![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Tuesday I saw a neuropsychologist. (Recap: I had to resign from my internship a few months ago mainly due to poor social skills caused by undiagnosed Aspergers.) I was diagnosed with Aspergers, which was not a surprise (I've known I had it since we started researching my brother's autism), but I was also diagnosed with Face blindness, which was a surprise but explains a lot. I've always been bad at pairing faces and names. When I was at camp in middle school, on the last day when we were getting ready to go home, one of the girls from my cabin came up to me and I didn't recognize her because she'd changed her clothes from what she'd been wearing in the morning. I can recognize people I know, but it takes me a while to learn to recognize new people, particularly when I meet them in a large crowd. From the testing I got, apparently I can memorize about three new faces at a time, and any more than that forget about it. I've never thought much about it because my Mom's the same way, and lots of people talk about being bad with names and such. But apparently I'm much, much worse than most people, which doesn't help social skills that are already pretty bad because of the Aspergers.
Apparently, they're in the middle of reviewing and updating diagnosis criteria as a prelude to a new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). So she evaluated me on a version modified by current discussion on the issue.
Criteria that fit me:
What this is like from the inside: I don't understand people. Really, I don't. I can learn, by rote, how to interpret body language and how to function in social situations but I do have to learn it by rote; it doesn't come naturally, and it's something I always have to be consciously thinking of. I care about people, but I've never really been good at showing it. In fact, there's a real disconnect between what I'm feeling/thinking and what other people perceive me as thinking/feeling. Often people don't understand when I'm trying to be funny or sarcastic. When I was in high school, when I had really horrible awful days, nobody noticed. But when I was having normal days, people regularly came up to me and asked what was wrong. And for me, figuring out what people are feeling by looking at their body language is very difficult. I like books, movies, and tv shows because they tell you what's important, by what they describe or what they focus on; I don't have to sort it out of the background noise. (Also, that helps me figure out what I need to be watching for with real life people.) But again, this is something I have to be consciously looking for, and often times I end up looking at the wrong thing because everyone's different and acts differently in different situations. Most people get most of their information, socially, from body language and voice. I miss most of that. One of the reasons I like interacting with people online is that it's a level playing field. There's nothing there that anybody else can see that I can't. We all see the same text. It's not a handicap, here.
I don't like calling it a handicap, philosophically, because on a fundamental level it isn't; it's a large part of who I am and how I think, and if it were miracularly cured tomorrow I wouldn't be me. I'd be someone who looked like me, but thought about the world very differently than I do. And yet, functionally, it is a handicap. I want to have friends, I want to get married and have kids, I want to be a pastor, and it always has and always will make that more difficult for me than for most people.
You know what one of the hardest things for me to do, socially, is? Small talk. I understand its function (to demonstrate that you care about someone by paying attention to the minutia of their life; to break the ice; to provide neutral ground when needed). But it still doesn't make sense to me on a fundamental level. It's repetitive, it goes in circles, it provides no information of lasting value. For me, when I'm talking, by far the most comfortable thing is to follow a line of thought out to its logical conclusion, in a straight line. Kind of like a train on a track. Small talk ... bounces from what you had for lunch to the weather to who you saw at the store the other day to how 'bout them Yankees to ... and on, and on. It keeps jumping the track. And each time it does that, I have to reign myself in, stop, consciously change directions, and try and jump back into the conversation. It's tiring, and after a while it gets very hard to do. Also, while I care about the person I'm talking to, I really don't care about the weather. It was hot. I already knew that. It was obvious. Everybody already knows that. So why do we have to talk about it? This holds true for most of the minutia that makes up small talk. I understand that it's important to other people, but it's not important to me, and like I said, it's hard for me to do, and it's frustrating. (This is another reason I love the internet. I don't have to do small talk at all; when I post or comment, I can pick a subject and go for it. Facebook is the online equivalent of smalltalk, and it's the most efficient way to do it; you comment once per subject and everyone can see it, and you see everyone's comments on their own small talk once in a concise, efficient way.)
I can't deal with people face-to-face for long periods of time without the opportunity to go someplace and be alone with myself and recharge. Because dealing with people is very hard work. And that's one of the reasons why it's hard for me to form friendships: much as I might want to have friends, be social, do things with people, it's damn hard work. And then once I get to know someone well enough to relax around them, they generally find my quirks too difficult to deal with or I offend them by saying/doing something wrong because I missed the cues, or whatever. I get anxious when I have to deal with people, because I want to do a good job, and I know no matter how hard I try there will always be certain things that I miss. And yet, when I retreat inside my shell so I don't have to deal with that anxiety, I get very lonely.
Apparently, they're in the middle of reviewing and updating diagnosis criteria as a prelude to a new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). So she evaluated me on a version modified by current discussion on the issue.
