Asperger’s Traits:
Motor Skills: I’m terrible at sports, and generally most physical activities involving other people. My reaction timing is very terrible. However, involving other things like working with tools or lifting, I excel and am significantly stronger than most people.
Insomnia: Many people on the spectrum have trouble sleeping, so we tend to stay up a lot and sleep very little.
Sensitivity to Clothing: I have sensitivity to certain types of clothing, such as undershirts, T-shirts, socks that have loose corners that bunch up, etc. etc. I can’t deal with any of those things.
Infatuation: When something captures my attention enough to make me interested, I have to know every single thing about it. I will study for years on whatever subject, e.g. I know the exact formula to make the type of cast iron that my engine block is made of, and I have studied on radios so much that if I went to the mountains and hand-mined materials I could make an entire AM/FM receiver with a small piece of germanium crystal and some copper, and I could transistorize it if I got some plastic and thin gold foil.
Sensitivity to Light: I cannot stand fluorescent lights, they make me very irritable, or as I like to say; “stabby.” They make my brain shake. LEDs are also annoying, but to a different aspect, they keep me from focusing, moreso than Fluorescents anyway. Because of this my house is filled with incandescents, especially my bedroom which has one of the antique-style Edison bulbs with the big filament. All of the lights on my car are incandescent as well, and I would rather spend $50 on a rare incandescent aftermarket sealed-beam than $5 on an LED (or worse, an HID) that does the same or better. On the other side; I have an attraction to incandescent lights, especially the ones in vacuum, because of their color, but also because of nostalgia. I also have a more-than-usual attraction to any kind of incandescent or flame lamp that sits behind a globe of colored glass, such as cobalt glass or lead red glass lenses. I also have an unusual attraction to the color and light of flame, which is one reason the lights on my porch run from kerosene.
Sensitivity to Noise: I can be sensitive to certain frequencies of sound, and they can make me irritated and slightly more violent. But with sound I have it under control enough that nobody can tell, sometimes not even me.
Sensitivity to Touch: I am usually not uncomfortable with people hugging me or somesuch, but people touching my face is very irritating, especially if they pat on it. I am also very thermally sensitive when touched, especially to cold. And when I am touched and it is unwelcome, a little of my under-control social anxiety comes back, and I become a little irritated and a bit frightened. If I am touched purposely to annoy me, I become very irritated, and having water flicked on me makes me angry.
Social Anxiety: I am usually not socially anxious, but when verbally confronted by someone who is overtaking and trying to be mean and threatening, it shows up real fast and real hard.
Food: I am not very sensitive to eating, unless it’s lettuce. God I hate lettuce, the taste is so overtaking and the consistency is so terrible that I could find the tiniest of shreds of it in almost anything. Chocolate is similar, the flavor is simply overpowering. But I continue to buy chocolate on occasion, forgetting that it does this.
Difficulty with Relationships: This is a very terrible subject for me, and I don’t really want to write about it here. Lets just say I can’t, and it hurts. Bad. Loneliness is one of the major causes of depression and pain here. It happens because of a combination of almost definite social rejection and extreme social anxiety when regarding this specific topic.
Difficulty obtaining and holding jobs: I have never gone out to the job store and was able to pick out any of the hundreds of jobs I would be extremely proficient in. This is also because of social rejection. 80% of us are unemployed, and even if Jesus himself sold his soul to the devil so you could have a chance getting a job, good luck keeping it.
Tics and/or fumbling: Biting nails, wiping eyes at strange intervals, fumbling with hands, tics in the eyes, sitting weird, foot tapping, etc, etc., are caused by social anxiety and/or are a means of sensory control. Just because I do this may not mean I’m nervous, but at other times it could.
Avoiding People: I avoid asking people for things or talking with them, and instead I try to get a close friend to do it for me. It’s not because I’m trying to throw them under the bus or have them do all the work, it’s because at a young age we are punished for not having correct social skills and therefore learn to avoid people as much as possible. Punishing your aspie child for this is a good way to make him even more antisocial and socially anxious, and it happened to me until I put my testicle helmet on and gave my parents artificially-fabricated, seemingly innocent, passive-agressively horrible responses when they did this and it caused them to stop.
Rudeness: I have no natural filter to sugarcoat my statements with sweet candy bits and fairy dust and the sugars and spices and all the other horse shit that little girls are supposed to be made of, so I have learned that filtering can be good in certain situations. But it makes me uncomfortable, and through a rougher childhood than most aspies I have come to decide that fact must be stated cleanly and clearly, and if someone gets offended I explain to them that I was merely stating an observation and had no intention to offend. I then explain why it is completely moronic in every single way to get angry about it, yet in ~ironically~ my best attempt at sugar-coating my words. From there it is their decision to make if they want to be friends with me or not, which is OK because I have no desire to be friends with people who get offended at every little truth anyway. This is how I make friends, which is not actually too common among aspies, but it works for me. I have five friends.
Art: Pretty common among aspies, with me it’s not scenery or somesuch. With me it’s schematics, done with dip pen, 1910-style.
Reading/Writing Above Average: I have very neat and impressive handwriting, and when I was in first grade I used to read dictionary words to the high schoolers and define the words to them. I had a ninth-grade level in English.
High IQ: Very common among the spectrum.
Apparent Disorganization: A lot of people on the spectrum are very organized, and there are two ways of doing it: First; is lining everything up nicely and neatly and prettily, and second; scattering everything about but yet knowing where everything is at because you can’t find anything you own when it’s all organized pretty. Both of those things are very organized, and lots of eccentric people live one of those two ways.
Odd Ways of Standing and Walking: When I walk, people say I walk funny. I have to step on cracks evenly with both feet, and will stay there and compensate over and over until I get them even. I also align myself with straight edges and corners, and when I am on a wood floor or something similar I will step over the planks that table and chair legs are aligned with or stand on. When I run, people say I gallop like a deer. When I stand straight up, my two feet are either perfectly aligned with each other or crossed.
Meltdowns: My meltdowns are uncommon, and do not involve confusion. They are very mild and I function normally, but when they happen I lose the ability to talk altogether or start talking in gibberish. You probably couldn’t even describe it as a meltdown considering all that happens, but it is caused by the same triggers. Most of my life nobody would even notice, as I would stay in my room pretty much all the time and when this started I would just go there and work on whatever it was I was working on until it stopped.
Atheism: Because many of the people on the spectrum have a high IQ, we usually tend to not believe in god.
”I Deny Your Reality and Substitute it with my Own:” This line from Ghostbusters really resonates with me, as I do it quite often and many people on the spectrum do it. I spend the majority of my time in my imagination.
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