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Er, hi and stuff

vometia
over 9 years ago

I figured it'd be the polite thing to introduce myself before I go blundering about the forums writing random stuff, as tends to be my wont.

My reason for being here is, well, I was actually directed here by an online acquaintance after discussing video-games and what-not since conversations seldom stay on topic.  Or at least they don't where I'm concerned.  So my actual reason for being here is as a "person with autism", though strictly speaking my diagnosis is of Asperger Syndrome, as was.  I kinda knew it was significant, and would probably answer a lot of the assorted and creative "issues" that I seem to experience, but y'know, there's time for that later.  I guess later has now arrived, considering I'm 46 years old.  Better late than never, I suppose.

I also have ADHD, just to make things a bit more interesting.  Or actually a bit less interesting, as I have no concentration, unless something is randomly interesting, in which case I have too much concentration and growl at anyone who disturbs it.  Though the "H" part of the diagnosis went in my late teens and I got fat.  So I seem to be spending much of later adulthood trying to lose weight with variable and random success.

I'm one of those people who doesn't view Asperger's as a disorder, for me it's just a personality type: sometimes one that's creative, sometimes one that's annoying and limiting, but if there's a "disorder" anywhere I guess I consider it one of society for really only catering for a rather limited set of personality types (or just the one, for that matter, whatever "Type A" looks like.  I think it looks like Katie Hopkins.  But I digress.  Again).

Er, was I making a particularly relevant point or just waffling?  I forget now.  I guess I was just trying to understand what it's all about, and to make life a bit easier to deal with, both for myself and my long-suffering partner who has to put up with my randomness and (usually intentional) absurdity.

Oh, and my real name is Christine.  I just think Vometia is more "me".

I'll stop prattling now.  Fortunately I've run out of concentration.  Yay.

  • over 9 years ago

    vometia said:

    Let me just get on with being myself, idiosyncrasies and all.

    Willdo :-)

  • over 9 years ago

    I think it's a matter of perspective: it's more a case of accepting who I am and being that person than trying to live as someone else.  So for GID, that means living as the gender I identify with.  And with ASD, that means accepting I have ASD instead of trying to pretend I don't.  I spent so much of my life pretending, I pretended I was a gender I wasn't, I pretended I was NT when I wasn't.  Embracing either isn't easier, but it makes life an awful lot simpler; in my case accepting my GID and running with it made a huge and very positive difference.  I figure by that metric it's not an unreasonable idea that accepting that I have ASD and that it's not going to change is going to make me a lot happier too.  I became quite skilled at pretending I don't have ASD, and becoming quite successful at it.  It hasn't made me happy: in fact it made me stressed and miserable.

    I guess from my perspective the best and most effective route to happiness is to be true to what we are.  Though of course the possibilities for doing so tend to be very dependent on a person's individual circumstances.

    So for the gender stuff, I now just identify as female.  Not trans-woman, MTF or anything like that.  Just female.  Because that's all I am.  And for ASD... I identify as ASD.  Because, likewise, I tried being something I wasn't.  I tried being NT.  And I was convincing, but utterly miserable.  So why bother?  Okay, rhetorical question, there <i>are</i> plausible reasons to bother, but none of them appeal to me and none of them have worked.  Let me just get on with being myself, idiosyncrasies and all.  Because "idiosyncrasy" sounds kinda more awesome than "warts". :D

  • over 9 years ago

    When you say that you are tackling the things that can be fixed you are going to fix your body rather than fix your unhappiness with your body?

    There is no way to fix (e.g. surgically) our ASD so we have no choice but to learn to live with it and deal with our unhappiness with it by learning how to accept it and live with it rather than against it.

    I would have thought it would be possible to do the same with GID - I've read that the standard approach is to go for gender change reassignment but the wikipedia page suggests that this doesn't actually resolve suicide risk or mental disorder risk.

  • over 9 years ago

    Hey, thanks for the reply. Smile  You'd think that after 30 years of being online and misinterpreting other people's comments (and making my own creative gaffes on a frequent basis!) I'd have got the hang of it by now.  But apparently not. Laughing

    I have very mixed feelings about my ASD: in some regards, I guess I just view it as a sort of alternative skill set, but that doesn't stop me getting frustrated when it contributes to me not being able to do stuff I want to do.  But I just want it all anyway.  I think I'll probably end up being happiest with tackling the stuff that can be fixed (e.g. gender shenanigans) and learning to live within the limits of stuff that can't, such as ASD.

