Believe it or not, TV tropes has an excellent article about Aspergers.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/AspergerSyndrome?from=Main.AspergerSyndrome. Not exactly going to win awards, but still a pretty nifty layman's description of how it all works and addresses some common beliefs.
While never having been formally diagnosed with Aspergers, I and pretty much everyone who knows me thinks I have the condition. Pick a trait and I either still exhibit it or did when I was a child, from eye-contact to delayed speech development and speaking with an accent for no reason, obsessive tendencies (re-reading the Red Dwarf Omnibus a dozen times before I was 11), lack of social awareness and my constant "stimming" (god that's an awful term), to just hating the hell out of corduroy and occasionally getting an utterly inexplicable desire to get or possess white soft smooth things and having to cut my grocery shopping short because I can't focus on anything that isn't shaving foam or yoghurt :p
Still, that said, either way I'm now in the least severe range. I used to be quite bad as a child, but put one hell of alot of effort into understanding people and behaviour, so now I can play the social game better than even most neurotypicals. I'm still far from 'normal' but I understand social norms and how other people form their perceptions well enough that I can consciously play the game they're all unconsciously playing and, well... essentially manipulate the hell out of it so I can be myself without people judging me or being dicks to me :p
I mean, Highschool years were singularly the worst years of my life, don't get me wrong. My lack of social awareness there, combined with the inherent asshole-ishness of teenagers made sure that I was close to suicide (or worse) a significant portion of the time. However once I got through it and managed to stop feeling revulsion whenever I remembered those times, I used anything useful I could from it. It was horrible, but it was a wealth of information regarding social interactions.
That time I had a bunch of girls in class start screaming at me that I stare too much? Well, I was staring because I honestly had no idea what I was meant to look at or do with my eyes when I wasn't using them. Lesson: don't stare at bogans, even if they are dressed in bright colours and constantly moving about/screaming at people or things in a way that unconsciously attracts attention. Focus on some inanimate objects or create an activity that *looks* like you're doing something and keeps your eyes in a non-dangerous direction.
I could keep citing examples, but they're probably really only useful to me, in context. There are pretty well thousands, if I took the time to remember them all. Basically, my experience and understanding of Aspergers tell me to look at it this way; our implicit and explicit cognitive processes work subtly differently to neurotypicals. Our neurological makeup is apparently best shown as something like a torus, our associative networks and processes follow a fairly circular path and don't really like to make new connections unless they can latch onto that already existing torus. In practice, this means that in order to learn and understand things in a manner that's compatible with neurotypical's understanding of the world, we *have* to adopt a hierarchical, systematic method of thought and consciously learn and make amendments to that system, using our already existing ideas and concepts as a starting point. We can't rely on implicit schemas (Schema: shorthand for an understanding of how a particular concept works) in the same way neurotypicals do, because our implicit associations just don't work that way. We have to create explicit schemas and KNOW why we think this or that, or why this is appropriate or not, because those ideas aren't things that come naturally to us in a way that we can use in day to day life.
In order to operate in the same manner as a neurotypical, we have to explicitly learn things that they learn implicitly. That takes a hell of alot of time, effort and mistakes. However, if we put in that effort and get a hang of it, we're actually left far better off than them. Yes, it's a hellish and horrible experience to start off with (I still take antidepressants!
) but creating those systems of concious awareness and understanding of social norms means we can use and analyse them in ways most people wouldn't even think of, because by necessity we learned their internal workings.
Hell, when I was in grade 7 I spent nearly a month trying to figure out what it was that made males or females attractive and what constituted "hot", not able to wrap my head around the idea that it was a subjective concept and that my classmates were just assuming there was an objective answer (they still do, btw), now just 10-ish years later I'm about to finish my psych degree and start a counselling degree.
Counselling, the field where understanding social cues, body language, implicit associations and all-round emotional turmoil is of paramount importance, and y'know what? I'm fucking great at it.
Of course, at the end, I have to also point out that studying psychology and human interaction isn't completely necessary, I just strongly recommend it. Plenty of people with Aspergers get by without bothering to learn about people and just get into a field of work or life that interests them... which I understand, I couldn't stand other people before I started learning about how they operate. For most of my life other people just represented a lifestyle I couldn't understand, had friendships and romances I could never have and were impenetrable walls of overly emotional, short-sighted, knee-jerky, fuck-witted-ness. It's a stereotype, but has some kernel of truth to it; people with Aspergers do tend to be drawn towards hard sciency type positions or vocations; things with rather strict and clear guidelines on how they work and little need for dealing with other people. That's perfectly valid aswell, if it's what works for you. I've not spent a whole lot of time there but I'm quite sure almost every single chemistry student I've met must have some form of Aspergers :p
Edit: Just gonna yank the word "college" out of that 4th paragraph up there. Highschool was horrible, college was by comparison, awesome. Changing peer groups to friendlier people with more things in common is great for depressed teens. Still made mistakes, but at least I didn't get beaten up or humiliated in front of groups because of them.
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Topic: Aspberger's advice? (Read 3916 times)