An atom. Riiiiiiight. Image by Halfdan
About a quarter of the way through eleventh grade, my Chemistry teacher called home with concerns. I was performing below my potential. I was despondent in class. I was off in another world.
“Are you on drugs?” asked my parents. “Broken-hearted? Knocked up?”
“I don’t believe in atoms,” I said.
We should have known then that something about me was a little off.
Memories like this one and others are flitting through my brain lately, and they’re looking a lot different than they did the first time around. I think I’m officially in the Validation phase of accepting my Aspie diagnosis. According to Rudy Simone, that means I’m looking back on my whole life and am re-framing it. It probably shocks you to know that I’m doing that obsessively.
Some of these memories crack me up for their weirdness alone. Others for the blatant Aspieness that didn’t raise flags in the ‘80’s but wouldn’t go unnoticed for a second today. Here are a few of my favorites:
- I dropped out of Brownies after my initiation ceremony because I couldn’t get over the absurdity of having to study my face in a mirror on the floor and pretend it was a pond.
- I dove under the table and screamed every time someone ordered flaming cheese in Greek Town.
- I stayed up until 4:00 AM once in fifth grade because I simply HAD to figure out the pattern of squared numbers. I solved it and promptly fell asleep. Answer: (n+1)2 – n2 = 2n+1
- I agonized (read: sobbed, barfed, had nightmares) for days in second grade because I lost a library book.
- I could recite every line in Miracle on 34th Street (including the part when Santa sings in Dutch), but could not remember to comb my hair. Ever.
- I read Ramona Quimby, Age 8 at least 487 times.
- When asked in first grade: “If you were mayor, would you allow radio stations to play tunes that transform your citizens into exotic creatures?” I replied, “Those songs don’t exist.”
I know not all of you out there reading are Aspie, but for those of you that are, please share some of your painfully obvious but overlooked childhood Aspieness in the comments below!
I may not be Aspie but living with an Autie (not that’s not a typo for Auntie)…I absolutely LOVE your sense of humour and how you can laugh at yourself. You are laughing at yourself right?!?!?
I am! Though there are things I find very unfunny about Asperger’s (crappy health, for instance), a lot of it really cracks me up. It’s just so darned goofy! Thanks for the comment
• First of all I love this post, why? It’s in list form with bullet points and it’s short. LOL
• I didn’t do the book thing… reason, dyslexic and they wouldn’t let me read about dragons. Therefore reading was unimportant because all I ever thought about, talked about and wanted was my own dragon. Or multi-headed monster would have been ok too!
• School…one big nightmare, at least I invented my own fake vomit with added parmesan cheese for that lovely smell. This got out of most days where I was expected to read out loud to a WHOLE class. REALLY… you should have heard them laugh!
• There was a reason for me sitting and swirling ball bearings around on a circular tray, oooo shiny! It was wonderful having a Grandad that worked in the car trade and got them for me by the bag full. I could even line them up in various sizes, and grades of shininess.
• Oh yep, memorising the whole Rubix cube solution book and being the fastest in the school gave me the biggest joy of my whole school career. Yes I did stay up all night writing down all the sequences and moves. Also timing each move for each stage. WD-40 is a godsend.
• The only reason for going to the arcade is to play video games! To become the best at video games! Keep your high score and never share your gamer knowledge. The idea of talking to people while there is ridiculous, there are far more important things to do.
• There is nothing wrong with keeping a brown winter coat on with your furry hood up for the whole of summer 1983 because it helps you feel invisible when you have a bad haircut. It also hides that you are going through body changes that are slightly freaking you out.
• AND…One more, it is totally fine to wear rainbow roller disco boots EVERYWHERE. This includes going up and down stairs, going to the toilet, around the supermarket and getting on a bus. If you don’t let me wear them, I’m not leaving the house. I had a need for speed and they made me taller.
I have turned this comment into a post, expect a ping…thanks so much for the giggle.
Love and hugs. Lisa. xx
This comment is an AWESOME post! I love it and it made laugh out loud the real way (not the LOL way). The Rubix Cube solutions came so far out of left field for me that it deserves its own Youtube video for its sheer awesomeness. And WD-40 is a godsend? For the Rubix Cube? I’m dying. Best line ever.
