I overcame Asperger's Syndrome, and so did you!
I haven't offended anyone in a while, so I feel the need to piss off some people. Since nobody reads this journal anymore, I doubt I'll succeed, but I can pretend.
I've always lumped Asperger's Syndrome in with ADD and and homosexuality as fake diseases. That is, they are patterns of behavior that are slightly out of the norm, but really not that much so. Most people will agree that homosexuality is not a disease and is in no need of a cure or treatment, religious zealots aside. Not too long ago, though, people thought of it the same way we think of ADD and Asperger's. It was a disease, something wrong with the brain, and it needed to be treated if not cured , and cured if possible. I contend that ADD and Asperger's are the same--behavioral aberrations that the "afflicted" can choose to hide or cope with if they want to be more mainstream, or embrace if they choose to be abnormal.
One of the reasons I consider ADD and Asperger's fake diseases is because they are entirely behaviorally based diagnoses, according to a baseline of normality that is entirely subjective. Quite apart from the possibility of faking the disease to get a diagnosis, they are both simply abnormal levels of normal behavior. Everyone daydreams, finds things boring, and lets their mind wander. People with ADD just do it a lot more. How much more constitutes ADD is an arbitrary level determined (at great length, and with much debate, I'm sure) by a group of people with their own prejudices. In the end, it came down to a committee consensus of how much weirdness was too much, and that's the line for ADD versus "within parameters." The line gets blurred further by the personal opinions of the diagnosing doctors, and as a result, diagnoses of ADD skyrocketed in the late 90s and early 2000s, before settling to a steady but rapid rise in the last few years.
Asperger's is similar, but more so. For one, Asperger's has been inextricably linked with autism since its inception. It started as, and is basically treated like very mild autism. Many autism experts and autistic people think this is crap, and I agree. While the root causes may be the same, Asperger's and autism are in totally different leagues of behavioral abnormality. The fact that autism has its own spectrum of "functionality," from high to low, pretty much eliminates the need for the existence of Asperger's Syndrome. If it is really very mind autism, then call it "very high function autism." If not, it's just a load of crap.
That aside, Asperger's is just like ADD in that it's entirely based on the subject varying from a subjective line of normality by an arbitrary amount according to a single diagnosing doctor's personal opinion. Based on what I've read about Asperger's, in official publications on the subject, as well as personal accounts of people actually diagnosed with it (ignoring the self-diagnosed cases that internet geeks propound), many children, including me, had diagnosable Asperger's, and most, like me, simply grew out of it.
One official publication, which you can read here (it's not the only one, or the best, but it's the only one I can find to link to), gives the following characteristics of Asperger's in kids:
Social communication
Their explanation: You may have problems when talking to other people. You may have been a late talker...It may take you a bit longer to understand what is being said, or you may get confused by certain words or phrases. It can be very hard to tell when someone is joking...especially as so many gestures...can be hard to understand.
Why it's bullshit: All kids have problems with this. Some learn how to understand, then use these things faster than others. We aren't born understanding hyperbole, sarcasm, and irony, these are things we learn over time through social interaction. Like all learned skills, some people will learn them more slowly than others due to lack of talent, lack of interest, and/or lack of experience. That's how human learning works. Even as a master of sarcasm and irony myself, and a critic of hyperbole, I still miss it in others sometimes, especially if I don't know them well or haven't seen them in a while. This is because I don't know or I'm out of practice with interpreting their personal types of vocal and visual cues.
Social understanding
Their explanation: You may have problems with some social relationships. You may not understand all the social rules and may therefore say or do inappropriate things. Sometimes this can be mistaken for rudeness. A good example may be a child who sees a strange looking person in the supermarket and says out loud "You look really weird."
