I have been thinking about my social skills lately, and how I picked up some basic social competencies from the age of 16 onwards - I am now 26 years old. But maybe we can compare Asperger's syndrome to Dyslexia: just as a Dyslexic will never be able to read perfectly, although they might just scrape a grade in English after significant effort, so a person with Asperger's will never have perfect social skills. However, with a lot of effort, it is possible to just scrape a grade in the 'social skills exam' (with luck, perhaps even a C!), but the way social skills are learnt will be radically different to how Neurotypicals learn them. Perhaps we use a different part of the brain to learn social skills, and so we learn them like a Dyslexic learns to read - the software is not automatically programmed into the brain so we have to build it up block by block. A Dyslexic could learn to read quite well, but only after many years of hard work, and they will always be Dyslexic - the skill will never be natural for them.
What are your thoughts?