I’m in love with the fake vomit, mainly because you took it to such a new level with your Parmesan cheese.
Thanks for the laugh!
My 10 yr old aspie has also just solved the rubrics cube, and as time goes on I notice more and more aspie traits in myself such as obsessively learning the capitals of every country in the world as a child. The rest I plan to save for a blog post too
Hi @c oreilly, just been over to your blog and subbed.
Look forward to reading that post.
Love and hugs. Lisa. xx
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LOL! I quit Brownies after a month I think; it was because I told my mom: “All they care about is snack time and the leader is lazy!” I was 8 years old.
My mom just found a note I wrote this past weekend that told her how sorry I was for breaking my Rubix Cube. I told her: “I cried and cried” I took it apart to see how it worked and then put it back together, but it didn’t work the same. I was afraid that I would get in trouble and thought I had wasted her money.
I told my teachers on several occasions that I was not finished with recess, and I was staying outside until I was done. I remember telling one teacher: “You and the class will just have to go in without me. I’ll be in when I am finished.” That did not go over well.
I loved Ramona!
I was asked by the school librarian if I really wanted to check out that :”Edgar Allen Poe” book when I was 9. I said: “Of course! I have been reading him for a while.” After that she didn’t question the other strange books I brought forth of eery tales and mysteries. The books that none of the other kids checked out. Maybe that is why I got them — the strange books were the ones that were left.
My mom gets creeped out by Aesop’s fables, so I read them out loud to the frogs and other critters that lived under our outside.
I packed up my most important valuables, went next door talked the two little girls there into packing their belongings and coming with me. I was 5 or 6 years old and they were younger than me, all because I felt like my mom and their parents parental skills were wrong and unjust. I figured we could do a better job on our own. We made it to the dangerous highway where I paused wondering what to do next. By that time they found us. My mom asked why I ran away and I told her: “Because you were wrong, and you treated me badly.” For some reason those were words made her laugh and she couldn’t be that upset with me. When she asked me why I took the girls with me I told her something about her telling me I was not allowed to leave the yard alone. Lol!
Now that I think of it that was a pretty scary thing, but I had no clue of the dangers and I was determined to run away from her injustices! She may have asked me to clean up something. HA!!
Technically our neighbors yard was attached to ours so I had not actually left “my” yard. I have an added word “were” in the sentence “For some reason those were words made her laugh and she couldn’t be that upset with me.” I do not know why. Word! Ha ha ha I had to point it out so I would not loop. (Insert eye-roll here)
Angel, this comment is hilarious. I think you would make a very good Ramona. Please tell me you’re working on a kid’s series. Poe at age 9? I’m dying here.
Too bad you didn’t know AlienHippy back during your Rubix Cube crisis – she could have helped you out with her WD-40 (see her comment above). LMAO.
I absolutely love your blog!
You have a great sense of humour.
Not entirely sure if I am Aspie or not (yet – I’m getting assessed in the near future), but I thought I’d still share.
I don’t have routines that have to happen at certain times, but I have routines that absolutely have to occur everyday. Like eating the same breakfast before I go to university (I even have my favourite bowl) or going to bed with a hot water bottle and go to sleep with the same piece of music every night. My longest period of eating the same food every morning lasted around 4 years. Not sure what I did as a child, though. Oh wait, I would go to sleep listening to one album every night, Linkin Park – Hybrid Theory. I did sometimes switch to other albums too, but I just had to listen to music.
I also still got dressed until I was about 8 or 9 years old. Not because I couldn’t do it by myself, but I would always get so sidetracked by other things that I simply forgot I still had to get dressed. It still happens to me today (I’m in my early twenties) and I missed my bus because of that several times already. Yes, I feel a little stupid because of that. No, I can’t seem to do anything about it.
I was so clumsy as a child (and still am) that, according to my mum, doctors believed I had a motoric dysfunction. I am not sure if that has anything to do with Asperger’s, but apparently Aspies are very clumsy and uncoordinated. And I am just that.
Wow, this is almost worth its own blog entry. I’m not even sure if these examples could be considered as “aspieness”, but whatever.
Oh, Chesire Cat – I think we could be good friends! We seem to have a lot in common. LOL. I am all about the favorite cereal bowl. I go to bed with a heating pad. And I have had many years of falling asleep to the same song.
