Hi, I have often wondered if I am Aspergers.
I have an unusual behaviour in relation to the cold where I will often sneeze if one part of my body is cold (usually feet) and I will be able to isolate the part of the body that led me to sneeze. I was clumsy in school in that it took me 3 years to learn to hold my pencil properly and faced a lot of criticism by teachers for this. I have an education degree but it doesn't let me become a teacher as despite the fact that I have good knowledge and patience with students, my reaction speed at dealing with behaviour problems tends to be a bit on the slow side. I love routine in life and often in periods of change I find myself looking forward not to the positive change that is happening but rather 2 months after the change when the implementation of the change has become a routine. I also have a mathematics degree which I specialised in the maximum amount of mathematics possible due to my fear of writing essays (when I later did my education degree I improved on this fear).
I have always considered myself good at dealing with logic based problems and I find that people appreciate my insight to problems that I have. In the past, I was getting involved with trading forums on the internet and I had a good following due to me giving advice people valued but I had to stop trading for financial reasons and the demographics to the forums changed and so I don't find the same feeling of connectedness that I used to get on those forums. I have since been searching for a forum to feel part of as I miss the sense of community that I used to get on that forum but never found it.
Like many Aspergers people I have a big passion and this passion is ideas. Over the years I have collected business ideas, research ideas, political ideas and not-for-profit ideas. I collect grand scheme ideas. I tend to have the attitude that if an idea doesn't have multi-billion dollar potential then I will disregard it. I have been building a collection of ideas for the last 11-12 years and refining this collection. Due to the cost of implementing ideas and my limited resources, I don't really have concrete applications for the ideas but I take the attitude that I am saving the collection for a later time in life when the right ingredients to execute the ideas will have. I believe that my collection is so difficult to work with that I may be passing on these ideas to other people in future generations to investigate these opportunities after me. I understand that my logic is not perfect and that there are flaws in my reasoning for some of my ideas but I consider that the potential impact of the set of my ideas has a degree of validity that any individual idea does not.
Because of this passion of ideas and conservative approach to financial risk I live a life where I have emotionally heavily invested in ideas but I aim to minimise the time and finances invested into the idea. It's like I live in 2 different worlds. One is the dreamy world where my skills and talents have huge potential to make dramatic changes in the way people do things in life while the other I am a simple guy doing pretty normal things and my skills are pretty standard for somebody in my position. People close to me tend not to want to engage in this theoretical world with me as I have not managed to validate any evidence that I have the resources and positioning to execute any of my ideas successfully and they find the rollercoaster of emotions that I go on with my ideas exhausting. I have often thought about writing my ideas down and getting them out of my system by doing that but I am concerned by intellectual property issues by having them written down and I am also concerned that I will find writing them down very mentally exhausting as I do not look forward to the anticipated rejection that I will get by people who look at my list of ideas and don't take them seriously.
My ideas tend to have a high level of mathematical content in them and tend to be very technology oriented. I think my dream job would be to be on a think tank group in a technology company that generates collections of potential solutions to problems that are obvious in the community but at this stage I don't see that opportunity as usually the people in those groups from my understanding a computing and engineering people and I don't know of any of those groups looking for mathematicians.
My wife has read up on the net on Aspergers and thinks that it sounds like me. I have thought about it for many years. For me the word that comes to my mind when I think of Aspergers is precision. I get the impression that Aspergers have areas in their life where they have greater levels of precision than average people but I think that the way the brain allows them to focus a higher level of precision in one area, it comes at a cost in another area. I have been tested for Aspergers in the past and no diagnosis was made and I think personally that one of the areas of precision for me is codes of conduct. While I have difficulty in communicating in fast modes of communication and am a bit awkward in social settings, I feel that I possess skills in maintaining a level of diplomacy within slower modes of communication that I do very well with. That is my theory on why I was not diagnosed in the past.
I don't know if I would call myself Aspergers but it would not bother me if I was diagnosed with it. However, at this stage I am not going to do any of the surveys online to test myself as I feel happy being in the grey area where there is evidence that supports I may be but not an official diagnosis. I am interested to get feedback on what are the benefits in receiving a diagnosis.
