I must warn you first before you enter – that this post contains an awful lot of stuff yanked from Wikipedia. As such it will be long winded and possibly very wordy. Also, it’s very personal, so if you take this the wrong way, I will set the Bear on you. Anyway, read if you would like an insight to my head, and the insanely complex network inside. Even I don’t get it sometimes.

Asperger syndrome (also called Asperger’s syndrome, Asperger’s disorder, Asperger’s or AS) is an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and people with AS therefore show significant difficulties in social interaction and restricted, stereotyped patterns of behavior and interests. AS differs from other ASDs by its relative preservation of linguistic and cognitive development. Although not mentioned in standard diagnostic criteria, physical clumsiness and atypical use of language are frequently reported.

Well, that’s it in a nutshell. I’m betting that the majority of you before have wondered what I’m like when I’m thinking about things, or the way I talk, write, act etc. I had been an Asperger child since a young age, or as far as my mother can remember. My childhood was filled with days where I would go and be analysed by psychologists, child specialists and others. I’m not sure when I was officially diagnosed, I think I was around 11 or so, in first year. But at the time I was relieved that I finally had something, some descriptor, just a reason or an understanding as to why I am who I am.

The first thing I will say to you about me, I find it very hard to refer to my mother as “my mother”. Whenever I’m talking to other people about her, I refer to her by her first name. The other person I will refer to her as “mom” or “mommy” when talking to is my little sister. And I only refer to her as “Ma” on my phone so that it’s the first number that shows up when I press M in the contacts list.

A pervasive developmental disorder, Asperger syndrome is distinguished by a pattern of symptoms rather than a single symptom. It is characterized by qualitative impairment in social interaction, by stereotyped and restricted patterns of behavior, activities and interests, and by no clinically significant delay in cognitive development or general delay in language. Intense preoccupation with a narrow subject, one-sided verbosity, restricted prosody, and physical clumsiness are typical of the condition, but are not required for diagnosis.

This is probably what makes the condition so different – the fact that it’s not just a single symptom that defines those who have AS, and those who don’t. There are several different facotrs that can determine whether you may have AS or not, but again even having all of the characteristics of someone with AS, may not mean that you actually do suffer from it.

And I’m not saying “suffer from it” in a bad way. It’s just that my vocabulary probably isn’t as wide as it could be in this sense. I’m just talking about having it or not.

Social interaction

The lack of demonstrated empathy is possibly the most dysfunctional aspect of Asperger syndrome. Individuals with AS experience difficulties in basic elements of social interaction, which may include a failure to develop friendships or to seek shared enjoyments or achievements with others (for example, showing others objects of interest), a lack of social or emotional reciprocity, and impaired nonverbal behaviors in areas such as eye contact, facial expression, posture, and gesture.

While I don’t have as many problems socially now as I did when I was younger, it is still a maor factor with me. “The lack of demonstrated empathy” is a big thing. When my grandmother died ten years ago this June, when I was nine years old, I was sad at the time. I still have a memory of me sitting beside her on a made-up bed in my great-aunt’s house (I think), and being very sad at saying goodbye to her. However, the following week, during a break period at school, the principal called my over, and brought me just inside from the school yard.

Now I should explain this here, my principal from primary school knew my family very well. It may have been because my mom was good friends with two of the teachers there, but I do believe it all boiled down to the fact that the principal lived about a 3-minute walk from my house! So, it’s only natural that he heard of my grandmother’s death. He called me in asking me if I felt alright. While I was still a little sad at the time, I got over it extremely quickly. So quickly, he himself was very surprised (judging by his reaction when I made it clear I got over it). And since then, death really hasn’t made all too much of an impact on me. It’s not as if I don’t care about death happening, it just doesn’t affect me emotionally as it would other people.

Hence why I can be seen talking very nonchalantly about events happening around the world where many people have died, almost as if I don’t care about the loss of life.

Unlike those with autism, people with AS are not usually withdrawn around others; they approach others, even if awkwardly, for example by engaging in a one-sided, long-winded speech about a favorite topic while misunderstanding or not recognizing the listener’s feelings or reactions, such as need for privacy or haste to leave. This social awkwardness has been called “active but odd”. This failure to react appropriately to social interaction may appear as disregard for other people’s feelings, and may come across as insensitive. The cognitive ability of children with AS often lets them articulate social norms in a laboratory context, where they may be able to show a theoretical understanding of other people’s emotions; they typically have difficulty acting on this knowledge in fluid, real-life situations, however. People with AS may analyze and distill their observation of social interaction into rigid behavioral guidelines and apply these rules in awkward ways-such as forced eye contact-resulting in demeanor that appears rigid or socially naive. Childhood desires for companionship can be numbed through a history of failed social encounters.