Good luck with your eval – I hope you get the answers you’re hoping for. Thanks for the comment!
Do you also have your favourite type of spoon? We have three different types in our flat and I absolutely hate having to eat my cereals with the other two spoons that I don’t like. It just doesn’t taste as good, but I have to put up with it.
Thanks! I hope I will get those answers too. Your blog makes it easy for me to focus on the funny/good aspects of Asperger’s!
I don’t, but I’m very close to a suspected Aspie who does. He brings his own silverware to dinner parties! This comment really made me laugh. Thanks so much for reading & for the nice comments!
LMHO…I do! I have to have my special spoon for my cereal, or tomato soup. I only have two of them left and I have had them since I was 4 years old. They have roses on them and I simply can’t eat cereal or tomato soup without that shape spoon.
I just love how similar us aspies are with so many weird things…giggle.
And something else: Once in English Literature we had to memorise 12 lines of Shakespeare’s Othello. Everyone was content with their 12 lines. I chose to do 42 and had no problems remembering them the next day. I also learnt a whole essay (a short story which I once wrote for a Short Story Contest) by heart and recited it word for word in an exam.
But trust me to forget what I ate for lunch in the evening of the same day.
I also told a teacher that her handwriting was stupid because I couldn’t read it. That didn’t go down very well. I realised afterwards that this is probably something you shouldn’t tell your teacher.
I also remember a teacher being very concerned about me because I was always sitting on a bench, reading a book, every day in every free period. That was pretty much the time of my life, though. Sadly, we were not allowed to sit upstairs on the benches (why did the school staff put them there when you aren’t allowed to sit there in your free periods?!), so I often ended up having endless discussions with some teachers instead. Very upsetting.
That is all I can remember for now.
I’m so glad you added the extra comment! “I chose to do 42.” Awesome. “I also told a teacher that her handwriting was stupid.” Even more awesome!
Ohhh. There is a boy with Autism at the school where I often teach who seems to do nothing at recess and lunchtime except sit alone on a bench. I have often wondered if he’s feeling alone and marginalised. I have asked if he’s OK (but even I, a very non-Aspie, used to pretend in my first year of school to be really happy when I saw a teacher walking passed, even though I had no friends). Now you make me think that perhaps he’s happy to have some time where nobody expects anything from him. And you make me think that I might suggest he’d like the idea of taking a book or something out with him, too.
I just had to say the word: “Cheshire Cat” was part of my post today. Seemed interesting to me to see that name here, too. Hi there.
~ Sam
Oh my goodness, this is great! I love it! I am not on the spectrum myself, but I have two out of four kids with autism (one age 9 and one ages 6). This post is just great, it gave me a great laugh and it highlights the wonders & beauty of the spectrum. I can so much see my kids doing some of these things, too. I love your sense of humor. Thank you for the great read!
That you so much, Merri! And thanks for reading!
Thanks for sharing your list. I dropped out of honors English in high school because I was too afraid to ask the librarian how to use the card catalog. I memorized Hotel California and wrote the lyrics on my desk everyday, at school. I stayed up all night when I was eleven, because I was afraid if I went to sleep I wouldn’t wake up at exactly 7 in the morning to say goodbye to a friend leaving on vacation. Thanks again ~ Sam
The card catalog story breaks my heart, Aspergers Girls! Poor little Aspies – I feel so sorry for the little ones with their inner struggles. Deb below dropped out of Sunday school because she accidentally stole a bible. I transferred middle schools for something even smaller. I hope we can save this generation’s Aspies from stuff like that.
Love this post! So funny and true!
I think of all the delightful things we have in commom: dropping out of brownies, fretting over polynomials, re-reading favorite books, and so on.
How validating to me to follow your validation!
P.S. You are delightfully funny!
Lori
Thank you, Lori! How nice to have found another Brownie drop-out. I’ve had a hard time finding people who understand that one. And two points to you for throwing the word “polynomials” out there. I love math words.
Angel: When I took apart my Rubik’s cube and put it back together and found out it doesn’t work unless you put it back together solved, it set me off on a quest to learn group theory and circuits and such. As a result, I now know that if you disassemble a Rubik’s cube and reassemble it randomly, you have a 1 in 12 chance of it being solvable.
