Aspies For Freedom

Batman, it's a heterogeneous group of people here, coming from many different perspectives.  In my opinion, that is a good thing.  I learn from people.

Ian for dummiez:

Idea+???=profit!

I love reading the long more philosophical type posts. They add a richness to this forum.

Often I have to read the longer posts two or three times to fully understand the meaning and message in these types of posts. I find them soothing.

I've always thought that long victorian-esque words were useless. If no one can understand what your saying it's like saying nothing. For the same reason long posts defeat there purpose; you communicate less because few people would bother to read it.

Yes, but if post your ideas gradually between two or three posts, the concepts are more clear, and the discussion becomes much more interesting.

yes - I notice not many people respond to the longer posts - which disappoints me - cause I can see the longer posts could generate some really interesting conversations.

Maybe your idea of posting ideas more gradually is a good one. My posts are usually short - but that's cause my ideas come in short bursts. People are different, some people become very involved in their topic when talking about things that are of special interest to them.

Batman--people are sharing their perceptions based on what they see as true.  It's arrogant and ungraceful for you to discount them because they don't cohere with your self-assessment. And yeah, sure, perhaps some people are motivated by sympathy or a desire to be encouraging and supportive to you.

Regarding confidence, my opinion is that it's a combination of skill and attitude.  The attitude part is shown by an "I can" approach rather than by an "I can't" approach.  My observation of you, based on your presence here, is that most of your life is lived from the perspective of "I can't."  How true this is, I don't know.  It's a question you'd need to ask yourself, for each instance or habit of saying "I can't."  Is it really true that you CAN'T?  Or is it more true that you "DON'T WANT TO"?

As for skill, I believe that everyone has some set of things that they're naturally good at.  And practice/refinement makes people better at those things by developing their talent.  Granted, many skills and talents may be pretty useless for practical life, but they are skills and talents, nonetheless, and they form the basis for developing confidence.  If you've done it, then it follows that you CAN do it.  (Short of having a stroke or something like that which takes abilities away.)

It's pretty common to have skills without confidence.  (I'm a master of this, actually--I seem to forget that I've been successful, so I question myself in almost every instance of something new.  Can I do this?)  It's also possible and fairly common for people to have confidence without skill. They'll go through various crash-and-burns but may eventually develop the skills to match the confidence.

I'm imagining, Batman, that if you've gotten this far through my post, you might be thinking that you have neither confidence nor skill. So what do you do then?

My answer--forge ahead anyway and realize that life entails risk. Start doing what you're interested in.  And yeah, your efforts might often fail.  So what?  Failure is not the worst thing that can happen to a person.  Having  an unlived life is worse.

Note: I believe that you do have skills, Batman.  The fact that you can post here as much as you do, and that your posts have properly spelled words and gramatically correct sentences, shows that you've mastered the English language.  That is a skill many would aspire to have.  I'm guessing that you have other skills that you have taken for granted.

A long post--so it goes.

The truely intelligent never bang on and on about how smart they are.

Make what you wish of that, Batman.

Logical Conclusions thick as pigshit in my opinion.

Big, Brash, Bullshit.

Oh but I thought you were keeping yourself for me?

I would have probably dropped out of school without support services and tutoring. And I tend to do quite well on standardized tests and in grades for my subjects. But activities of certain volume and/or complexity I just need extra help on, and really need to be taken through it. Especially instructions. Long sets of instructions are endlessly confusing to me. (One reason it took so long to learn long divsion - but now I've forgotten it.)

Long posts I am okay with, as long as the individual paragraphs are short (3-5 lines). Unfortunately, when I write a lot of times I write in larger chunks of text, but once I realized I was doing this, I started breaking it up more (I thought it a bit odd that I was writing stuff that I wouldn't be able to read on the forum in that format). I am still guilty sometimes though.

As far as words, and using big, over-complicated words, I think I'll always do this to a degree. When I was younger, I would often speak using words that even I didn't understand. In fact, the whole way that I learned to construct sentences was by copying from texts that I didn't understand. Eventually I came to understand most of it. Sometimes I still use words I don't understand though.

I like the idea of asking posters to clarify/summarize things. Especially since I know that, most of the time that I'm being incomprehensible, I'm not specifically aware of it.

I couldn't understand a bit of the Island thread, either. And I wonder also what threads might go under the heading of "philosophical"?

The whole reason I lurked here for a couple of years before joining, then before posting much, was because I felt I couldn't add anything new or useful. For some reason, after long enough lurking, something clicked and I could start posting on some threads. I guess it's because I'm not much for initiating a question or a comment. I for one liked the idea as a kid of "speak only once you've been spoken to".

Although I am quite interested in politics and psychology/behavioural sciences/sociology, anything too philosophical or technical tends to get a bit much for me. It just seems too wordy and involved.

Zakkie, I think it is possible to be reliably officially diagnosed - if the doctor/psychologist/psychiatrist uses the criteria in the DSM IV. It's just a matter of finding somebody willing to take the time to assess you and unfortunately in a lot of places, a large amount of money.

Batman, I used to think you might be an enneagram type 6 but now I'm wondering if you might be a type 4.
http://www.eclecticenergies.com/enneagram/type4.php
http://www.lessons4living.com/enneagram4.htm