Perceptions

No social flow or instinct naturally connects between you and the folk you talk to. That's the essential thing that makes AS. It shows in 2 key ways. You lack the feel to relate at a casual level, with this not being out of shyness but having no instinct for the other person's angle on your best way to relate to them. Your speech connects instead with the content of a meaningful subject, and you understand the exact content of messages, what is said. You have no learned feel for guessing unsaid details or social rules that alter the meaning.

So, say, a magazine website host asked me to write something, changed her mind what types of details she wanted, and took a huff because I hadn't guessed by social instinct more about what she wanted than she told me. You can't do that with aspies. Every part of communication must be worked on consciously. I'm the quieter type, for whom this means only communicating as necessary: I get quite lost at any conversation and just go quiet if surrounded by unfocussed chat. You ask me to do errands but only tell me half of what they are and expect me to guess the rest, then I get stuck. It's nice now to have an explanation for that. These limits on communication lead naturally into another classic trait, self-sufficient dedication to my interests. For a caring and politically intense soul like me it's a virtue to be criticised for my determination in banging on about an issue until it makes a difference. I get a feeling of knowing the world better, by putting things in comparative lists in their spatial or scale order. My teenage addiction was to transport timetables.

The further range of AS traits are non-essential extras. For instance, I don't have the trait of not understanding metaphors and taking them literally. This delayed me being sure of having AS at all because all books before 2003 used to assume this trait was always present. Then there's the fun of learning that other quirks to do with your body's sensitivity are part of your AS. My selection includes: arm fidgetiness, wearing shorts, using sleeping bags, and feeling jolted by sudden noises.

By: Maurice Frank