(Yes, I’m autistic)
Funny, I was going to ask you soon how the snarly hair fit in. You forgot obsession with frogger. I’m starting to believe I’m an aspie. I saw romancing the stone 13 times, but I just don’t fit intothe superior intelligence aspect……which makes me just plain crazy. I will think of some more examples for you. Oh starting to write a script for ur haunted house in July, stealing sugary food from my house, waking up at the crack of dawn, making a homemade slip and slide in ur backyard.
This reply has me cracking up on so many levels, I don’t even know where to begin! Thanks the for laugh
I forgot, I don’t believe in atoms either. If you cant ever see them, how do you really know they are there? Thus the reason I had a hard time learning that stuff.
I loved this post! I too was obsessed with my Rubik’s cube for quite a long time. It made (and still makes) a fantastic stimmy toy for when I was in situations where flapping and rocking aren’t acceptable (eg the bus, or jury duty…). I’m not great at solving it (I can consistently solve in under 2 minutes, but its not elegant, and I always solve layers), but it is super duper fun, and I can solve 4x4s and 5x5s now too.
I definitely have my fair share of funny/quirky AS stories, but one of the more amusing anecdotes is thus: I read “The Lord of the Rings” in 2nd grade, and one day when I was in the middle of The Two Towers, I came BOUNDING into class (you know, that aspie/autie bouncy-flappy giddy exuberence, bursting at the seams, and unable to control the flappiness) exclaiming “Gollum’s Good!! Gollum’s Good! Gollum’s good and his name is Smegal!!!” – needless to say the teacher’s response wasn’t nearly so happy. It was followed by a “WHAT are you reading?” and a book confiscation. Luckily, I had another copy at home.
The clumsy/klutzy thing is something I completely identify with. I trip up the stairs (yes UP) at least 2-3 times per day, and down the stairs multiple times per week. (luckily the opposite isn’t true – down the stairs hurts more – oh, gravity). I’ve also been known to walk into glass doors and windows, solid doorframes, etc. Hardly a day goes by without me tripping over my feet. But happily, I’ve managed to stay relatively whole (with a few notable exceptions).
And I can definitely relate to many of the things you’ve said here in terms of obsessing over math problems until all hours of the night, being able to recite various movies (a friend and I once traded – she did the entirety of her favorite: My Fair Lady, then I did the entirety of my favorite, The Sound of Music. I kid you not, we both could recite the entire dialogue and all of the songs. In 3rd and 4th grade… friends for life we were, and still are.) And agonizing over broken rules and mistakes is something I still do, often obsessively.
Thanks for writing this post! It definitely made me smile.
E – once again, your comment outshines the post! I love this and am in stitches about you & your little friend reciting your favorite movies (incidentally, how lucky were you to have found such a person so young?). I wholeheartedly agree with your favorite movie pick. I traveled Europe on a shoestring, where I survived on baguettes & Laughing Cow cheese for weeks because I was so broke. But I thought nothing of handing over $70 for the Sound of Music bus tour in Salzburg. LOL.
This quote is the best ever – “I’m not great at solving it (I can consistently solve in under 2 minutes).” Ha ha! I think most people would say you ARE great at solving it. It takes me months, and I always end up cheating.
I find myself telling my friends about your comments and posts, and they are consistently as entertained as I am!
I’m glad you enjoyed it.
Laughing is something wonderful. And really, I’m NOT that good at solving it. There are people who can do it blindfolded, in under 20 seconds! I can do it one handed (left and right hand, since I have to be equal on each side), but that takes far longer. Once you know how to solve the cube its really very simple and fast. It’s really only a set of about 5 memorized moves (at least that’s how I solve it…) And I’m glad your friends are entertained too. 
I enjoy it when I can make someone else smile.
I’ve never belonged anywhere. Reading these blogs and replies makes me feel….like I belong to a group of people that I truly want to belong to. The recognition of all my childhood quirks feels so good!
(Btw: I am the ‘take apart the Rubic cube’ type of person.)
I’m with you! I’ve never found such a large concentration of people who “get it.” It was such a pleasant surprise when I started blogging. It does feel so good to finally belong, doesn’t it?
Fabulous post. You have just brought back a very special memory of when I was in the Brownies!
CJ x
Thank you, Crystal Jigsaw!
