08-25-2017, 10:28 AM
(08-24-2017, 11:11 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(08-24-2017, 12:14 AM)Kinser79 Wrote: @PBR
I'm not going to respond to your long screed. Mostly because it is as boring as it is unhinged. As usual you used your same tired ten talking points. I'm starting to question if you might not actually have a spectrum disorder. I suggest undergoing some tests for it and getting a real diagnosis. You know, the kind you'd get going to a real psychologist and not just talking to a social worker for ten or so minutes.
I went to a psychologist when I had a psychological problem (grief-related depression) with no connection to the autistic spectrum. Everything (except substance abuse, which is not one of my problems) had gone wrong in my life, and few people cope with that well.
Asperger's is considered part of the autistic spectrum. I show many of the symptoms, some of them physical. I do not cope well with loud noises, so I could never enjoy rock-and-roll as normal people do. I have trouble with stairs. I have great difficulty in understanding body language and other forms of non-verbal communication. The dog is better at that than I am.
I was bullied frequently as a child, which is commonplace for people with Asperger's. I have had difficulty getting and holding jobs (ineptitude in understanding non-verbal communications) and was never good at dating. My capacity for expression of humor is best described as either sarcastic or sardonic. The comedy that I can get is either physical comedy (Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Orvilie and Hardy, Lucille Ball) or perhaps sardonic (the sort of humor that Alfred Hitchcock offers in The Trouble with Harry). Maybe something wise and witty. Vile stuff from the late Sam Kinison? Turn it off!
People have told me that I am 'high-functioning', but that appearance results from my suppression of the more objectionable features of autistic behavior. I must act to seem normal enough that my lapses are mere 'eccentricity'. I wish that I needed not be such a conformist as I am. For me, life is acting. I would rather be normal; as much as I act in real life, and I think I am good enough at it that were it not for Asperger's I would be able to make a living in Little Theater.
Maybe had I known much earlier I would have gotten better vocational guidance. I could have gotten some protection in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. I have a high-enough IQ to be a potential trouble-maker in many milieux.
The one thing good about Asperger's (aside from it not being as bad as other disorders) is that it makes one unlikely to develop any chemical dependency.
I need to respond to all this because I have the condition as well although it affected me in somewhat different ways, creating much emotional jeopardy down through the years. Emotional jeopardy is an unusual game; sometimes you just have to play, which means that you have to be vulnerable. I also was bullied frequently as a child, and the year I was in fourth grade I was removed from public school following the Thanksgiving break. My parents supplied a tutor for a couple of years before space at a private boarding school became available. Much has gone wrong in my life through the years from that point on. Loud noises really don't bother me much except when trying to carry on a conversation. In fact my mother always said I played music and radio too loud. (No longer do much of that, though). Never did have trouble climbing stairs, but too have had difficulty obtaining and holding jobs at times although I had two jobs that lasted seven years, which in this day and age is about par for the course. By that length of time they will usually figure out some way to consider you too big an expense.
In the dating realm, we may not have had the same experiences, and this is where the topic of emotional jeopardy comes in. I wanted an active dating life very badly and did at times have some successes and had a few relationships that possibly could have led to marriage. I admittedly blew my last opportunity in the early 2000s because of my own restlessness. I had a fall in 2008, the same year the economy had its own fall. While I recovered well physically my financial stability took a big hit from which I have never recovered. Did obtain a job by the end of that year only to be removed unceremoniously in March of 2009. That's when I learned without a doubt how, in today's workplace, office politics and political correctness trump reason, and that petty jealousies can and often do lead to real-world consequences. A book I wrote titled JUDAS TIMES SEVEN is a somewhat fictionalized account of my experience, as I never learned the truth as to what went down and why after I developed an attraction to a woman who also was my lead person for most of my time there.
The only way in which we may have gotten better regarding our common condition is that we have at least come to recognize that vulnerability isn't a sign of weakness. It actually provides us with strength to overcome the toughest of obstacles. There are those who have told me that I managed to overcome tremendous odds in order to be able to live independently. And yet I don't come even close to considering myself as any kind of hero. If I were going to write my own autobiography, which I may take on sometime before my last breath occurs, I would probably title it "Ladies' Man Dreams", as I had almost an obsessional dream of being the ladies' man who could win the affection of nearly any woman I desired. The obsession was so intense that anybody who tried to get in the way, even family members, I considered to be the enemy. Now 72, I figure that it's now safe to go public with it because it is no doubt too late in life to try to become that ladies' man now. And do you feel that the term "Ladies' man" is more derogatory today that it may once have been? I have heard that there was a time when it carried a certain sort of mystique.