some kind of theory of how people/society really behave(s) (rather think of pre-Newton physics, e.g. Galilei already found out that (ignoring air resistance) the falling time is independent of the mass and the falling time increases by square root of the height; of course where these "strange" laws with strong experimental evidence come from needed the invention of calculus).
So back to "What a waste of time would it have been if everyone of them had to start from point 0.". What a waste of time is it when people all the time had to derive all those laws to which "ordinary" people in society behave (and cannot explain why) from ground up.
So document the rules about people/society/... that you found out and document the experimental evidence that gives strong evidence to you that these rules that you state do indeed hold (a scientific theory is worth nothing if it is not accompanied by a proper documentation of the experimental evidence for it).
Perhaps (if it not embarrassing to you) it is a good idea to use tools that the web provides (e.g. some kind of wiki or Github) so that other people can cross-check your theories, validate your evidence or present counter-theories which also explain your experimental evidence.
You are in a very early phase in a theory of the hidden rules of society (as I told: think where Galilei was in terms of classical mechanics), so this means you probably have to consider lots of frustrating foundational questions. So you are perhaps a true pioneer. But I believe it is worth it, because this might enable researchers who work in AI better understand humans/society.
I actually think some people get attached to the idea of their victimhood and helplessness, and this can easily become a disincentive to making positive (and very difficult) change.
(Yes I know there is the other side of it which is real, that medical expertise can help too. But like everything else, oversimplifying into a clear binary of diagnosable vs not, is not always useful.)
Elaborating, I think, rather than disagreeing: Self-treating into passable normalcy is basically life. One of the characteristics you have to have in order to be diagnosed with any psychological disorder is that it has to be interfering with your life. Absolutely everybody can read the DSM and find a good half-a-dozen things they may have tendencies towards, but if it's not interfering with your life, it's not a disease/diagnosis. Liking a clean space does not mean you're on the "OSD spectrum", being a bit nervous around spiders does not mean you're on the "phobia spectrum", etc.
"Healthy" isn't a single point in psych space, if for no other reason then that there isn't a "perfectly healthy" person available to define that point for us! It also certainly isn't a well-delineated boundary, but it is clearly not a single point, and even within the space of "healthy" there is clearly a lot of diversity.
Yes, and this is true of any mental issue. Hell, it's also true of physical ailments that don't leave obvious visible markers. Depressed? You don't seem depressed. Anxiety? You talk with people all the time. People don't always understand that this functioning is the result of a lot of invisible effort.
I'm sure that their are people out there that like to play the victim, but that doesn't mean that people's struggles aren't real.
Wow, you really hit the nail on the head with this. Just look at all the people here trying to second-guess my own self-assessment!
One of my biggest frustrations when I talk about this stuff is that people will 1) insist I'm not autistic, as a compliment of sorts, 2) insist I'm not autistic as a sort of attack/defense, lest I 'use' it to victimize myself, or 3) start treating me like a 'broken' person and assigning all 'oddness' to aspergers.
At first this really bothered me, as I was also trying figure out myself what this diagnosis meant, either taking it too seriously, or forgetting that this rather massive piece of lifelong puzzle had now fallen into place, and dealing with the consequences (some bad, some very good).
Reaction #2 was surprisingly common and painful, especially from people that I didn't expect it from. I'd feel hurt because it never crossed my mind to 'excuse' myself. Even though I do think it provides a legitimate 'explanation' for past behavior that I felt, and sometimes still feel, deeply ashamed or embarrassed about. A certain amount of self-acceptance and forgiveness, I think, is crucial for many people who are on the spectrum, because they often deal with severe social anxiety to begin with, and the tendency to obsess/ruminate does not go well with guilt and embarrassment over the past.
The way I see it now, or try to, is that we're all (people in general) just too inclined to overvalue labels, in particular in the field of mental health, and as a result either reject them entirely, or let them form a wedge between 'the real us' and 'the disability/disorder'. When of course in reality such a distinction is not always very useful outside of the realm of the profession (whether diagnosis or therapy).