    I think for me, one of the more questionable strategies is learning to hide it, and when I'm on good form, people don't generally realise I have ASD; but when I'm not on top form, such as being tired, stressed or drinking, the facade rapidly slips away and then I feel embarrassed because suddenly I've lost my NT disguise and all the ASDisms start to sneak out.  I guess it would help to learn not to feel embarrassed by it.  But I'm good at being embarrassed.

  • over 9 years ago

    no probs, I say and post things that get misinterpreted quite regularly - I err on the side of bluntness apparently!

    Most people on the forum are unhappy because ASD causes friction and disagreements with the rest of the world. You are not alone in having a miserable experience with it. My point was that we look to blame or change something for the unhappiness but we don't always focus on the right thing - many have bad experience with parents or school etc and then blame their parents or the school for the problems they are going through. In fact it is best to really get under the skin of the ASD and unlock that puzzle before trying to change anything else.

    Anyways, I'm glad that you came back to forum as I thought I had upset you and I'm sorry for that.

    :-)

  • over 9 years ago

    I think I may have managed to interpret your post the wrong way: I seem to do that sort of thing a lot. :/

    Thanks for your thoughts, and what I now understand you probably meant!  In my case it's not about looking for something to "blame", I think it's healthiest to accept what I am.  Much of my unhappiness stems from the years I didn't accept that and fought with it instead.

  • over 9 years ago

    My concentration has temporarily returned, and so has my blathering.  Boo.

    I was also thinking about the co-morbid conditions that I also get to enjoy along with ASD (yay, I've learnt something already in my brief time here!) which seem to be a bit of a feature of the fabulousity of the condition, though its exact associates tend to vary.

    I've already mentioned ADHD, or rather Adult ADD as it should be called, I believe.  I looked into this in my mid 30s, having realised that my attention span was way worse than would normally be explained by depression alone, "anxiety and depression" being a frequent companion since my teens.  It was a struggle to find a specialist, but I did eventually do so and he additionally observed that I appeared to have Asperger's.  I'm not sure if he made a formal diagnosis (that came later when I actually needed one) but a few online tests certainly supported his suspicions: a couple of particularly detailed ones highlighted me as "high functioning", which I understand to mean "can blag her way through a conversation even though she often doesn't really get it", especially anything looking suspiciously like a metaphor and non-verbal cues.  Seems the rest of the stuff they tested for was fairly low-functioning, or at least functioning with a significant degree of indifference.

    Then there's agoraphobia, though that is in part due to childhood bullying due to being "different" (not just the ASD: more of that in a moment) but there's also that information overload that I get when I'm out and about, which makes even mundane activities like walking and driving excessively stressful.  And I'm reminded of "the incident at Oxford Circus" a few weeks ago, which didn't really involve any more than being at Oxford Circus tube station.  At 6pm.  Which is about the worst possible place in the entire universe to find oneself when it comes to "argh, millions of people randomly milling about and I can't figure out what's going on.  Make it stop!"

    The other "different" is one that I understand often has ASD as a side-effect which is the slightly thorny subject of transsexualism: I'm of the MTF variety.  I never really identified strongly as male, but didn't think much about it until my teens and found my body doing things it shouldn't (no, not that, just stuff like being hairy and growing in the wrong places) and then I realised it all kinda sucked.  Anyway, less of the specifics of that (except to say that life as the female I should've been is a lot less bothersome for me) but I have heard at least anecdotally that a lot of MTF types also have ASD.  I'm guessing it comes of bathing a female brain in testosterone at the wrong time in its development in particular: I'm sure testosterone is great... where it's intended to be.  But putting loads of it in the wrong type of brain is like putting petrol in a diesel engine.  And that also got worse during puberty, and only ever got better once I got testosterone-nuking injections and the promise of a more permanent solution.  At which point the irritation, stress, anxiety, anger and so on did actually relax a fair bit.  I think that oestrogen also helped, but more subtly; I only realise that now that I've had to stop it temporarily, which is most certainly not entertaining.

    My concentration has just wandered off again.  Yay.  I may be back when I find out where it's loitering.

  • over 9 years ago

    A lot of MTF may well be ASD, the subject of gender change does come up on the forum relatively frequently.. There is a lot of unhappiness in ASD and I think people tend to blame 'obvious' things like being in the wrong body. Actually, life as a female ASD is likely to be as unhappy as life as a male ASD unless, or until, you really get inside the fundamental issues of the ASD. This is a thorny subject and it is hard to say anything without it sounding judgemental but I think that it should be debated and people should think of alternative ways of thinking about their problems.