Tag Archives: aspergers

ASD Behaviours and Traits

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Warning: Very long post!

Once again, I seem to be writing something other than I meant to because of a response I started writing to one of The Third Glance‘s posts. This one is on my own ASD behaviours as a child and teen – what I know of them, at least. I have vague memories of my childhood, somewhat better ones of my adolescence, but most of what I remember is generic things that repeated, and specific events that stood out in my memory for some reason or another (some good, some bad). I may easily miss some – I’m still learning what is “normal” for ASD and what might have been something else, but these are the ones that my mother and I remember (or I experienced). Not in any particular order, except that of how they occurred to me while writing. Read on for the details

Making Decisions and Prioritization

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(Before I get into the details of the post, if you haven’t read it already – or if you read it before Jan. 09/13 – I would greatly appreciate you reading all the way through my First Post. Then feel free to come back. Thank you.)

Originally, this post was going to be about my diagnosis, and how it felt to finally have that official medical validation that said, “Yes, I have Asperger’s. Yes, I am on the autistic spectrum.”

But then I read The Third Glance’s article about how she survived jury duty, and in my response, I found myself explaining about why I wouldn’t make a good candidate for jury duty. I don’t have as much trouble processing audial/verbal input as she does, though I know I’d end up exhausted at the end of each day. No, my reason was both much more and much less complex, in some ways.

I can’t make decisions. Continue on to find out what I mean…

First Post

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Okay, this is my first post on this blog, although I’ve been using LiveJournal for a while now. But rather than the general stuff and fiction of my LJ blog (now at tag’s Haven), this is going to concentrate on my life; the difficulties and achievements I have in this life.

I was inspired by two blogs on WordPress to get this done, and a third confirmed that I was doing the right thing. Flappiness and The Third Glance were the ones that inspired me, and Aspects of Aspergers essentially told me I was doing the right thing, just by reading through their blogs.

So, a bit about me.

Currently I work as an intern with the Independent Living Resource Centre, which is a cross-disability organization that aims to help people with disabilities live fulfilling, independent lives.

Independent Living is as follows:

Independent Living is about having choices, making decisions, taking risks, and taking responsibility. Independent Living is about having control over one’s own life.

“Independent Living is not measured by the quality of tasks we can perform without support, but by the quality of life we can have with support.”

–from the ILRC Website

The other things you need to know about me is that I write SF and Fantasy, both fanfiction and original, and I hope to get published sometime within the next ten years at most; and that I love cats, especially the one who happens to be my avatar, Imber.

[edit Jan. 08/13]

Before you finish reading this post, I’d like to make a note about my life, and I want everyone who reads this blog to take it seriously, please. My parents made some mistakes with me as I was growing up. But every parent does that. And mine didn’t have the advantage that many parents have today of knowing that I was autistic (let’s not get into issues of denial and problems accessing services, okay?). I had an advanced vocabulary from the time I could talk, which was at an about average time, and never showed any indications of problems before I entered kindergarten. Back then, that was too late to be considered an ASD. They didn’t even find and acknowledge Hans Asperger’s papers on AS until three years before I graduated high school, and it wasn’t an official diagnosis until the year I graduated. So my parents did the best they could with what info they had. And they went to bat for me with school officials, which wasn’t easy. And now I’m living with them, while we’re all trying to deal with the fact that I have definite, measurable issues with independent living, as proved by the 9 years I spent on my own, and I haven’t been able to get an OT – see my next post, coming soon – and the local Autism Society is being no help at all.

So. My parents are in a very frustrating situation, and are still doing the very best they can to help me. If I make any comments about things that they’ve done, or not done, throughout my life… it is not their fault. They didn’t have the resources we have today, nor did they have the resources we are developing here and now, on my blog and others, with adult autistics being able to tell people what it was like for them growing up. Please take that into consideration before you make any comments on my parents’ behaviour that might be mentioned in here.

[end edit]

Thanks for reading. See you all later!

😉 tagAught