Why it's bullshit: Once again, all kids do this, and most eventually learn how to avoid it. Bill Cosby had a whole show about this very phenomenon. As with the social communication section, and all human skills, some people just aren't going to learn how to deal with this as fast as others because they lack talent, don't care, or don't get enough practice. Embarrassment is a great way to deter a kid from practicing social interaction. As a result, some people say "the darnedest things" well into their teens or adulthood. When they get old, it becomes "being old and not giving a shit," but as a young person, it's Asperger's. We used to just call it being a dick.
Imagination
Their explanation: What interests you may not interest other children. Perhaps you have a certain thing that you are really interested in and, if it was your choice, you would talk about it all the time. You may not be interested in games that involve pretending to be something else, such as cowboys and indians, or cops and robbers. This may be because you find it hard to think about how a cowboy would act, and therefore it is not that much fun for you. Perhaps you would prefer your own company, and would rather play alone than in a group. I think that everybody feels like this sometimes...
Why it's bullshit: Once again, all kids do this, and most eventually learn through experience that obsessing is social poison and tamp it down. When I was a kid, I didn't care about cops and robbers or cowboys and indians, or lots of other normal things. I was obsessed with combat aircraft, especially WWII aircraft, and could talk endlessly about the advantages and disadvantages of the F-4U Corsair, Zero, Messerschmidt 109, Focke-Wulf, Spitfire, P-51 Mustang, etc. For my best friend, it was the same with trains. Another friend had an encyclopedic knowledge of MacGuyver, and specifically which model of Victorinox Swiss Army knife he carried in a given episode. Over time, we learned to tamp down our enthusiasm for these things, and we learned at what point people became uncomfortable hearing about them. We branched out to other subjects--for me it was all military aicraft, not just WWII, then all military equipment, then all military history, then history in general. For my friend with the trains, it became a love of transportation and, by extension, business and economics. He now owns a trucking company. My MacGuyver friend moved away, so I don't know what happened to him.
As for playing alone, the last part of the booklet's explanation is the best, because even the booklet has to admit that "everybody feels like this sometimes." No shit, Sherlock, it's called "me time."
Being clumsy
Their explanation: Perhaps it is slightly harder to run as fast as everyone else, or balance on one leg, or ride a bike.
Why it's bullshit: Once again, these are skills, and they must be learned. A lack of talent causes a kid to get discouraged, leading to a lack of practice, leading to delay. I wasn't athletic, i couldn't to a cartwheel, I didn't learn to ride a bike until I was 12, despite having one since I was 5. I just didn't care enough to practice, and had no real talent for these things.
Disliking change
Their explanation: To some extent everybody likes to be able to guess what the day will be like. You may find it is really quite upsetting when everyday things get disrupted.
Why it's bullshit: NOBODY likes change. Change is scary, especially for kids. We learn to accept that things change and not freak out through social interaction and practice. When we're infants, we get upset when our mommies go away for a minute. As toddlers, we cry when we lose our favorite toy. As kids, we freak out when we change towns, or schools, or even teachers. We deal with it--some better than others--because that's life.
Being fascinated by something
Their explanation: You may have something that you are really fascinated by. I'm sure sometimes that people would be interested to hear all you have to tell them, but sometimes they may be too tired or busy.
Why it's bullshit: See "Imagination" above. This is actually explained there, I don't know why they repeated it.
Speaking in a strange way
Their explanation: Some people may remark that you speak in a strange way. What they mean by this is that you possibly speak in only one tone - a bit like a speaking computer. By carefully listening to the different levels of voice that people use when they talk, you can try to copy.
Why it's bullshit: They say it themselves, "By carefully listening...you can try to copy." It's another skill we learn, and some people don't care to learn it. If they care, they can and will learn it eventually. In middle school I actually learned to eliminate inflection from my voice, and how to avoid showing emotion on my face, because I was weird. In high school, I re-learned how to use inflection and expression, because I was tired of being so weird, and eventually lost the knack for the perfect poker face and monotone I once had. These are skills. Practice improves them, lack of practice is detrimental.
Basically, Asperger's is a delay or stagnation of the development a certain set of skills. The booklet here takes 5 pages to define Asperger's, and spends 15 more explaining how to overcome it. It basically explains how to learn and practice the necessary skills for being normal. It even says that you can basically overcome it, to some degree.
