For those of us who grew up in the decades before the 90s, the diagnoses of Asperger's just didn't exist when we were kids. I sometimes wonder how different life would have been for me or my brother had we actually had some early intervention in our younger years.
I was always labelled the shy one, or known as the quiet weird kid at school. I wasn't shy, I was just incapable of communicating most of the time. If I was asked a question, my brain would find a dozen ways to interpret it, so I'd have no way of knowing what the correct response would be. I couldn't process an answer if I didn't know which way I was supposed to process the question in the first place. My brain still does this so I'm often giving answers to a completely different yet similar question to what I've been asked, which usually just confuses the person who asked the question in the first place. Sometimes I have to clarify what the question is actually about before I can answer, which further confuses the person who has asked it as they don't see the multiple ways of interpreting it the same way as I do. The person who's asked the question might think I'm trying to complicate things, when in reality I'm trying to simplify things before I can begin the process of formulating an answer for them. Having grey matter distributed unevenly throughout the brain can cause a lot of complication for otherwise normal thought processes. The extra brain cells in some areas can mean extra possibilities for some thoughts, while the lack of brain cells in other areas can mean less possibilities for other thoughts. I'm not shy, I'm just confused a lot as my brain inputs information and then has trouble understanding how to process it. This can make life very difficult at times, especially in social situations where you're expected to have immediate responses during conversation. I've overcome a lot of the social issues as I've grown older and the extra neural connections have finally decided which combinations work best together, but I'm still uncomfortable in front of new people and feel out of place when there's a conversation happening that I am physically incapable of keeping up with due to all the extra thought processes happening in my scone while everyone else happily moves from one topic to the next.
Asperger's sux at times, and I'll always be stuck with it. Those who know me well actually like my company. Those who don't know me will either get to know me and my eccentricities as a good thing, or just decide I'm a weird person they'd like to avoid contact with at all costs. Either way, I'm happy to be almost 48 years old with the worst of the mind hurdles behind me. I've found a group of people who are comfortably happy to be associated with me and who I'm comfortably happy to be associated with. Most of them live in Facebook land, which is a bonus because we don't have to make actual eye contact to converse with each other and I actually have time to think before I put my two cents into the conversation. I have met one or two of them, which went well because we all knew what to expect from each other after having gotten to know each other in thought over quite a good amount of time. I even got engaged to one of them last year after our brains slowly fell in love via Facebook interactions over a number of years. We now raise our own blended family together.
Having a house full of people on the Autism spectrum has had its head banging on the wall moments for us at times, but that's another story altogether. We have a happy family, and that's all that matters. We have happy children who live in an age where early intervention and extra support in schooling is now a reality. They still have trouble understanding how to process the world, the same as us. But they're no longer shunned as weirdos or just fobbed off as being shy. We're the strange, eccentric family that lives in the middle of the street that doesn't interact with their neighbours. We aren't being snobs by not interacting with you. We're just not capable of knocking on your door and introducing ourselves as easily as you might be able to with us. That's the other thing about Autism and Asperger's, we aren't always capable of initiating the contact, but we will actively make an effort to join in if we have a friendly invitation and don't get fobbed off as weirdos when we do go out of our way to make that effort.
We now live in a society that supports people on the Autism spectrum and my kids are growing up with the security of being accepted for who they are. It's also helping us oldies to accept who we are, after years of not knowing why we were different and why we couldn't interact the way the other kids at school did.
Our kids will always have their Autism and Asperger's, but luckily they won't have to go through all the crap that we did in our younger years.
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