OT: Asperger's syndrome.

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.