Thought you might like this article from our local paper, the Coloradoan. Think it was on the Associated Press too.
DENVER – Animal scientist and advocate for people with autism Temple Grandin is being inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame.
Grandin, who is being honored tonight, has been a professor at Colorado State University’s College of Agricultural Sciences for 22 years. Grandin developed humane livestock handling systems that are used on ranches, in feedlots and in meat packing plants worldwide.
As a person with autism, Grandin also speaks about the importance of education in helping children with autism thrive.
HBO released a movie in 2010 about Grandin’s early life and career and she was also named to TIME magazine’s list of “100 Most Influential People in the World.”
Thanks for the recommendation, MK. I love Temple Grandin & think she is such an inspiration. She does a fantastic job bridging the neurotypical/autistic divide. What guts she has!
About four months ago, I was at a training for working with children on the spectrum (on top of being an aspie myself, I also work as a mental health professional with aspies) and got to meet Dr. Grandin. At lunch, she stood directly behind me in the buffet line. I was so excited I had to call my wife after lunch and gush about how I got to stand next to Dr. GRANDIN, acting like I’d met the greatest rock star of all time! It was a great experience, and I really enjoyed getting to listen to her.
I was disappointed when I met Temple Grandin because she gave me a lecture about how I was doing everything wrong and refused to even try to understand my very severe circadian rhythm disorder, saying very dismissively “just get a good alarm clock.” (Okay, I’ll be sure to tell my sleep specialist that he was all wrong when he said my condition is incurable and I should just re-structure my life so I can live around it. All I really needed was a good alarm clock.)
*sigh*
That’s a super interesting story, Sparrowrose. How deflating for you!
Deflating is a good word for it. In her defense, what I have is EXTREMELY rare. When you go to the medical journals to read the research, there are only 59 cases total in all the studies put together. Most conditions have 3 to 10 times as many as that in just one study!
But it’s still hard to feel dismissed by a hero.
That sounds brutal. I can’t believe you were even able to get diagnosed – thank goodness you were. It seems like doctors are often just as willing to dismiss patients as Grandin was with you.
I suppose heroes are human, too, but what a bummer for you.
In my online sleep disorders support group, I have met about a dozen others with this condition (sighted hypernychthemeral syndrome.) Many of them complain that their doctor doesn’t understand or that they can’t get a diagnosis. (It’s extremely common among completely blind people — approximately 50% of them have it, although it’s believed that it’s got different causes among blind people than among sighted people. But because so many blind people have it, some doctors say “you can’t have it, you’re not blind.” (Even though those 59 sighted people are right there in the medical journals!))
Interesting to me, in doing my own reading (with something rare, we tend to read a lot more about our own condition) I’ve discovered that people on the autism spectrum have a much higher incidence of all circadian rhythm disorders (CRDs), including my rare one, than the general population does. So it really is an autism issue!
I’ve been working on putting ideas together and collecting research and at some point plan to write about the importance of understanding CRDs and how they affect those on the spectrum. Not sure where to try to publish it, but I think it’s important info that could be helpful for people to have available somewhere out there.
It’s so interesting. How do you treat it? Can you treat it?
The treatment for blind people is melatonin and something like 98% of them respond to the melatonin and are “cured” so long as they keep taking it.
For sighted people, light therapy, dark therapy, and melatonin has an effect on about a third of patients but for most, that effect is too small to be helpful. About 10% can be controlled/cured so long as they are very strict about their light/dark therapy and melatonin. Most of us are forced to restructure our lives in order to “live around” the disorder. I’m in the process of dropping out of graduate school in order to try to cope better.
There is one famous person who has this. The author George Dawes Green has it. This is a USA Today article about him and about this condition:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-07-14-sleep-disorder_N.htm
Just found your blog via twitter. Since my daughter was diagnosed with aspergers, I am starting to recognise much of me in her (and my son who has ASD) so reading your post made me think back to my days at Brownies. I also left after the initiation ceremony because of being forced to wear the brown bobble hat. Another incident was when I accidentally came home with a childrens bible from Sunday school. I felt so bad, never told anyone and refused to go back to church. It troubled me for years. My mum couldn’t work it out at the time and it wasn’t until I was an adult that I told her. I think she was amazed that I couldn’t tell anyone about it. Have to laugh about this now.
