[QUOTE=qwerty8883;6339925]
Quote:
Originally Posted by Blue Cadillac
Indeed they do but the anxiety with most people on the spectrum is quite different and very misplaced in comparison to someone who is considered normal. I presume that most people suffer from anxiety as a trait in most new social situations (due to the fact that the unknown must scare us all to some extent) However the anxiety i feel from walking out side my front door is probably (but not in all cases) ten fold as bad to that of a "normal" person.
As an example when i go into a social situation with any one person i will very carefully watch body language to gauge reactions from the person i am interacting with (quite normal i presume?). If i get even the slightest undertone that they are losing interest i will instantly change the subject matter. When this change takes places and i make my presumption based on observation, my anxiety goes from say 7/10 to 10/10 and will have a huge detrimental effect on my perceptions of how the conversation went and also weather or not i like this person due to my perception of their reaction to my conversation. I would also say that i will take my perceived knock back (which may or may not have actually been perceived by others in the same manner) in a hugely detrimental way and this will determine how i perceive them in the future. To stop this from happening over years i have learned to instead of being myself create specific persona's for specific personalities that i will come across (of course the issues arise when i start to behave as myself rather than as the persona designed to manage the anxiety in these situations)
articulating my feelings is very difficult but what i am getting at is that every social interaction for me is like say, A job interview. It doesnt matter if its with someone in a shop, the postman or an associate. Only the closest family members do not cause this problem and the Internet is another gem of a place where i do not suffer from this issue.
Now my case is probably very different from 99% of all other people who are on the autistic spectrum.
i also waffle on............   |
Bolded the part that applies immensley to myself. Any knockback by a person could ruin my entire day and I spend the entire day ruminating about it until it's resolved in my own mind. It's horrible. And others around me have no idea why I'm so affected by it.
Many of the things you say relate to me. Only I don't usually try to put on a different persona (although having said that I do sometimes mask my real self with nonsensical humour). But yes, social situations are like a job interview for me also and the anxiety levels are always so high. I try to deal with it, but deep down I am always uncomfortable, and also worried that others think lowly of me.
Only thing that doesn't apply to me though is that you said you don't struggle on the internet. I do. I try to explain my posts in an explainable way but nobody seems to understand them and it winds me up. And I'm massively effected by how people on the net can be so insulting/insensitive too.
I take things to heart WAY too much, and you know what, I've even taken this thread to heart!
I also have really bad obsessional tendencies. Like, really bad. Cleaning my teeth for example takes forever as I'm unusually careful about it. I hate being the last person out of my house because that means I have to lock the door, in which I check it's locked like 20 times.
Even watching DVDs is a chore - I constantly have to rewind them because my mind trails off and I don't understand things. Putting them back in the case is horrible because I constantly have to take them out again to re-check that I've not damaged them.
ASDs are no walk in the park!
It's all so complicated. I'm basically an obsessive worryer. Having aspergers is really difficult and when I read people's posts on here saying that people are faking it etc, it makes things 10 times worse for me.
People only think that people are faking it because every case of an ASD is different.