I need a place to write. I need it because my head is full, things are spinning at breakthrough speed, and I need to put things down on a page. I need it to be online, because I need to think I might be read in order to give a semblance of structure to my rants. And, for the time being, I need it to be sent into the void, hence this place will have no comments, and no tracking. I hope it’ll be read, I hope it’ll help some people who know me to know me a bit better. But I need it to be on a volontary basis: by not having a direct mean to know who’s reading, I’m removing the burden I could put on people to react, so they can show they’re reading, so they can show they care. I’d love to think...

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Who am I? What am I trying to do here? I’m trying to get things out of my head, without the fear of judgement. I am certain things. Other things I have still to discover. I want to be able to explore without being said that I should behave like this or like that, or being told that my outlook is wrong. If it is, then by all means, trust in me to get it in the end. I need this new place because I’ve been told that I should stop looking at life through the Aspie lens, even my closest friends have said so. Having Asperger’s Syndrom is autism, it’s a fucking mental condition. I cannot stop looking things through it more than someone with a depression can “just get over it”. By telling me so,...

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It’s not the first place I’m creating to express my Aspie side, there has been two already, but I had a pretty limited output there. There’s “limited in terms of volume”, as in my twitter account. You can find it there: https://twitter.com/friendlyaspie. There’s “limited in terms of scope”, as in my Instagram account. I thought “what are people using Instagram for?” Food pictures, that’s what. Hence I opened an account dedicated to my meals, and I updated it every day or so for one year. And for that one year, I had the same salad almost every day. I was having that salad every day before opening that account, but it seemed a good way to show some people around me who were perceiving the...

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I’m a passer: I can pass for NT, I can behave in such a way that people don’t see me as autistic. I’ve got to thank communication skills courses and years of amateur plays. And I’ve always been a kin observer of people, it helps too. At some point at school, the very same point where I was a close to being a complete failure and I was loathing it all, I had the chance to meet a teacher I had a good feeling with, and that guy was teaching us communication skills, for IT students of all things. We were all quite bad at it, but I liked the guy, and despite looking down at the idea of faking being someone I was not, I started to listen to those things he was trying to teach us. Silly things they...

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I’m currently reading a book by Tony Attwood, one of the world’s leading Asperger’s Syndrome specialists, and Michelle Garnett. In it, I just came across a text titled “The Discovery of Aspie Criteria”. It’s about the stigma attached to the term “diagnosis”, and how better it could be to call it a “discovery” when applied to an aspie. It’s not about changing existing classification, but more about finding a way to push forward the actual good sides of the condition, because there are many. I’m going to paste here a list of those good sides, directly copied from that article[1], because it feels familiar, I recognize many things (most) and more importantly, I recognize many things in this...

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In order to go on with the self discovery, and put the my current approach into perspective, I’ve got to depict the situation I find myself in, so here it goes. I met a girl, six years ago. There were several reasons why I could not even start to think of her as a potential love interest. Circumstances were against it, and, mostly, every study shows that people end up in a relationship with someone of a similar background. Our backgrounds couldn’t be more dissimilar: we were different in terms of language, culture (civilisation wouldn’t even be too big a word), age, upbringing, family history and wealth, personal history, projects, maturity, name it; just about anything really. And not even...

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As we’ve seen, I’m a master of disguise. I think I understood very recently that it goes far beyond hiding the fact that I’m an Aspie. It might go as far as having a very deep disconnection between the surface and what’s inside, hiding many things from people around me, whether they’re close or not, and even, and that I have to explore, from me. I’ve seen a couple of shrinks lately. Both are actually Asperger specialized neuropsys, and one of them might even be on the spectrum himself for all I know. This is the one who directed me to, among other things, resources about depression targeted at aspies. OK, I know it’s a difficult period, but depression might be a bit strong a word. Still, I’m...

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As a echo to what I was writing earlier, I found this litle tidbit in an article about aspies and depression: the autistic experience of depression often involves something other than the standard sadness we all associate with depression. The autistic version of depression is dominated by apathy, and a pretty profound inertia that can make it hard to approach tasks or even move physically. Talks about “feelings of meaninglessness.” too. Touché?...

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The quote I wrote down yesterday was from a Asperger specialized therapist. Here’s another one by the same person: Most clients I’ve met are dying of loneliness. Most are guarding, full time, against a pervasive and nameless panic, or, in Sylvia Plath’s words, the “o-gape of complete despair”. Asperger’s Syndrome is a weird animal. Among other things, there are hard to concile contradictions within it. As read in a review: ” the need for social interaction and the stress it causes; the desire to be alone and the fear of loneliness;” Being with people, even people I love, is draining. Being alone is dying. I need time alone to charge, but it’s a very delicate search for equilibrium: I need to...

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I spent the day driving. Let me rephrase: I spent the day having nothing else to do but think. I created this place to sort out my thoughts, but there is not a lot of what came through my brain today that will be sorted in any way. It has been akin swimming through a nightmare. I spent a week having to socialize with family, I was really eager to have some alone time. Now that I have it, I feel completely empty inside. I created this place to sort out my thoughts, not to talk about my mood. But today, I feel like screaming into the void....

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I’ve been able to talk to a couple of people, included my therapist, and I’m a bit better. I still have things to process, though. In the meantime, I want to talk a bit about… video games. I work in IT, I’m some sort of a nerd, so obviously, I play video games. Actually, it’s not that obvious: I really started playing very late in my life. I remember it quite well: I was just out of another big breakup. Since then I’ve been playing quite irregularly: sometimes almost nothing for months, sometimes head first in the game and doing little else, to the point of being ashamed of being such a no-life. These days, I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research about Asperger, about depression, and...

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I had an awful lot on my plate this week. This place is where I formalize my thoughts, but right now, there’s like a big stormy cloud in my mind, and it’s not yet ready to be sorted and given a tidy form, hence the silence. As I said, I was diagnosed high potential, or gifted, or whatever the state of the art calls it right now. I’ve been diagnosed as autistic too, and it appears that my personality type is INTJ (which is unsurprising, as it seems to be the one that comes back the more often for aspies). There is a lot of overlap, so I don’t know what comes from which. One thing I read about INTJs is true for me though: I don’t really know how to handle a problem. Not that I can’t and don’t...

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I was browsing the Internet, and one specific area of Reddit were people collect quotes from very smart individuals; things like “I’ve got an IQ of 157 and was writing philosophical essays when you peons were still drooling in kindergarten.” My reaction is twofold: Do they even know what a realistic IQ number is? OMG, do I even remotely sound like that? I hope I don’t. IQ is just a number, and by itself doesn’t mean anything. I know my score, it’s a good one, and yet I’m very easily outsmarted. As a matter of fact, just about every person I know is smarter than I am in may ways. People bragging about their IQ of 150+ are liars, stupid (someone with that kind of IQ would know how unlikely it...

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