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Creative & Intelligent

Agatha

Hi All

Now I've had a formal diagnosis of Autism with final testing/report to be done in August, I decided to tell a couple of friends outside my own family.  Both were surprised and both independently said "oh, but I thought people with autism were high intelligent and really creative".

I am neither intelligent (I did scrape through with some o levels - but really basic C grades and not many), I am not at all creative (despite trying various things over my lifetime) nor can I sing in tune - nor apparently hum in tune according to my family.

So what do I say to people when they say that ... because I'm not sure I'll tell anyone else that I'm autistic at this rate.  And why am not clever or creative !!!!! When my friend said that to me the other day I felt I'd even failed at being autistic !

And really sorry for posting this - I do feel bad when people have such serious issues they face in life that I'm asking such a silly question, it feels wrong but then I've nowhere else to ask the question!! So sorry !!!

  • in reply to Agatha

    No problem maybe just try and condense it down a bit Grin

  • in reply to BJS

    I think you right - I must admit I never though I could be autistic as I'm so "normal" ....until my family pointed out that I'm not !!!

  • in reply to O

    Thank you !!!!!  The subjects I'm interested in I can talk for hours about ...and I do tend to over study and see both sides of every viewpoint on stuff !!  I notice patterns that people make in their lives and mannerisms !  Maybe I'll remembered another time and say this rather than looking blankly!!!!

  • I think people have a view of Autistic people such as Rainman or Gary McKinnon (hacked into the Pentagon looking for UFOs) and so their perception is of Geeks playing on computers all day.  The reality is that we are all different and have various interests and abilities.

  • I don’t know what you could say to that kind of response. However I would say that from what I’ve read and seen about my self is that autistic people manifest intelligence in a non typical way a lot of the time. I don’t have good grades they are terrible to be honest I struggled a lot in school. But I am VERY knowledgeable and know a lot of things about what I’m interested I know a lot about space for example and can talk about it at length but I do not have any grade of diploma to do with anything remotely about space. I recently have been getting into the psychological differences between people who identify as left wing and those who identify as right wing and those in the middle too. I’ve never formally studied psychology. I’m very perceptive and good with pattern recognition and I see things that, (from what I’ve seen anyway) neurotypical people don’t. 

    Maybe you could say something like that

    you just need to find what you’re competent at. :)