Normalizing these kinds of labels, without ignoring them entirely of course, strikes me as a very good development. The more we accept that we're all different/weird/'disordered' in various ways, but that some of us suffer more from this difference than others, the better we can actually come to positive outcomes, whether that means changing society, changing or coping through therapy, or the use of medication.
The label itself doesn't provide more meaning than whatever individual specific characteristics a person exhibits to what extents.
These are not signs of Asperger’s.
While I'm sure there are cases where the person diagnosed is coddled (and this is something to keep an eye on), there are many more cases where there's a real problem, and the lack of a diagnosis or the lack of accepting that the (un)diagnosed simply has limitations is a big part of the problem.
It's a bit like the attitude that welfare is a bad thing because some people are lazy. I'd argue that, provided we can afford it as a society (and we can), if even one out of ten people is helped, the other nine can scam their way into welfare all they want.
Over time I realized a lot of those quirks are not so weird, or at least not weirder than those of 'normal' people.
In fact, this is one reason why, as I understand it, adult aspies are sometimes warned that they might not want a proper diagnosis, as it can have a severe negative effect (even if just self-worth), and there's not much that can be done to 'solve' the problem.
I understand that a lot of people who go clubbing actually don't like it, but they're under the false impression that's what people their age do to have fun and they need to participate to meet people, etc.
So normal person == enthusiastic clubber is false.
> watching sports on TV
I personally don't watch sports, but I think the people who enjoy watching them tend to have grown up with them and have a much greater knowledge and appreciation for the game than those who don't. If you don't understand what's going on, a random televised game is very much like watching mediocre language sitcom in a language you don't understand. Not knowing the language of the show doesn't make you less "normal."
With respect to sports, I actually do enjoy watching the odd sporting event now and again. What is actually foreign to me is caring about who wins.
Haha, same here!! Does it mean I might be an "Aspie" too???
But I never thought I'm 'on a spectrum'. Since heterosexuality is also completely foreign to me - I just assumed I'm a minority in most other areas too ;-) I had to have a long adjustment to the idea that despite being a part of a persecuted minority - there's nothing wrong with me. It's the society that is the problem - not me. Being in a majority is not a proof of a validity of your views - it is just an easier way of living, because you don't have to think about anything. And once you do that mental adjustment once - it is easy to apply elsewhere. I think that watching TV is a waste of time, I'd rather read a book - so what? I'll politely nod when someone is excited about yet another insufferable TV hit series, just as I will politely nod when they are talking about their heterosexual marriage / kids / suburban utopia. I don't have any desire to join in.
I don't have any diagnosis of autism, so it might just simply be that I was a huge jerk for the first 20 or so years of my life. It may have been the consequence of developing academic skills several years ahead of other children my age (this too is a circumstance that must inevitably affect the developing mind). My experiences studying and traveling internationally as an adult were invaluable, forcing me to perceive and then confront this shortcoming in my own personality. When I discovered that many things I assumed were invariant bedrock assertions in fact vary greatly among other people, it was like I had to recreate my concept of others and self from the ground up to reconcile what I'd seen with my life experience to that point.
I think I still approach social interactions analytically (coping) rather than intuitively but at least I've learned not to be so much of a jerk to others, or at the very least to be conscious of it and apologize when I am.
Its also more common in industries that most of the HN commentators work in as is the film tv and theatre industry
[UPDATE] A lot of reply comments are of the form: what you have described here is not Aspergers, it's just normal growing up. Well, yeah, it's not so easy to give a complete description of my situation in an HN comment, and I'm not sure I'd be willing to do it even if I could. I'm not particularly proud of the person I used to be. But I will tell you this: in retrospect, when I was a kid, I was completely oblivious to the fact that my peers were agents in their own right, with thoughts and preferences and hopes and dreams that might be different from my own. That, I am now given to understand, is the hallmark of autism spectrum disorders. But I don't think it matters whether or not I "actually" had/have Aspergers. What matters is that because I was clueless, I behaved obnoxiously (not realizing that I was doing so) and as a result of that I had very few friends. It was intensely painful, and it took many years of concerted effort to change my situation, but I ultimately managed to do it. That is really what I want to convey: whether or not it was abnormal, it hurt, but I was able to make it better. And if I could do it, so can you, regardless of what label we choose to attach to our conditions.