Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi, I just stumbled across this site and found myself reading the discussions which are very interesting. I set up a profile which you’re welcome to ignore because I don’t really know completely what I’m on about but these are the half unformed thoughts about myself and my life that I have been wondering about.
How do you know if you’re just above average intelligent/academic or on the autism spectrum?
I might say something wrong while explaining this, I’m sorry if I have already, using wrong terms etc because I’m not deeply educated on it.
I’ve kind of been thinking isn’t it rational to shun socializing if you’re intelligent and not necessarily in an environment where you have connection with other intelligent people?.
Isn’t preferring objects to people rational for someone academic? Humans are quite silly and frivolous and unless you’re working at a top uni, not going to be highly intelligent. But does avoidance of them mean you’re arrogant or use your brain in a more productive way. Some people take drugs or drink so maybe they’re not going to be using their brain to its full capacity.
So isn’t it just a survival instinct that if you’re clever, you’re going to prefer to be alone rather than settle for averagely intelligent humans, which might look like there’s something wrong.
Isn’t it a fact that we live in an unaesthetic, Capitalist, Consumerist driven world that often makes the man/woman made world quite ugly, full of fake advertising and trash. So isn’t avoiding all that sensory disingenuous junk again rational?
Isn’t it rational to order the world around us, so isn’t keeping collections and cataloging the height of intelligence?
Doesn’t it just mean that you’re a good person if you like rules and like them to be followed?
Isn’t the best way to get things done during the day to have a repetitious routine? And not liking it when undisciplined people come along and try and tear you from your strict routine, just because they’re lazy and lack focus and are addicted to frivolous hedonism.
Might be utter junk coming out of my head, thank you
I didn’t find university much different to school as far as social complications went. No real instinctive ability to understand how to socialise comfortably and easily, often treated with ignorance, contempt and abuse, and excluded. That was the 80s, before the Aspergers diagnosis was introduced.
University teaching can be quite unstructured and difficult for an autistic to adjust to.
UCL graduate.
The intense anxiety of trying to please my parents by getting to university vs knowing full well I lacked the ability to cope with the independent living side of being at university, along with the effects of severe verbal bullying, was a major factor in my developing a serious mental illness. This was in the mid 1970s, way before there was the amount of help and support available now.The term I should've done A levels was the 1st time I ended up in a psych hospital, after a few days in the school sanatorium. Since then, apart from an abortive attempt at a history A level correspondence soon after my 1st psych admission, I've gone into avoidant mode re several suggestions to do a college course. That has been because of what my care coordinator calls 'bullying related trauma'.
Your story is similar to mine problems starting at a levels. I feel like I had a breakdown. Like I couldn’t keep pretending socially anymore, it was exhausting. I had two faces. So I dropped out of college and became a recluse. I remember some of my college classmates writing me letters as well as my lecturer telling me to get well soon. Then it was a case of my mom running around trying to make me normal again. I’d go for appointments with a psychiatrist at a clinic where there were girls with eating disorders staying. I’d ask this £90 an hour Psychiatrist if he had any proof that I had a chemical imbalance or was bipolar. Because that’s the conclusion they came to at that time. And he admitted that ‘no there was no proof but that psychiatry was about treating a problem with drugs and that if the drugs worked, well great, happy days’. So I’d just take the meds for a while, become normal, then stop and go back to being me again. I still don’t buy what they labeled me as. But the difference is that society leaves me alone now and let me get on with being me unmedicated. Probably just because I have a job now so it’s like they can’t harass me.