Will I always have Asperger Syndrome?
Yes. The child with Asperger syndrome grows up to be an adult with Asperger syndrome...However, many people by they time they are adults have changed a lot, and they may not have as many problems as when they were younger.
As with all developmental delays, you never completely catch up, but you can fake it to a degree that people can't tell the difference. I'd be willing to bet that there are adults out there who were diagnosed with Asperger's as kids, but can't get diagnosed with it now, because they learned enough necessary skills to fall within normal parameters. In fact, there are, and they write books about it.
At one point, this booklet, distributed by the National Autism Society in the UK, even compares Asperger's to autism, and basically says it's not autism, because it's not crippling.
Is Asperger syndrome the same thing as autism?
The difference between these two things can seem very confusing. They are similar...However, a person with Asperger syndrome is sometimes more able than a person with autism. This means that you can do things for yourself that a person with autism might need help with.
So people with autism actually need help to survive, and people with Asperger's are just weird. Sounds about right. Which is exactly why "I have Asperger's" is not an excuse for anything, ever. It might be a reason, but not an excuse, like saying "I'm lazy" to get out of helping your friend move. It explains why you're being a dick, but it doesn't change the fact that you're a dick because you just don't care enough to try to not be a dick. So there you have it; people with Asperger's are lazy dicks.
As you can see, I fit all the categories of Asperger's when I was young. I didn't have Asperger's, though, because it didn't exist. I learned the necessary skills to be normal over time, like most people do, and because I'm normal now, people will contend that I never had Asperger's, I'm just blowing my little quirks out of proportion. That is exactly my point. Asperger's is nothing but a particular set of quirks, and it can be eliminated through practice. Giving it a name does nothing but make people want to use it as an excuse: "it's a permanent disorder, I can't help it!" Yes you can, you're just a lazy dick, and I will treat you as such. I do this not only because you act like a dick, but because you don't care enough about me and other people to try to act normal, so why should I care enough about you to treat you with kid gloves?
I've always lumped Asperger's Syndrome in with ADD and and homosexuality as fake diseases. That is, they are patterns of behavior that are slightly out of the norm, but really not that much so. Most people will agree that homosexuality is not a disease and is in no need of a cure or treatment, religious zealots aside. Not too long ago, though, people thought of it the same way we think of ADD and Asperger's. It was a disease, something wrong with the brain, and it needed to be treated if not cured , and cured if possible. I contend that ADD and Asperger's are the same--behavioral aberrations that the "afflicted" can choose to hide or cope with if they want to be more mainstream, or embrace if they choose to be abnormal.
One of the reasons I consider ADD and Asperger's fake diseases is because they are entirely behaviorally based diagnoses, according to a baseline of normality that is entirely subjective. Quite apart from the possibility of faking the disease to get a diagnosis, they are both simply abnormal levels of normal behavior. Everyone daydreams, finds things boring, and lets their mind wander. People with ADD just do it a lot more. How much more constitutes ADD is an arbitrary level determined (at great length, and with much debate, I'm sure) by a group of people with their own prejudices. In the end, it came down to a committee consensus of how much weirdness was too much, and that's the line for ADD versus "within parameters." The line gets blurred further by the personal opinions of the diagnosing doctors, and as a result, diagnoses of ADD skyrocketed in the late 90s and early 2000s, before settling to a steady but rapid rise in the last few years.
Asperger's is similar, but more so. For one, Asperger's has been inextricably linked with autism since its inception. It started as, and is basically treated like very mild autism. Many autism experts and autistic people think this is crap, and I agree. While the root causes may be the same, Asperger's and autism are in totally different leagues of behavioral abnormality. The fact that autism has its own spectrum of "functionality," from high to low, pretty much eliminates the need for the existence of Asperger's Syndrome. If it is really very mind autism, then call it "very high function autism." If not, it's just a load of crap.
