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People relativising AS and telling you that you seem 'normal' to them.

Hope

I hate it with a passion when people say to me, often randomly, 'I don't think anyone would have thought that you struggle with asperger's, you seem so normal', and then they say that they themselves struggled to fit in at school for some reason and does that mean they therefore have aspergers? It is like they are questioning the diagnosis by implying I cannot possibly have AS because I am so chatty and extrovert!. They do not realise how their comments make me feel sick inside, the anguish and stess the comments make me feel, particularly when the comments come from people who should know better. My regular support worker understands me and would never relativise my AS, but a support worker who has only recently started working with Autistic adults and who does not have much experience in this field, recently came out with these comments and left me feeling hurt and upset, although in other respects I get on with him. I feel like I am a fake, that my identity is being questioned, and it makes me feel unhappy, like I will be a perpetual outsider, not fitting in anywhere. I don't wish to be defined by asperger's, but it is nevertheless such a big part of my identity and I am so proud of my achievements and successes with regard to fighting back against my anxiety and the negative side of my AS and how my experiences have shaped me as a person. I always feel like I have to justify myself and it makes me feel so tense and upset. Anyway, I felt like replying, what am I supposed to look like as a person with AS? Am I supposed to hardly talk, to be rude and non-compliant or highly distracted?.

Has anyone else with high-fuunctioning AS experienced similar issues? I do feel so unhappy at the moment, but maybe I am being too analytical and taking things too far.

Parents

  • Exactly, it's the time factor - the actuality of dealing with the impairment over time. People who make such comments probably have no appreciation of the pressures where things go wrong often and have a build up effect. It is easy to claim to have similar experiences. But it is about living with the constraints those experiences impose.

    Inevitably it is an "invisible" disability. But there's no easy way of communicating the difference between impression and practical day to day living.

    I went to a training session a few years back, I think it was by the late Genevieve Edmonds, who got the NT audience to pair up and stand back to back and try to explain something to the other person in the absence of eye contact.

    I think you have to accept you will always get these comments. Put it down to NT's social blindness. They don't know they depend so much on eye clontact and pragmatics; indeed they will often claim it doesn't exist. They do it automatically so they don't appreciate it. We have to work at it to emulate something of what is required.

    So just think of them as ignorant - mice in a maze, or pavlov's dogs. Nothing great about that is there?

Reply

  • Exactly, it's the time factor - the actuality of dealing with the impairment over time. People who make such comments probably have no appreciation of the pressures where things go wrong often and have a build up effect. It is easy to claim to have similar experiences. But it is about living with the constraints those experiences impose.

    Inevitably it is an "invisible" disability. But there's no easy way of communicating the difference between impression and practical day to day living.

    I went to a training session a few years back, I think it was by the late Genevieve Edmonds, who got the NT audience to pair up and stand back to back and try to explain something to the other person in the absence of eye contact.

    I think you have to accept you will always get these comments. Put it down to NT's social blindness. They don't know they depend so much on eye clontact and pragmatics; indeed they will often claim it doesn't exist. They do it automatically so they don't appreciate it. We have to work at it to emulate something of what is required.

    So just think of them as ignorant - mice in a maze, or pavlov's dogs. Nothing great about that is there?

Children
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