I have Asperger's

And social anxiety/generalized anxiety. Life is fun, huh? :-p

:hi:

The world is a weird, very random, and truly wonderful place.

I think the last radical shift I had in my viewpoint was reading Richard Scarry to my kids. The world really is like Busytown. I used to think there was a reason behind much of what people did, since my own world was built on an elaborate foundation of social rules I'd gleaned from my observations of people. I already knew and accepted my own weaknesses -- my disabilities following verbal instructions, my troubles recognizing people, my astonishing ability to misjudge peoples' intentions, and my gift for saying inappropriate things -- but part of me still assumed there was some underlying order to society that I simply couldn't see, and that if I only studied people a little more I might find it.

But reading that book, all those little animal people getting into all sorts of trouble, bouncing along from one chaotic situation to another for no discernible reason, well, that's the way it is. Everyone makes their own sense of life, and I was free to make my own sense of life, and the sense of life I made really didn't have to conform to any set social standard. Certainly I had to understand the rules of society and, for the most part behave in a manner that was non-threatening and comfortable to other people (if only to stay out of trouble and exist as a social being) but I was under no obligation to internalize the common explanations for these social rules because people do what they do, experience what happens, and explain it later, no matter what claims of rationality and foresight they make. Thinking things through before we act is a rare human behavior. Mostly humans go through the day responding to inputs and making decisions based on emotions and intuitions and habits, because we simply don't have the time or the brainpower to calculate the consequences of our every action.

I wonder if the social anxiety was brought about by the aspergers? I know I have trouble with the simplest things, like how to enter a conversation and how to know when it is time to stop talking and walk away from people. That last one stumps me a lot and it's embarassing because people kind of end up 'getting rid' of me.

:hug: