I'm BAAAACK bitches!!!

 

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher.

After all, aren’t blogs pretty much all vanity?

Why would I think anyone out there wants to hear what I have to say?  Or is it more important to me just to say it, whether anyone ever listens or not?  I guess the latter, since I am restarting this blog after many years absence.  I’m  AspieDave, and I am autistic. I don’t care about your theories on autism, or whether you think I should just do a bleach enema.  If that’s what I have to do to be “normal” then normal can just sod right off. As far as I’m concerned, I AM normal, for me, and people like me.  Yes, I have a hard time reading other people’s reactions.  I’m better at it than I used to be, but that’s kind of like saying someone can sort of play “Lady of Spain” on an accordion, when before all they could manage was a wheezing cacophony.  I can, or could anyway (more on that later), think faster than most people.  I have a higher percentage ratio of white matter to gray matter in my brain than most people.  It’s not a great analogy, but think of the white matter as the wiring in the network.  More connections, faster speed. 

Being autistic isn’t easy.  But then, being “normal” isn’t either from what I’ve seen.  I have normal friends and autistic friends.  And yes, we can make friends.  We can have relationships, we can do anything any other human can do except sometimes we can’t read your body language and figure out what you’re thinking.  Instead we tend to run our brains into overdrive thinking about what you MIGHT be thinking.  Usually, we go dark and think you disapprove of us, what we’re saying, how we’re dressed, and on and on and on.  We learned to do that the hard way, most of us, as three and four year olds on the playground.  Anxiety is common among us as are other “co-morbid” disorders, like Tourette’s and OCD.  People with autism tend to love “the rules”.  Not because we’re destined to be cops, but because when there are rules and everyone follows them we know what to expect.  I think partially because of that focus, many of us end up being scientists, engineers, and lawyers. A lot of the rest end up in the creative arts.  Creative expression can be a wonderful outlet for us. Acting, the process of creating a character, and putting that persona on is also something we can do very well.  Instead of being ourselves, we become the character, and since we are now someone else, we can open up in a way that is normally very difficult to us.  Comedy, especially dark comedy, can be a forte. 

Since “Rain Man” people like to picture us that way.  I loved Dustin Hoffman’s performance as a savant, but there are far more autistics out there than most people realize and we don’t all act like he did.  Pick a hundred autistics as a study group and you may find a hundred different behavior patterns and levels of gift, or impairment. 

I intend to talk about all of that, in my own time.  About books, movies, tv shows, politics, science and anything else that occurs to me because I am AspieDave, and I am the Aspie at Pooh Corner. anity f