I am currently obsessed by Waja's ..
For those of you who dont know, they are a wolf type dog simulation online game and the idea is to buy and breed and sell waja's.
I first joined in 2008 but after a couple of years I just stopped, but then at the end of 2011 I found them again and have again become obsessed...
By obsessed I mean spending 6 or more hours just searching and breeding and buying waja. I will sit there till 6 in the morning or even later.
This is what its like for people with Aspergers, our obsessions with things take over and we are so absorbed in what we are doing that we forget the time, forget others, even forget ourselves.
I can sit here for 6 hours or more and not have anything to drink or eat just because I'm so absorbed.
Luckily most of the things I get obsessed with dont last long.... in a few months time I may be over waja's again....
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Monday, January 23, 2012
Trying to Explain what its like...
Non-autistic people or neurotypicals (NT's) see safety in numbers. We aspie / autistic people see a threat.
Unless we are shipwrecked and have been floating at sea in a life raft for three days with no food we don't see safety in other people.
People stimulate the amygdala in our brains, causing adrenalin overload and a fight or flight reaction. So we may feel testy, want to flee, or, because we've trained ourselves to do neither, we simply become awkward, stiff, jerky, even suffer from a temporary inability to speak.
I personally suffer from a temporary inability to speak when I am really stressed.. I may want to talk, to answer questions, but my body just wont let me.. So I am not ignoring you at all, I just can not talk to you right then.
Some of us, because of the adrenalin rush, switch into performance mode, and we can seem both witty and charming for a short period of time. This tricks people into thinking we are socially adept. It is easier to seem "normal" the older you get because you have had more practise.
But it's just a smoke screen.
Performances are tiring and we can't keep it up for long-certainly not an entire work day, or any other lengthy gathering. Eventually, we become exhausted and depleted and must retreat mentally or physically.
If I am out I can more often than not come across as being just like everyone else, albeit more quiet than most people, but by the time I get home I am so tired and sometimes grumpy that I just don't want to talk to anyone and need to be alone.
Sensory overload is a daily battle and is now part of the criteria for autism spectrum disorders.
So even if we don't have a meltdown, we are certainly not going to be relaxed or cheerful in such environments.
We don't care for small talk and are all about our special interests. If we are not interested in who won American Idol or what happened in the latest episode of Gossip Girl, its because such discussions sound like the wah wah wah of Charlie Brown's teacher, or the clucking of chickens.
I personally feel very uncomfortable with small talk... I don't understand it, I certainly do not understand the need to talk about the weather when it is right in front of us.
We might think you are a bit dull because you don't share our passions, or we may not notice and go on and on about the genius of our favorite film composers, actors, or pets, oblivious to the eye rolling and nudging going on in the room.
We have a more than healthy streak of self-absorption, mainly due to the fact we don't always consider the needs of others.
Our understanding of the social rituals of this world is basic. If you had a few years of high school French, you can probably buy a pastry in Paris, figure out what date it is and find your way to the post office, but you can't converse in depth, understand cultural allusions and references, innuendo, or idiom.
That is about the extent of our own understanding of non-verbal signals, facial expressions, and the art of conversing; Especially when we're children, but to some degree, forever.
We march to our own drummer and have a funny way of marching. We don't just take the road less traveled, we forge a new one. But because we have Dyspraxia and/or Proprioceptive dysfunction, we might not do it so gracefully.
Dyspraxia means deficits in motor planning. Proprioception is knowing where your limbs are, relative to one another. While we may not need a cork on the end of our fork to keep from poking ourselves in the eye, we may fall up the down escalator or get hit in the face with the dodge ball a lot.
I personally have the ability to fall over a flat floor or drop things when in a shop.
We don't have a strong sense of gender roles.
Women with AS don't have the whole eyelash batting, hair-tossing artillery of gender-specific body language that others seem to feel comfortable with.
We think it's a load of crap. We may get better at it with age, but will often slip into and prefer complete androgyny.
We may get involved in our interests and forget to brush our hair, wear mis-matching clothes, think make-up is too much of a hassle or have an aversion to deodorant or bra's, so we can seem slovenly, cold or butch.
I personally do not feel that feminine and like to wear men's t-shirts because they are long and big, and I prefer loose fitting clothes as anything that feels tight, makes me feel really stressed and uncomfortable... I also don't really like to wear high heel shoes as I do not understand them... Our feet were not meant to be on an angle like that and if they were then we would surely be born that way.
Of course there are times when I must get dressed up and look feminine and I do, but just because I can it doesn't mean that I enjoy it.
We're geeks. We might rather be thrown into a world where we have to battle orcs or even the Borg than deal with the suit-and-tie banality of this one.
I personally prefer anything scifi - books, movies, tv shows.
We're generally convinced that the NTs on shows like Fear Factor are not from the same species as us.
Real Life shows to me seem so much more "fake" than any scifi show I've seen.
We take things literally. Monty Python might make perfect sense but a knock-knock joke can have some of us running to answer the door.
I personally do take somethings literally, but over the years I have learnt how to understand some things, yet I still get confused by things that people say. Such as in 2010 I hear someone interviewing Tom Jones and it was mentioned about how the welsh people like to sing... what was said was "They like to sing in wales don't they." .... but I took that as "They like to sing in Whales don't they."
It took me a few minutes to realize my mistake.
Last but not least, anxiety is our prevalent emotion. Add to that the post- traumatic stress disorder from the loneliness, confusion and bullying we've endured, and a quiet tap on the shoulder may cause us to jump out of our skin. Or we may seem worried and controlling all the time.