That aside, Asperger's is just like ADD in that it's entirely based on the subject varying from a subjective line of normality by an arbitrary amount according to a single diagnosing doctor's personal opinion. Based on what I've read about Asperger's, in official publications on the subject, as well as personal accounts of people actually diagnosed with it (ignoring the self-diagnosed cases that internet geeks propound), many children, including me, had diagnosable Asperger's, and most, like me, simply grew out of it.
One official publication, which you can read here (it's not the only one, or the best, but it's the only one I can find to link to), gives the following characteristics of Asperger's in kids:
Social communication
Their explanation: You may have problems when talking to other people. You may have been a late talker...It may take you a bit longer to understand what is being said, or you may get confused by certain words or phrases. It can be very hard to tell when someone is joking...especially as so many gestures...can be hard to understand.
Why it's bullshit: All kids have problems with this. Some learn how to understand, then use these things faster than others. We aren't born understanding hyperbole, sarcasm, and irony, these are things we learn over time through social interaction. Like all learned skills, some people will learn them more slowly than others due to lack of talent, lack of interest, and/or lack of experience. That's how human learning works. Even as a master of sarcasm and irony myself, and a critic of hyperbole, I still miss it in others sometimes, especially if I don't know them well or haven't seen them in a while. This is because I don't know or I'm out of practice with interpreting their personal types of vocal and visual cues.
Social understanding
Their explanation: You may have problems with some social relationships. You may not understand all the social rules and may therefore say or do inappropriate things. Sometimes this can be mistaken for rudeness. A good example may be a child who sees a strange looking person in the supermarket and says out loud "You look really weird."
Why it's bullshit: Once again, all kids do this, and most eventually learn how to avoid it. Bill Cosby had a whole show about this very phenomenon. As with the social communication section, and all human skills, some people just aren't going to learn how to deal with this as fast as others because they lack talent, don't care, or don't get enough practice. Embarrassment is a great way to deter a kid from practicing social interaction. As a result, some people say "the darnedest things" well into their teens or adulthood. When they get old, it becomes "being old and not giving a shit," but as a young person, it's Asperger's. We used to just call it being a dick.
Imagination
Their explanation: What interests you may not interest other children. Perhaps you have a certain thing that you are really interested in and, if it was your choice, you would talk about it all the time. You may not be interested in games that involve pretending to be something else, such as cowboys and indians, or cops and robbers. This may be because you find it hard to think about how a cowboy would act, and therefore it is not that much fun for you. Perhaps you would prefer your own company, and would rather play alone than in a group. I think that everybody feels like this sometimes...
Why it's bullshit: Once again, all kids do this, and most eventually learn through experience that obsessing is social poison and tamp it down. When I was a kid, I didn't care about cops and robbers or cowboys and indians, or lots of other normal things. I was obsessed with combat aircraft, especially WWII aircraft, and could talk endlessly about the advantages and disadvantages of the F-4U Corsair, Zero, Messerschmidt 109, Focke-Wulf, Spitfire, P-51 Mustang, etc. For my best friend, it was the same with trains. Another friend had an encyclopedic knowledge of MacGuyver, and specifically which model of Victorinox Swiss Army knife he carried in a given episode. Over time, we learned to tamp down our enthusiasm for these things, and we learned at what point people became uncomfortable hearing about them. We branched out to other subjects--for me it was all military aicraft, not just WWII, then all military equipment, then all military history, then history in general. For my friend with the trains, it became a love of transportation and, by extension, business and economics. He now owns a trucking company. My MacGuyver friend moved away, so I don't know what happened to him.
As for playing alone, the last part of the booklet's explanation is the best, because even the booklet has to admit that "everybody feels like this sometimes." No shit, Sherlock, it's called "me time."
Being clumsy
Their explanation: Perhaps it is slightly harder to run as fast as everyone else, or balance on one leg, or ride a bike.
