Aspies For Freedom

Some people might agree or not, I don't care if they do. What I wish some people would know.

1on't say 'Hello' if you are only makeing yourself do it, or just passing by. It is used to introduce one's self, not say at the drop of a hat for no reason. Thus, please don't get angry, NTs, if we don't say "Hi' because we need a reason to do so.

2:Lack of verbal display does not equal stupidity, and certainly not laziness! An aspie's/autie's brain, I think, works at least six times harder than the mouth alone. Can any NTs think at their very hardest and not get a headake? Well, we do it on a moment to moment basis. That is, if we aren't zoning out to relax.

3:Telling us to calm down or stop crying or ask us what's wrong, when you know it's an uncontrolable meltdown, only makes it harder to impossible to cope with it. If it helps you that way great, but we think hard enough to socialise a word correctly for you, so throwing a need for perfect speach into the mix doesn't help. Thanks for careing, by the way.

4:If someone really offends you when they call you stupid or inferior, why call us broken and inferior?

5:Everyone has a trial in life. Whether they are wealthy or poor. Sick or healthy. So on and so on. Life takes wisdom and knowldge. Changing someone else just to make yourself feel better isn't one of those. Are you trying it to feel better for yourself?

6:All that could be going on in our face and voice tone, is really more going on in our brains. example: Can you jump on one foot, use a hoolihoop, pat your own head, and say Peter piper five times fast, all at the same time and make it perfect? Hey, people are watching! Lol

Good one. I sure hate it when someone pities me as if I was pathetic and hopeless. I had that before.

8: Don't compare who we are to health risks and actual diseases like cancer and AIDs! How would you feel being called a sick disease that kills people? Please, please don't act tocix toward your children that way either.

9: Don't tell me to just calm down and suddenly smile. Understanding our feelings would be a wiser choice.

10: Don't nag us along or rush our thoughts, or feelings for that matter. It's very rude, would you like that?

11: If you don't like something we said, or that we keep repeateding, please tell us patiently and don't leave us in the dark about it.

*toxic, *repeating

Dang my spelling...

Don't worry Batman - I was good at churning out good grades, too, but it didn't actually count for much once I was out in the real world.  It's sheer ***-mindedness that's got me through since I left uni.

**NOTE: the below is NOT aimed at anyone on this forum.  It sounds a lot angrier than I intended and I can't figure out how to word it any better.  It's not anyone here who's made me angry, it's my life and all the ruddy nonsense going on in it right now.  Please do not be offended.  Ta**

What I'd like NTs to know is actually the same thing certain elements of the Aspie movement need to get their head around: no one (individual or group) is better or worse than any other.  Aspies are not better or worse in any way because we're Aspies.

Carrying on like every Aspie is a potential Einstein is no different from treating Aspies as "Indigo children" or for that matter saying autistics have no emotions - all those things are just ways of forcing people into some stereotype regardless of how poorly it fits.  Saying Aspies are intrinsically superior because of this 'genius' myth is monumentally unfair to the millions of Aspies who will never achieve any sort of greatness.  Does that mean they're less worthy somehow?

Ballocks it does.  Because no one's worth any more or any less than anyone else.

I'm sorry, this is a button-pushing issue for me - it makes me really angry when people expect things from me which I cannot deliver.   See, I am NOT your genius.  I am NOT your next step in evolution.  I am NOT your indigo child.  I am NOT any of your myths or stereotypes.  I'm just me, and I'm ordinary.  Maybe not normal, but ordinary.

Better than?  Worth judged by intelligence? Segregation?

I give up.

To clarify further: what I have given up on (or will after this post) is trying to reason with Aspies with this "master race" mentality.

1.  Not all Aspies are particularly smart.  To say Aspies are special because of their high intelligence is to say that any Aspie WITHOUT high intelligence is a failure.
2.  Some Aspies are smart in ways that can't be measured, or are no practical use - yeah, so I can recite every Dangermouse episode in order of original transmission.  Big deal.  
3.  Aspies who bleat about discrimination on the basis of neurotype, and then turn around and say all NT people are stupid/shallow/inferior, are hypocrites.

To have an "enclave"  for smart kids only is to say that children of average or lower intelligence don't deserve to be protected from bullying, and that bullying is OK if the perpetrator is highly intelligent, or an Aspie.  It also increases the us/them divide which is in my experience the source of a lot of bullying in the first place.  And it's defeatist - we can't stop bullying, so let's just make a place for the victims to run away to and hide.

Exactly.  Excellent suggestion.  And that includes realising that

Does not apply to all of us.

And let those who don't have higher intelligence be free to express their ideas without someone telling them they're not as important.

OK Lucie, I'll explain what I think's going on.  If I have misunderstood, I apologise.

A few posters in this thread have said that Aspies are better than/superior to neurotypical people, and the most common "reason" cuited is that because the former are more intelligent.

I do not agree with this hypothesis, for two reasons.  1.  Not all Aspies are particularly intelligent, and 2. I do not believe intelligence is a measure of a person's worth.  

However, shortly after I said this, a post appeared saying:

I take this to mean that I should shut up and allow the Aspie Supremacists to spout their nonsense without challenge or question.

While we're arguing semantics and avoiding the real issue, which is this brewing notion of Aspie Supremacy, please note nowhere in this thread have I used the word "crap", to describe anyone's ideas or for any other reason.

Sorry Zakkie (and everyone else too!) - I was still on page seven when I posted #112, and I didn't realise there was another page to go, and the discussion had moved on somewhat!

This thread's been great.  Really, really valuable.  And no, I'm not being sarcastic, I mean it.  It's gone from being "what do Aspies as a group want to tell NTs as a group" to "what Aspies agree on as a group anyway" - and we've found some pretty big rifts.  That's important, because we have to have these discussions and arguments between ourselves to sort out what we DO stand for, before we march out en masse, banners aloft and heads high, campaigning for, um... whatever it is we agree eventually we're campaigning for.

Last time I checked, the diagnostic criteria didn't mention mathematics.  I wouldn't go around deciding what is and isn't a core Aspergian concept on the basis of a ten year old article from a computer magazine, when there's living breathing Aspies telling you it's bunk.

So what's WIRED magazine when it's at home, anyway?

Doctor Who Magazine once ran a thing on Aspergers, on the basis that a lot of obsessive-fan types have Aspie tendenciese.  But that doesn't mean you have to be a Who fan to be Aspie, any more than you have to be a computer programmer to be Aspie.  So can we just drop the *** stereotypes, please?  

I'm perfectly confident that we could go through this forum and pick ten random Aspie members, and find the percentage of computer programmers, maths nerds and males is much lower than some random magazine article would lead you to believe.

I volunteer to be Random Person 1: female, offical DX, NOT a programmer, NOT a maths nerd.

Most stereotypes are like that, aren't they?  

The point I've been trying to make is that Aspies' skills are scattered hell, west and crooked.  Saying 90% of us are maths whizzes or computer geeks is no more accurate than saying 90% or us are cat lovers, anime fans, klingon-speakers or trainspotters.  Any one of those categories accounts for some Aspies, but nothing accounts for us all.  

Not even if it said so in a magazine.

I'll take it a step further - I suggest that 10% of mathematically brilliant Aspies are also the most likely to get diagnosed, because they fit the stereotype.  It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

If you go by the actual DSM, I've got Aspergers in spades.  But if you go by stereotype - male, maths whizz, computer geek, into Thomas the Tank Engine as a kid and online gaming as an adult - I don't fit at all.  I reckon that's why I managed to wander around the mental health system for a decade before finally getting DXed... by an Aspie psychologist who agrees the maths whizz stereotype is bunk.