I have an unusual behaviour in relation to the cold where I will often sneeze if one part of my body is cold (usually feet) and I will be able to isolate the part of the body that led me to sneeze. I was clumsy in school in that it took me 3 years to learn to hold my pencil properly and faced a lot of criticism by teachers for this. I have an education degree but it doesn't let me become a teacher as despite the fact that I have good knowledge and patience with students, my reaction speed at dealing with behaviour problems tends to be a bit on the slow side. I love routine in life and often in periods of change I find myself looking forward not to the positive change that is happening but rather 2 months after the change when the implementation of the change has become a routine. I also have a mathematics degree which I specialised in the maximum amount of mathematics possible due to my fear of writing essays (when I later did my education degree I improved on this fear).
I have always considered myself good at dealing with logic based problems and I find that people appreciate my insight to problems that I have. In the past, I was getting involved with trading forums on the internet and I had a good following due to me giving advice people valued but I had to stop trading for financial reasons and the demographics to the forums changed and so I don't find the same feeling of connectedness that I used to get on those forums. I have since been searching for a forum to feel part of as I miss the sense of community that I used to get on that forum but never found it.
Like many Aspergers people I have a big passion and this passion is ideas. Over the years I have collected business ideas, research ideas, political ideas and not-for-profit ideas. I collect grand scheme ideas. I tend to have the attitude that if an idea doesn't have multi-billion dollar potential then I will disregard it. I have been building a collection of ideas for the last 11-12 years and refining this collection. Due to the cost of implementing ideas and my limited resources, I don't really have concrete applications for the ideas but I take the attitude that I am saving the collection for a later time in life when the right ingredients to execute the ideas will have. I believe that my collection is so difficult to work with that I may be passing on these ideas to other people in future generations to investigate these opportunities after me. I understand that my logic is not perfect and that there are flaws in my reasoning for some of my ideas but I consider that the potential impact of the set of my ideas has a degree of validity that any individual idea does not.
Because of this passion of ideas and conservative approach to financial risk I live a life where I have emotionally heavily invested in ideas but I aim to minimise the time and finances invested into the idea. It's like I live in 2 different worlds. One is the dreamy world where my skills and talents have huge potential to make dramatic changes in the way people do things in life while the other I am a simple guy doing pretty normal things and my skills are pretty standard for somebody in my position. People close to me tend not to want to engage in this theoretical world with me as I have not managed to validate any evidence that I have the resources and positioning to execute any of my ideas successfully and they find the rollercoaster of emotions that I go on with my ideas exhausting. I have often thought about writing my ideas down and getting them out of my system by doing that but I am concerned by intellectual property issues by having them written down and I am also concerned that I will find writing them down very mentally exhausting as I do not look forward to the anticipated rejection that I will get by people who look at my list of ideas and don't take them seriously.
My ideas tend to have a high level of mathematical content in them and tend to be very technology oriented. I think my dream job would be to be on a think tank group in a technology company that generates collections of potential solutions to problems that are obvious in the community but at this stage I don't see that opportunity as usually the people in those groups from my understanding a computing and engineering people and I don't know of any of those groups looking for mathematicians.
My wife has read up on the net on Aspergers and thinks that it sounds like me. I have thought about it for many years. For me the word that comes to my mind when I think of Aspergers is precision. I get the impression that Aspergers have areas in their life where they have greater levels of precision than average people but I think that the way the brain allows them to focus a higher level of precision in one area, it comes at a cost in another area. I have been tested for Aspergers in the past and no diagnosis was made and I think personally that one of the areas of precision for me is codes of conduct. While I have difficulty in communicating in fast modes of communication and am a bit awkward in social settings, I feel that I possess skills in maintaining a level of diplomacy within slower modes of communication that I do very well with. That is my theory on why I was not diagnosed in the past.
I don't know if I would call myself Aspergers but it would not bother me if I was diagnosed with it. However, at this stage I am not going to do any of the surveys online to test myself as I feel happy being in the grey area where there is evidence that supports I may be but not an official diagnosis. I am interested to get feedback on what are the benefits in receiving a diagnosis.