Thanks for the comment, Deb! My heart breaks for you as a little girl with the accidentally stolen bible. I can totally imagine never going back to Sunday school for that. I transferred schools for an equally as minuscule reason. Hopefully this generation’s Aspies have it a lot easier – it seems people are much more gentle with them.
I liked to take ballpoint pens (the kinds with the spring) apart and put them back together. I looked for patterns or pictures in the ceiling tiles at school. I was fascinated by the tiles on the floor in the bathroom in grade school…I could see little white lines zinging through them. I never played with dolls, unless you count cutting the hair of my sister’s Barbies. I would have loved a doll house though, but just so that I could set everything up. (And to this day, the words, “Play dolls/stuffed animals/any sort of play-acting thing you can think of, with me!” strike fear into my heart. I. Can’t. Do. It.) My mother and grandmother owned a women’s and children’s clothing store and I would always go to the pantyhose rack and make sure it was properly organized (what is with people putting the open toe ones in with the reinforced toes, anyway?) I got along better with my chemistry teacher than with anyone in my chemistry class. One of my main reasons for wanting to go to the college I attended was because it had an honor code. I figured that way, everyone would have to be honest and straightforward with me, because I had learned that people don’t always say exactly what they mean, and that bothered me.
Sorry! I forgot to say hello first. (Just got right to the point, without the social formalities. Hmmmm….)
So anyway, hello, just found you, and look forward to reading more.
Hello, Stacey! Your comment is great – thanks for sharing it! I love that you chose your college based on its honor code. Something tells me you were in for a surprise? I found college to be excruciating.
“Unless you count cutting the hair of my sister’s Barbies.”-LOL!
Stacey – ME TOO! Both the pens and the patterns in the ceilings and tiles. And the organizing of everything. For me, it was those little holders of the single-serving jams in restaurants. And the sugar packages. They all had to be sorted and lined up properly!
Hello to all,
I have just found your blog through the wrongplanet.net site, and have had so much fun reading all of the stories, as I feel it resounds a great deal with my life. I am a recently diagnosed aspie, and am in a similar period of going through and re-analyzing all of my past experiences. So, here are a few that have been brought to mind:
1. In high school, I took a geography test on Mediterranean Europe. Having spent a good deal of time there in middle school, I felt fairly confident about the test. When it came back and I was counted as incorrect for not knowing the number of Balearic Islands (I had also actually listed the islands), I was quite surprised considering that I had actually visited all three of the islands. When I confronted the teacher and was told that I was incorrect because the book said there were only two, I said that was stupid. It wasn’t until college when I finally realized she was mad I said that was stupid, and not that she was mad because she didn’t know the information right….
2. About four years ago, I finally realized that people wear hats to block out sunlight, not to wear them so low that they don’t have to make eye contact with people (my whole reason for wearing them all my life).
3. I spent from about age 10 until around age 22 mapping out every possible mathematical system to the tiles on my grandmother’s bathroom floor, finally coming to the realization through math that it was definitively random and not an extremely intricate mathematical pattern that I simply hadn’t figured out.
I’m sure there are many more, but those are three of the biggest that come to mind. It had been very fun reading all of the other similar stories, and I hope there will be more to come!
I knew all the letters in Kindergarten but fell mute when asked to label them from the teacher’s particular letter board because there were additional horizontal bits sticking out of them here and there on that particular board. Sure, it looked like an A, but perhaps there was additional information about how letters are formed that I did not yet know, or more letters existed than I knew about. Rather than think to say so, I stared blindly at that board in silence.
It never occured to me to inform anyone when the batteries of my most cherished toys went out, although I thought and thought and thought about how I might go about procuring some.
One day I stood up in 7th grade science class waving the weekly required Seek-N-Find and demanded very genuinely, “Mrs. So And So, what is the purpose of these Seek N Finds?” I thought perhaps there was one that I hadn’t considered. When she refused to answer, I continued for a while about how from my point of view, they were time wasters and did not help actual learning of any new information. Then I suggested she make them optional!
I had something similar — I was reading early and the family visited some cousins and mom mentioned that I was already reading the newspaper and stuff. So a cousin pulled out a tape recorder and a Dr. Seuss book and sat me down. All I could do was just stare at the first page because the first word was “t” and I couldn’t think of any word that sounded like that so I just sat there, trying to figure it out.
