How do Aspie women compensate for their weak spots; do they, perhaps, make the very specialism of them? Shining a light on this newly realised paradox in my own life in case it illuminates a trend in how Asperger women cope with a world that demands so much that is quite alien of them.
Adult women who discover they are Aspie’s are like butterflies; for they have been tightly bound in an ever-increasingly alien and limited format for what felt like too long and then, ultimately, the extreme straightjacket effect of some sort of chrysalis experience prior to emerging through their diagnostic epiphany...
Life with Asperger's is, to me, like taking a long-running series of snapshots with all of your senses...drowning in them. Considering obsessive love of photography as the externalisation of an inbuilt autistic trait.
At the risk of this sounding like an over generalisation, it seems to me that neurotypical people mostly take in their impressions of the world through their heads and their fingertips whereas, as someone with Asperger’s (and I have read about this trait a lot in Aspie accounts), I seem to take in my impressions … Continue reading Impressionable: a breakthrough in working with super-sensitivity
Is it true that women with Asperger's struggle with verbal communication and prefer to communicate in writing and, if so, what are the pitfalls and the perks?
Asperger's can be challenging for any woman; and parenting a child with more typical needs than your own can place those challenges right under a microscope...but you both stand to gain such a lot, in the long run, as I am now discovering. Examining some classic Aspie traits in the light of motherhood...
When we open our minds to the fact we have access to experiences we can't always explain with logic, we realise we are the early warning system to ourselves. Above all, when we allow ourselves, we just know what we know...with every instinct in our body and soul and this is our gift; albeit it a typically double-edged one...(read on).
The propensity to teach ourselves new skills and prefer to do things our own way from the outset is, I suspect, a trait of high-functioning autism. It makes us into mavericks, it sometimes increases what looks like our failure or non-completion rate and it frustrates the hell out of partners when we prefer to construct things "out of the box" without first consulting the instruction leaflet. However, it also makes us movers and shakers when it comes to making paradigm leaps...a much needed skillset at this point in time.
I’m sharing these thoughts because I’ve been swept over by a sort of epiphany that I am on the autistic spectrum and I'm by far from the only one discovering this in my 50s! The more I delve, the more I (a) discover anecdotes that sound like myself now or as a child/young adult (people … Continue reading Are you on the autism spectrum?
When we are in chronic pain, or even an episode of acute pain that seems to go on and on, who do we share that with, can we even expect to share and does it make it better or worse to convey to loved ones what we are going through? Yet, do we need that outlet of saying it like it is and not feeling so isolated in our experience and, if so, where do we get that from, without stirring up the pot to make ourselves feel all the more defeated from over-talking it. This conundrum is familiar territory to anyone who lives with pain, chronic illness, even the disillusionment of daily chronic fatigue. Sharing some home truths, perhaps some helpful perspectives, from my own experience of this highly emotive topic.
Living whole 