Why it's bullshit: Once again, these are skills, and they must be learned. A lack of talent causes a kid to get discouraged, leading to a lack of practice, leading to delay. I wasn't athletic, i couldn't to a cartwheel, I didn't learn to ride a bike until I was 12, despite having one since I was 5. I just didn't care enough to practice, and had no real talent for these things.
Disliking change
Their explanation: To some extent everybody likes to be able to guess what the day will be like. You may find it is really quite upsetting when everyday things get disrupted.
Why it's bullshit: NOBODY likes change. Change is scary, especially for kids. We learn to accept that things change and not freak out through social interaction and practice. When we're infants, we get upset when our mommies go away for a minute. As toddlers, we cry when we lose our favorite toy. As kids, we freak out when we change towns, or schools, or even teachers. We deal with it--some better than others--because that's life.
Being fascinated by something
Their explanation: You may have something that you are really fascinated by. I'm sure sometimes that people would be interested to hear all you have to tell them, but sometimes they may be too tired or busy.
Why it's bullshit: See "Imagination" above. This is actually explained there, I don't know why they repeated it.
Speaking in a strange way
Their explanation: Some people may remark that you speak in a strange way. What they mean by this is that you possibly speak in only one tone - a bit like a speaking computer. By carefully listening to the different levels of voice that people use when they talk, you can try to copy.
Why it's bullshit: They say it themselves, "By carefully listening...you can try to copy." It's another skill we learn, and some people don't care to learn it. If they care, they can and will learn it eventually. In middle school I actually learned to eliminate inflection from my voice, and how to avoid showing emotion on my face, because I was weird. In high school, I re-learned how to use inflection and expression, because I was tired of being so weird, and eventually lost the knack for the perfect poker face and monotone I once had. These are skills. Practice improves them, lack of practice is detrimental.
Basically, Asperger's is a delay or stagnation of the development a certain set of skills. The booklet here takes 5 pages to define Asperger's, and spends 15 more explaining how to overcome it. It basically explains how to learn and practice the necessary skills for being normal. It even says that you can basically overcome it, to some degree.
Will I always have Asperger Syndrome?
Yes. The child with Asperger syndrome grows up to be an adult with Asperger syndrome...However, many people by they time they are adults have changed a lot, and they may not have as many problems as when they were younger.
As with all developmental delays, you never completely catch up, but you can fake it to a degree that people can't tell the difference. I'd be willing to bet that there are adults out there who were diagnosed with Asperger's as kids, but can't get diagnosed with it now, because they learned enough necessary skills to fall within normal parameters. In fact, there are, and they write books about it.
At one point, this booklet, distributed by the National Autism Society in the UK, even compares Asperger's to autism, and basically says it's not autism, because it's not crippling.
Is Asperger syndrome the same thing as autism?
The difference between these two things can seem very confusing. They are similar...However, a person with Asperger syndrome is sometimes more able than a person with autism. This means that you can do things for yourself that a person with autism might need help with.
So people with autism actually need help to survive, and people with Asperger's are just weird. Sounds about right. Which is exactly why "I have Asperger's" is not an excuse for anything, ever. It might be a reason, but not an excuse, like saying "I'm lazy" to get out of helping your friend move. It explains why you're being a dick, but it doesn't change the fact that you're a dick because you just don't care enough to try to not be a dick. So there you have it; people with Asperger's are lazy dicks.
As you can see, I fit all the categories of Asperger's when I was young. I didn't have Asperger's, though, because it didn't exist. I learned the necessary skills to be normal over time, like most people do, and because I'm normal now, people will contend that I never had Asperger's, I'm just blowing my little quirks out of proportion. That is exactly my point. Asperger's is nothing but a particular set of quirks, and it can be eliminated through practice. Giving it a name does nothing but make people want to use it as an excuse: "it's a permanent disorder, I can't help it!" Yes you can, you're just a lazy dick, and I will treat you as such. I do this not only because you act like a dick, but because you don't care enough about me and other people to try to act normal, so why should I care enough about you to treat you with kid gloves?