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OT: Asperger's syndrome.

From:Adrian Morgan <morg0072@...>
Date:Tuesday, June 27, 2000, 0:58
Irina Rempt wrote, quoting myself:

> > Inversely, I've been known to get _majorly_ offended > > when people assume to know what I'm thinking. That's > > one thing that really gets to me. Especially when > > they're wrong and won't admit the possibility that > > they _are_ wrong. > > I'm almost the other way around - if people assume to > know what I'm thinking and I feel they're wrong, I > start thinking there's something wrong with *me*, for > instance that I should really be thinking what they > think I'm thinking. Does that make any sense?
A related thing: If in a shop (e.g. to buy a snack) and someone voiced a prediction of what I would choose, then this would always offend me and I would deliberately choose something else. As for the incorrect-assumption thing, the most extreme example I can think of - and this one's so extreme I think anyone would be offended - was as follows. I've been hesitant to air this in public - I don't want to risk nurturing any of the tensions in my family - but it does illustrate some important points like how the knowledge that someone has a mental syndrome of some kind can cause people to make unnecessarily pessimistic assumptions about their behaviour. I've written it out so that I could then decide whether to send it or delete it, and I think that on balance it's probably OK. The only people on this list who have actually met my parents are yourselves (Irina and Boudewijn) and you know that they are, on the whole, decent people. It was the end of the year, I was living at the Bible College at the time, and Mum was helping me to clean up the room for the holidays. We'd washed the curtains and layed them out on the chair in front of my computer, then we went out for a meal and everything was fine. But as we walked back into my room afterwards, disaster struck. From just a look in my eye, apparently, she extrapolated that I was about to go and sit on the wet curtains and use my computer. I don't remember exactly how, but somehow we had a _massive_ argument (and Mum in a bad mood ain't a pretty sight), shouting at each other and all that (she was shouting, I was despairing) and essentially what made that argument happen was that there was no room for doubt in her mind that just because she had interpreted a glint in my eye in a particular way, she knew for _certain_ what I was thinking, what I was about to do. There was no space in her head for me to insert the information that in fact I had *not* been about to sit on the wet curtains, that instead whilst glancing at the computer I had been thinking where best to *move* them to, and that I did *not* need Mum treating me like a five-year-old and making it clear how stupid [1] I was for being about to do something that I wasn't about to do at all. [1] Speaking of the word 'stupid', it seems that in my parents' generation, words like 'stupid' and 'idiot' referred exclusively to intellectual capacity, whereas now their connotations are far more wide-ranging and also a little less extreme. -- www. | Here and there I like to preserve a few islands of sanity netyp.com/ | within the vast sea of absurdity which is my mind. member/ | After all, you can't survive as an eight foot tall dragon | flesh eating dragon if you've got no concept of reality.