Aspies For Freedom

Is this supposed to be something we don't already know?  Thanks for the advice, but it's a lot more complicated than you seem to think it is.

I can't decide if this is an unusually cheerful troll or an extremely naive person.

Dorj,
We can't just "stop being weird".  It's just not possible.  Our brains ar wired differently.  Asperger's is not a choice, it is something you are born with.

"I can't decide if this is an unusually cheerful troll or an extremely naive person."

The truth may lie in the middle.

Hmm... Well, let me put it this way. Let's say I had magical powers, and suddenly turned you into a wolf, and stuck you out in the wilds, and expected you to get into a wolf pack and survive there. Could you do it? What if I insisted on keeping your human brain, and didn't give you a wolf brain?

Well, first you'd be confused. You wouldn't know what the wolves were saying to each other with all their body language; because you wouldn't even see it as body language--just random wolves walking around. You wouldn't know to watch the ears and the way they held their tails and the way their backs arched and the way their whiskers and fur lie. And even if you knew it had something to do with those things, you'd be slow on picking it up.

If you were really unlucky, you might think they were just big dogs, and expect to be able to pet them. Well, guess what it means if you're a wolf, and you try to put a paw on another wolf's back? Yep. It starts a fight. The wolf sees it in a really aggressive way. Oh, and eye contact? Yep. Aggressive too. So is holding your tail too high, looking at the wrong wolf, sitting in the wrong place, holding your ears and body in the wrong way.

So, I turn you into a wolf and stick you into a wolf pack... and suddenly, you're "weird". What's more, your brain isn't wired to understand wolf-talk nearly as well as the average wolf, no matter how hard you try. Even if you begin to understand basic signals, you don't process them as quickly. All you can do, if you're lucky, is project submission and hope nobody bites you. Chances are, they'll bite you anyway, just because you're submissive and they're angry.

That's how out of place an Aspie is. We're the humans in the wolf pack, the people who don't get the signals. We can learn the signals, yeah; but we'll never be able to get them quite right. We'll always seem "weird", rub people the wrong way, be clueless about all the little complexities of human culture. It's like being permanently a part of another culture, maybe even a different subspecies of human. Culture is very complex; and our brains are built to deal with facts, ideas, and objects--not people.

We'll always be "weird". But one day, maybe, people will think that "weird" is OK, too. After all, if you're supposed to be a human, you'll be happier not trying to pretend to be a wolf.

Many of us diserve some personal pride while our societies negatively "define" us. We havn't given sociality "a little bit of attention", we give it tremendous attention and often suffer emotionaly from that self force. We think very hard about what we say to the point that some of us can loose emotional control for a few moments or avoid dealing the situation. Many of us live in fear of being, once again, told in some way how we aren't what someone else wanted.

Are the things that you "just can't seem to do" feel good and ABC if there was always someone telling you all the time how you can't do it? I think the posts prior to mine have given nice examples, so I don't need to add my own here. I for one have to force myself to deal with other people over and over again, knowing full well that somehow it will never be enough for them and that more insults and nagative definitions follow it.

Being blind can be a really hard way to live, but a little attention shift to being able to see can make your life as easy as ABC

I'll go for the "extremely naive" catagory.

Obvious troll, but a slightly amusing one.

they dont seem trollish to me.

Hmm, a troll trying to be nice. Interesting.

Also, on the subject of weirdness, there is no such thing as a person who is not weird. For example, you are a very weird troll. Unlike most trolls, you sound nice. You simply cannot avoid being weird, so why not embrace your weirdness?

Dont be rude please, dogbrain.i value your in sight but please be civil at least.

hmf! Yeah, like I decided to have other people treat me like I'm super stupid or alien regardless of how I break my back for them in the past.....not. What would you say to a blind person? You can't tell them to just focus on their eyes and they will see. It doesn't happen like that. Why think that we just magicaly turn into barbie doll copies! Yuck, I would rather cut my arm off than loose myself thanks.

inquiry: who is this 'we' that you speak of.if you mean others with AS then you are incorrect in this statement, we commonly cant read body lanuage or misquote it.

Why? He's right, based on what this guy said, this guy is very ignorant of neuroscience, that's not being rude, that's pointing out an obvious fact based on an observation.

Weather or not dorj truly is as ignorant as he seems may be up for debate, but based on what I've seen him say so far, he's either ignorant, or looking to get a rise out of us, which would just make him an a**hole.

I remember that some students from a suppressed people in Italy or something. They didn't consider themselves Italian. A sami guy had a lecture about sami minority culture in Norway for those students. The students were suprised that the sami guy considered himself Norwegian. Maybe that is because sami people usually aint suppressed now as they were before.