The cousin said, “it’s okay — you don’t have to pretend you can read” (which PISSED me off! LOL) and then told me that the first word was “It” . . . turns out the “I” was red (the rest of the letters were all black) and huge, like half the height of the page and so it just looked like decoration or something to me and I couldn’t read it as part of the word because it was the wrong color and size! (You’d think they’d know better than to do something that screwy in a Dr. Seuss “I Can Read It” book!!!)
Love this and everyone’s comments. Really makes me feel like I am not alone in all my aspie quirkiness!
- In elementary school, I would come home and wipe down my school shoes, put them back in their box, and put on my old shoes to go out and play.
- I hated recess because of how loud it was and only managed to tolerate it because of the swings.
- I read and reread Roald Dahl’s Matilda 100′s of times through out my childhood and when I am super stressed, I still pick it up to read. I actually keep a copy in my car and a copy in my house (same edition as my very first read through).
- In third grade, my best friend was my teacher and I would stay after class and wash the chalkboards and help her prepare for the next day. Never once dawned on my to make friends with the kids in my class.
- I also read Little Women and Anne of Green Gables over and over.
- I drove my family crazy with trying to dress and act like the books I was reading!
- I was rubbish at grammar but obsessed with reading. I could do matrix in algebra but struggled with basic algebra.
- For my high school writing class, I kept writing about Ebola because that was my passion for an entire year. I even wrote poetry about it.
- I wore the same outfit over and over all throughout high school. So much in fact, my mom instituted a dress once a week rule which I fought.
- I like(d) memorizing facts, studying the same topic for months at a time, socially awkward, very uncoordinated, and always lost in my own world.
Those are just a few of hundreds of things that pop out at me now. According to the people in my life who are not aspies, they think I am just quirky and really particular. But, not much as changed since I was a child!
I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome at 30 years old (last year) and I strongly believe my daughter and my son both have it. It’s nice to finally find a community that “gets it.”
OK. So this post is as terrifying as it is hilarious. Here’s the deal – all these things sound *completely sane and rational to me*, and as a result I suspect I, too, might be an Aspie…
+ As a primary school student I would make my friends write an agenda of activities we would engage in before I would go to their place for a play date.
+ I memorised things like all the Kings and Queens of England, along with their dates, because it would be wildly embarrassing not to have those kinds of details at your fingertips.
+ I started a new school when I was 13 (we’d moved 7 hours north to a large city) and the next week the whole class went on a week-long camping trip together. I begged the deputy principal to give me permission to stay home. I then spent the whole week either sitting in a tent by myself, vomiting, and alternating between states of catatonia and hysteria.
+ For the whole school year when I was 10 I took the complete collection of Anne of Green Gables books with me to school and kept the little suitcase with me in the classroom. I felt calm knowing I had them there with me.
My son has just been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, and all of a sudden I’m thinking the apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree…
In the last 13 years, as my 15 yr old son moved through the spectrum, PDD-NOS to Autism to Asperger’s I finally found the reason I have been so bewildered by the myriad rules of life and society and discovered why:
– I could read, add, subtract, etc. when I started school but couldn’t learn the art of shoelace
tying for 5 more years.
- If people thought I looked cute after putting on my mother’s lipstick, why did they stare in horror
when I returned after applying that same lovely shade to the rest of my face?
- The librarian tried so hard to dissuade my 4th grade self from reading “Jane Eyre”. To a previous
poster – I too loved Poe!
- You shouldn’t insist on ordering a cheese sandwich in a Chinese restaurant.
- You should ALWAYS tell the truth, except when you shouldn’t.
- Glitter covered platform shoes are not always considered appropriate footwear.
At 52 now, I have given myself the greatest gift, acceptance.
When I was 6, I argued with my grandmother (a grammar expert and school psychologist) about the grammatic correctness of “Him and me” versus “Him and I”. I was correct. (Him and me)
At 6, I argued with my grandmother (a grammar expert and school psychologist) the grammatic correctness of “Him and me”, versus “Him and I”. I was correct. (Him and me)
My first book that I read without assistance was “Alexander and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day” at 2. The next one was “The Hobbit”. Same age.