Yes, socially I was a little different – and still am. I have no problem sitting in the corner or to the side when there are loads of people around whom I have never met or seen before (which may have been obvious at Twestival on Thursday). However, those I do know and have met before, I have no qualms at all engaging in conversation, even if they themselves are talking with people I don’t know.

I do still tend to have some issues. I can ramble on for ages about things that I know a lot about or am insanely interested in, even to the detriment of the conversation. Sometimes, if I do see that someone else shares my interests, then we can hit it off like the flicking of a switch (like me and @emordino talking about CoD4!).

Restricted and repetitive interests and behavior

People with Asperger syndrome often display behavior, interests, and activities that are restricted and repetitive and are sometimes abnormally intense or focused. They may stick to inflexible routines, move in stereotyped and repetitive ways, or preoccupy themselves with parts of objects.

I think most of you by now will understand this, even without an understanding of AS. My interests can be summed up in two of three things: gaming, web junk etc. That’s basically it. I pick up other interests from time to time, but they do seem very minor in comparison!

Pursuit of specific and narrow areas of interest is one of the most striking features of AS. Individuals with AS may collect volumes of detailed information on a relatively narrow topic such as dinosaurs or deep fat fryers, without necessarily having genuine understanding of the broader topic. For example, a child might memorize camera model numbers while caring little about photography. Although these special interests may change from time to time, they typically become more unusual and narrowly focused, and often dominate social interaction so much that the entire family may become immersed. Because narrow topics often capture the interest of children, this symptom may go unrecognized.

I’m not too sure about others, but I surely recognised this quite quickly. When I was younger, all I wanted to do was sit in front of my old (and quite crappy at the time) PC, and play Command and Conquer non-stop. Nowadays, I just want to sit in front of either my computer or 360 and surf the web, chat, play games, watch videos etc. Special interests though are a little harder to pinpoint or myself. There are times when I’ve gone onto Wikipedia (or another wiki) and just read pages and pages on a certain game or series, but they’ve never become fully-fledged anal interests.

Stereotyped and repetitive motor behaviors are a core part of the diagnosis of AS and other ASDs. They include hand movements such as flapping or twisting, and complex whole-body movements. These are typically repeated in longer bursts and look more voluntary or ritualistic than tics, which are usually faster, less rhythmical and less often symmetrical.

Might not be because of AS, but I do have a knack of being unable to keep still for more than about 10 seconds without having to fidget or move something. I have no idea why, it just seems to be a habit of mine by now…

Speech and language

Although individuals with Asperger syndrome acquire language skills without significant general delay and their speech typically lacks significant abnormalities, language acquisition and use is often atypical. Abnormalities include verbosity, abrupt transitions, literal interpretations and miscomprehension of nuance, use of metaphor meaningful only to the speaker, auditory perception deficits, unusually pedantic, formal or idiosyncratic speech, and oddities in loudness, pitch, intonation, prosody, and rhythm.

Being able to speak, and wanting to speak are two different things for most people. For me, they seem to intertwine together, but also stay separate sometimes. One thing I do hate is any form of public speaking. At the Games Soc AGM at the end of my first attempt at second year, I was nominated for the Consoles position on the committee. Trying to actually come up with something to say on the fly like that was a complete disaster for me. I’m not sure if it contributed to me losing the vote 21-9, even with me having most of the previous committee on my side (and the very least Robby and Seán)…

You may also remember TeenCamp, and how crap I feel I was on the mic during my half-assed talk and during the Twitterati phase…

I also have a tendency to take words at their face value, and being unable to understand the real interpretation of the phrase. I can’t exactly give you a good example right now, but you would understand if I were to make a mistake like that again…

Three aspects of communication patterns are of clinical interest: poor prosody, tangential and circumstantial speech, and marked verbosity. Although inflection and intonation may be less rigid or monotonic than in autism, people with AS often have a limited range of intonation: speech may be unusually fast, jerky or loud. Speech may convey a sense of incoherence; the conversational style often includes monologues about topics that bore the listener, fails to provide context for comments, or fails to suppress internal thoughts. Individuals with AS may fail to monitor whether the listener is interested or engaged in the conversation. The speaker’s conclusion or point may never be made, and attempts by the listener to elaborate on the speech’s content or logic, or to shift to related topics, are often unsuccessful.