Criteria that fit me:
- Qualitative impairment in social interaction
- Marked impairment in the use of multiple non-verbal behaviors such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body postures, and gestures to regulate social behaviors
- Failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level
- Lack of social or emotional reciprocity (it's not that I don't want to, it's that I'm never sure how)
- difficulties in understanding social situations and other people's thoughts and feelings
- Restricted repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests, and activities
- Encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus. (For me, certain types of science fiction; history; english lit)
- Stereotyped and repetitive motor mannerisms (rare in adults) (I pace, and sometimes tap my foot or fingers)
- The disturbance causes clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning (as in, having to resign from internship)
- No clinically significant general delay in language, but clinically significant qualitative impairments in verbal or non-verbal communication
- Tendency to turn any conversation back to self or own topic of interest.
- Cannot see the point of superficial social contact, niceties, or passing time with others, unless there is a clear discussion point/debate or activity.
- Pedantic style of speaking or inclusion of too much detail
- Inability to recognize when the listener is interested or bored. Even if the person has been told not to talk about their particular topic for too long, this difficulty may be evident if other topics arise.
- Frequent tendency to say things without considering the emotional impact on the listener.
What this is like from the inside: I don't understand people. Really, I don't. I can learn, by rote, how to interpret body language and how to function in social situations but I do have to learn it by rote; it doesn't come naturally, and it's something I always have to be consciously thinking of. I care about people, but I've never really been good at showing it. In fact, there's a real disconnect between what I'm feeling/thinking and what other people perceive me as thinking/feeling. Often people don't understand when I'm trying to be funny or sarcastic. When I was in high school, when I had really horrible awful days, nobody noticed. But when I was having normal days, people regularly came up to me and asked what was wrong. And for me, figuring out what people are feeling by looking at their body language is very difficult. I like books, movies, and tv shows because they tell you what's important, by what they describe or what they focus on; I don't have to sort it out of the background noise. (Also, that helps me figure out what I need to be watching for with real life people.) But again, this is something I have to be consciously looking for, and often times I end up looking at the wrong thing because everyone's different and acts differently in different situations. Most people get most of their information, socially, from body language and voice. I miss most of that. One of the reasons I like interacting with people online is that it's a level playing field. There's nothing there that anybody else can see that I can't. We all see the same text. It's not a handicap, here.
I don't like calling it a handicap, philosophically, because on a fundamental level it isn't; it's a large part of who I am and how I think, and if it were miracularly cured tomorrow I wouldn't be me. I'd be someone who looked like me, but thought about the world very differently than I do. And yet, functionally, it is a handicap. I want to have friends, I want to get married and have kids, I want to be a pastor, and it always has and always will make that more difficult for me than for most people.
You know what one of the hardest things for me to do, socially, is? Small talk. I understand its function (to demonstrate that you care about someone by paying attention to the minutia of their life; to break the ice; to provide neutral ground when needed). But it still doesn't make sense to me on a fundamental level. It's repetitive, it goes in circles, it provides no information of lasting value. For me, when I'm talking, by far the most comfortable thing is to follow a line of thought out to its logical conclusion, in a straight line. Kind of like a train on a track. Small talk ... bounces from what you had for lunch to the weather to who you saw at the store the other day to how 'bout them Yankees to ... and on, and on. It keeps jumping the track. And each time it does that, I have to reign myself in, stop, consciously change directions, and try and jump back into the conversation. It's tiring, and after a while it gets very hard to do. Also, while I care about the person I'm talking to, I really don't care about the weather. It was hot. I already knew that. It was obvious. Everybody already knows that. So why do we have to talk about it? This holds true for most of the minutia that makes up small talk. I understand that it's important to other people, but it's not important to me, and like I said, it's hard for me to do, and it's frustrating. (This is another reason I love the internet. I don't have to do small talk at all; when I post or comment, I can pick a subject and go for it. Facebook is the online equivalent of smalltalk, and it's the most efficient way to do it; you comment once per subject and everyone can see it, and you see everyone's comments on their own small talk once in a concise, efficient way.)
I can't deal with people face-to-face for long periods of time without the opportunity to go someplace and be alone with myself and recharge. Because dealing with people is very hard work. And that's one of the reasons why it's hard for me to form friendships: much as I might want to have friends, be social, do things with people, it's damn hard work. And then once I get to know someone well enough to relax around them, they generally find my quirks too difficult to deal with or I offend them by saying/doing something wrong because I missed the cues, or whatever. I get anxious when I have to deal with people, because I want to do a good job, and I know no matter how hard I try there will always be certain things that I miss. And yet, when I retreat inside my shell so I don't have to deal with that anxiety, I get very lonely.