The control thing is just us trying to keep order in the chaos, trying to feel safe on this crazy planet. Many on the spectrum take anti-anxiety meds, but there is no drug to make you a neurotypical. And no, Sally Normal and Joe Regular, we can't just ‘get over it' and we can't just ‘be normal'. The brain is a flexible organ and we do learn, but we will always be Aspies. .
Unless we are shipwrecked and have been floating at sea in a life raft for three days with no food we don't see safety in other people.
People stimulate the amygdala in our brains, causing adrenalin overload and a fight or flight reaction. So we may feel testy, want to flee, or, because we've trained ourselves to do neither, we simply become awkward, stiff, jerky, even suffer from a temporary inability to speak.
I personally suffer from a temporary inability to speak when I am really stressed.. I may want to talk, to answer questions, but my body just wont let me.. So I am not ignoring you at all, I just can not talk to you right then.
Some of us, because of the adrenalin rush, switch into performance mode, and we can seem both witty and charming for a short period of time. This tricks people into thinking we are socially adept. It is easier to seem "normal" the older you get because you have had more practise.
But it's just a smoke screen.
Performances are tiring and we can't keep it up for long-certainly not an entire work day, or any other lengthy gathering. Eventually, we become exhausted and depleted and must retreat mentally or physically.
If I am out I can more often than not come across as being just like everyone else, albeit more quiet than most people, but by the time I get home I am so tired and sometimes grumpy that I just don't want to talk to anyone and need to be alone.
Sensory overload is a daily battle and is now part of the criteria for autism spectrum disorders.
So even if we don't have a meltdown, we are certainly not going to be relaxed or cheerful in such environments.
We don't care for small talk and are all about our special interests. If we are not interested in who won American Idol or what happened in the latest episode of Gossip Girl, its because such discussions sound like the wah wah wah of Charlie Brown's teacher, or the clucking of chickens.
I personally feel very uncomfortable with small talk... I don't understand it, I certainly do not understand the need to talk about the weather when it is right in front of us.
We might think you are a bit dull because you don't share our passions, or we may not notice and go on and on about the genius of our favorite film composers, actors, or pets, oblivious to the eye rolling and nudging going on in the room.
We have a more than healthy streak of self-absorption, mainly due to the fact we don't always consider the needs of others.
Our understanding of the social rituals of this world is basic. If you had a few years of high school French, you can probably buy a pastry in Paris, figure out what date it is and find your way to the post office, but you can't converse in depth, understand cultural allusions and references, innuendo, or idiom.
That is about the extent of our own understanding of non-verbal signals, facial expressions, and the art of conversing; Especially when we're children, but to some degree, forever.
We march to our own drummer and have a funny way of marching. We don't just take the road less traveled, we forge a new one. But because we have Dyspraxia and/or Proprioceptive dysfunction, we might not do it so gracefully.
Dyspraxia means deficits in motor planning. Proprioception is knowing where your limbs are, relative to one another. While we may not need a cork on the end of our fork to keep from poking ourselves in the eye, we may fall up the down escalator or get hit in the face with the dodge ball a lot.
I personally have the ability to fall over a flat floor or drop things when in a shop.
We don't have a strong sense of gender roles.
Women with AS don't have the whole eyelash batting, hair-tossing artillery of gender-specific body language that others seem to feel comfortable with.
We think it's a load of crap. We may get better at it with age, but will often slip into and prefer complete androgyny.
We may get involved in our interests and forget to brush our hair, wear mis-matching clothes, think make-up is too much of a hassle or have an aversion to deodorant or bra's, so we can seem slovenly, cold or butch.
I personally do not feel that feminine and like to wear men's t-shirts because they are long and big, and I prefer loose fitting clothes as anything that feels tight, makes me feel really stressed and uncomfortable... I also don't really like to wear high heel shoes as I do not understand them... Our feet were not meant to be on an angle like that and if they were then we would surely be born that way.
Of course there are times when I must get dressed up and look feminine and I do, but just because I can it doesn't mean that I enjoy it.
We're geeks. We might rather be thrown into a world where we have to battle orcs or even the Borg than deal with the suit-and-tie banality of this one.
I personally prefer anything scifi - books, movies, tv shows.
We're generally convinced that the NTs on shows like Fear Factor are not from the same species as us.
Real Life shows to me seem so much more "fake" than any scifi show I've seen.
We take things literally. Monty Python might make perfect sense but a knock-knock joke can have some of us running to answer the door.
I personally do take somethings literally, but over the years I have learnt how to understand some things, yet I still get confused by things that people say. Such as in 2010 I hear someone interviewing Tom Jones and it was mentioned about how the welsh people like to sing... what was said was "They like to sing in wales don't they." .... but I took that as "They like to sing in Whales don't they."
It took me a few minutes to realize my mistake.
Last but not least, anxiety is our prevalent emotion. Add to that the post- traumatic stress disorder from the loneliness, confusion and bullying we've endured, and a quiet tap on the shoulder may cause us to jump out of our skin. Or we may seem worried and controlling all the time.
The control thing is just us trying to keep order in the chaos, trying to feel safe on this crazy planet. Many on the spectrum take anti-anxiety meds, but there is no drug to make you a neurotypical. And no, Sally Normal and Joe Regular, we can't just ‘get over it' and we can't just ‘be normal'. The brain is a flexible organ and we do learn, but we will always be Aspies. .
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