Basically, that paragraph does describe the way I talk pretty well. I can be quite incoherent, the subject matter of what I talk about can vary wildly from the start to the end. I do feel I talk quite fast, and probably too fast for my own good – that does not mean that I don’t make a large amount of errors when trying to read prose, particularly out loud. The rest does mention how I can tend to ramble on and on about something without stopping, no breaks for interjections, no way for other to get something in.

But then again, this part of things doesn’t tend to be as bad as it could be. It may just be that I can’t speak all that loudly, but if in a group of people talking over each other, I can never get a word in, because whetever I say is drowned out by others…

Children with AS may have an unusually sophisticated vocabulary at a young age and have been colloquially called “little professors”, but have difficulty understanding figurative language and tend to use language literally. Children with AS appear to have particular weaknesses in areas of nonliteral language that include humor, irony, and teasing. Although individuals with AS usually understand the cognitive basis of humor they seem to lack understanding of the intent of humor to share enjoyment with others. Despite strong evidence of impaired humor appreciation, there are anecdotal reports of humor in individuals with AS, which challenge theories of humor in AS.

Yes, I do remember when I was younger having quite the vocabulary and using it in all the wrong ways… Taking things literally is something I have always done, for good or bad. While I don’t have issues understanding most mainstream humour, I bdo have a bit of a dry wit. I get described by my mom that my sister’s dad and I are a lot more alike than we think, since we both seem to appreciate satirical humour and things most people generally wouldn’t fine very funny.

Other

Individuals with AS often have excellent auditory and visual perception. Children with ASD often demonstrate enhanced perception of small changes in patterns such as arrangements of objects or well-known images; typically this is domain-specific and involves processing of fine-grained features. Conversely, compared to individuals with high-functioning autism, individuals with AS have deficits in some tasks involving visual-spatial perception, auditory perception, or visual memory.

This is actually something I don’t have. I, at least according to those standardised tests you take during school, have a great understanding of spatial awareness. You could probably throw me into that round on the Krypton Factor and I’d ace it.

Many accounts of individuals with AS and ASD report other unusual sensory and perceptual skills and experiences. They may be unusually sensitive or insensitive to sound, light, touch, texture, taste, smell, pain, temperature, and other stimuli, and they may exhibit synesthesia; these sensory responses are found in other developmental disorders and are not specific to AS or to ASD. There is little support for increased fight-or-flight response or failure of habituation in autism; there is more evidence of decreased responsiveness to sensory stimuli, although several studies show no differences.

I do actually have a few differences in my senses. I am extremely insensitive to smell, unless it gets really bad, which is usually why I am always told that there is something in or around my room (including myself) which smells, yet I can’t identify it myself. I’m also very pervasive to temperature. If I am taking something out of the oven or the microwave, I always have oven gloves, or a towel wrapped around it, because such things always feel hot to me, even if they are barely lukewarm.

Children with AS are more likely to have sleep problems, including difficulty in falling asleep, frequent nocturnal awakenings, and early morning awakenings. AS is also associated with high levels of alexithymia, which is difficulty in identifying and describing one’s emotions. Although AS, lower sleep quality, and alexithymia are associated, their causative relationship is unclear.

I do have a few problems trying to get to sleep at night. It is probably why I’m always tired in the morning as I have never had enough sleep the night before since it took me so long just to get to bed.

I think I described upon my alexithymia(?) earier in the post somewhere. Not about to go fish it out again.

The Final Word. Or sentence/paragraph/remark/whatever…

Now that I’ve reached the end, I’ve actually forgotten why it is I opened up the Wiki article on AS in the first place, and what compelled me to write this. It may be another symptom I have from my AS, or it may just be me not paying enough attention. I just hope that this will help you to understand me and my attitude a little better, as it’s always been hard for me to explain why I do what I do online…

I’m not sure if this will finally set free some of those feelings I’ve had opening up about me and my personal life. I have always felt that this part of me was probably something better kept to myself, since most people probably wouldn’t understand. However, I would have to say that Tommy is probably one of the main inspirations for me to open up about myself. He hasn’t had any problems letting people know of the nitty-gritty details about his life, so why should I?

I should probably also mention this blog I noticed ages ago. It is a personal blog written by Gavin Bollard focusing on the positive side of AS, rather than all the negative aspects. I’ve been signed up to the RSS feed ever since, even though I never added bit to my blogroll, or linked to it anywhere. I’ve read some of the posts he’s written and I’ve been able to relate some of my symptoms to those mentioned in his posts. If you want to, I would definitely say to go and read some of his pieces if you are interested in knowing some more about AS, and the impacts and aspects on life.