Aspies For Freedom

I really tried not to take offense to the last post, but yours is not acceptable.  There are plenty of NT people that contribute on this board, and to lump us all into one category is no better than me trying to "cure" you.  

I don't expect them to understand me... I don't understand them.

Janine - I'm not sure if you're the same Janine I invited here but if you are, don't be shy - they aren't   

I overanalyse stuff, and may II does that too.  She's Ok though.  

You know, it is not NT bashing to say they can be exasperating sometimes. People in general can be exasperating. Aspies too. (For example, if I hear one more "we should help low-functioning people become Aspies" I think I am going to scream!)

You don't believe people can move along the spectrum?

Appropriate services & therapy can be offered for particular issues - but I don't think that "moving along the spectrum" should be the goal. After all, the differing diagnoses are pretty arbitrary.

Besides which, the varying diagnoses are currently based in childhood behavior (i.e. speech delays, developmental delays, etc). Without time travel, you can't change an autism diagnosis into an aspergers diagnosis. Luckily it's a pointless distinction anyway.

I want to scream at anyone who puts me in a box. At anyone who claims he/she has figured me out completely. At anyone who acts accordingly.

I don't want a fixed label. I roam around in this world. i roam around the spectrum too. Not fixed.

Amazing myself.

I need that freedom to even amaze myself.

I want to scream at anyone who want's to take that freedom of amazement from me.

AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRCCCCCCCHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Roaming about I do get lost once in a while.

I want to scream then too.

I actually screamed once at my NT ex-gf "I... am... NOT... NORMAL!" after a dispute in which she constantly tried to make a point like 'How can you say/do/not do this-and-that... that is not normal!'...

The scream was kinda THIS - IS - SPARTAish. It was one year after we found out about me being autistic.

You don't need to be Aspie/Autie to be bullied, isolated, or depressed.

School is not a nice place for anyone unless you're willing to drop your moral standards and become a two faced socialite in order to gain popularity. All of my friends in school were neurotypical; some of them were also bullied.

I feel isolated and depressed right now but my Aspergers is not a contributing factor to that. Conversely, I don't want to scream at a man because he doesn't understand how awful my period is. I don't want to scream at a leggy size 12 blonde because my insecurity makes me feel inferior to her. I don't scream at the mental health teams who have to deal with me now because no-one detected I was AS/ADHD and being emotionally abused at home as a kid.

Conversely, I don't understand what a NT goes through and I don't believe that gives them the right to scream at me. Are we talking any ole NT that we can pop shots at, or are we specifically honing in on a NT in particular? Because most of the NTs in my life are pretty sound - they piss me off at times, but I'm not looking at their brain scan at the time. Last time I checked, it was miscommunication. NTs get it too, you know. With each other. Who'd have thought...

Anyway, are we having this Deathmatch yet or what, so we can have this over and done with? The "big bad NTs don't get me" argument is soooooooooooo 1992 *flicks hair and checks fingernails*

Korrigan, it seems to me like you're going through a process the same as other AS people here are going through a process.  You know (and they know) that everyone should be accepting of each others differences here, which means accepting your NT differences as much as you accept ours.  Then you get mad when you see instances of this happening and you vent, and then AS people vent but when we vent there's often much more venom involved.  There are reasons for that, but the thing is - we cannot achieve a utopian community overnight, we need to work towards it in little steps and that means allowing people to vent but them leading them back to more acceptance again.  Many young AS people have been militarised and radicalised by the Mercury parents and this slops over into negative feelings about the whole of NT society.  However - I would rather they expressed thier frustration in an appropiate way that other members can deal with and help them work towards greater acceptance, than for them to keep quiet and be rejected from the community that acts as a safety net for them so they don't spiral off into depression by feeling rejected.

Right now, you're feeling rejected too, and people are trying to be a safety net for you too Korrigan.  We love you here honey.  You're one of the nicest people on this board.  Please don't take things too much to heart.

So true. It's like I wrote before, that if you say something like "It's not that I dislike all X people, just the X people who do Y" then that demeans the group. I've had many frustrating experiences with other people, many of them NT, some of them autistic. But the NT person who is rude and treats me like I'm defective doesn't mean that the fact that they are NT is causing this. It is because of individual's personality and society.

In other words, it makes as much sense as saying, "Well, I've talked to autistic people who were belligerent and refused to look at another side of the argument, gah, I hate how autistic people do that." Are there a number of autistic people like this. Sure. Does that mean that they're like that because they're autistic. Nope.

This isn't trying to discourage venting; indeed, I vent quite often through this forum and my blog about frustrating interactions with people. Often it has been because they have disregarded what they know about me (such as I don't like to be touched, have difficulty talking at time, or think that since they have an autistic kid they can tell when I'm just plain misbehaving rather than in meltdown), and usually they have been NT (duh, NT is the majority, and all the people with power over me at the school were NT, so yeah).

It would've been erroneous for me to conclude that their being NT had anything to do with their rude treatment of me. The fact that they're NT and I'm not has a lot to do with miscommunications and other misunderstandings (this happens all the time with my NT mother, for instance), but there is a difference between a miscommunication and the refusal to try to understand another's perspective.

You may not always get it right, but just attempting and letting the other person know this goes a long way to being cordial, and this goes doubly for AS/NT interactions, and this extra effort has to come from both sides. If you go into a foreign country, of course you should try your best to understand their customs, but they should also cut you some slack when you make a faux pas and try to explain kindly to you why what you did would seem rude to them.

So technically, I have wanted to scream at people who happen to be NT, just like I've wanted to scream at people who happen to be autistic. Maybe you haven't felt the desire to scream at an autistic person yet because in general you encounter a lot more NTs than autistics. But trust me - if you hang around autistic forums long enough, oh, you will.

I suppose saying "normal is boring - none of us is normal anyway" wouldn't have cut it.

To be honest... No, *I* don't ever feel like *you* want to scream at an NT.
But then again how could I? I don't even know you.

Starting a thread with a provocative/hostile headline and not returning to the thread looks like trolling, as if the poster is just sitting back enjoying the problems they have stirred up.