Friday, February 10, 2012

Why did it take so long to figure out?

It is not unusual for an adult like myself to figure out that he has ASD. I will tell you that I am glad that I finally know that I have it. I have always wondered why I was different growing up but never knew why. I know why now and the question now becomes, why did it take so long?
The first reason is that it hasn't been diagnosable for a very long time. My understanding is that the diagnostic criteria for ASD didn't come up until 1992. In one article I read, it wasn't until 1994. Regardless, I was a university student at that time. In an earlier post I talked about how ASD can often look like ADD or ADHD. This is understandable, the Asperger expert, Tony Attwood, suggests that ADD exists in 75 percent of people who have ASD.
Without proper diagnostic criteria available, it is impossible to figure out what is going on. There are so many things that I look back on growing up and I often wonder how things would have turned out if I knew why and how I was different. I didn't know how I was different, so I often made mistakes in social situations. I now aware of the myriad of social errors that I make and tend to repeat over and over again. I can adjust and plan ahead what I will say. I avoid answering questions literally. I try not to talk about myself and my own interests, which is really difficult. I try very hard to not repeat social errors based on my own past mistakes. A good example of that is to avoid answering the question "How are you?" literally. No one cares about how my foot is. No one cares that you are stressed about driving on the highway in the snow. My answer to the question now is "It's the best day of my life!" I have learned to lie, and it makes it easier to maintain the conversation. I get better results with that response. Sadly, I didn't learn this until I was 37. I wish I learned it when I was 5. That is the key difference between an NT and someone who has ASD. The NT will learn this rule intuitively, I learned it by reading the rules. Another thing that is worth mention here is that the answer "It's the best day of my life!" is not even mine. It is an answer that I copied from someone I deemed to be very good a social conversation. So I copied it. This 'imitation' of another person is a technique that I use to improve my social skills. I know "Person A" is really good at conversation. I know that "Person A" is popular among his peers. What does "Person A" do that I don't. Oh yes, I get it. When someone asks "Person A", "How are you?", he always responds by saying that it is the best day of his life. I would like to be perceived by my peers like "Person A" so now that is my answer as well.
Apart from the diagnostic criteria for ASD not being available to doctors until I was in university, I have had another difficulty with figuring out why I was different as well. I grew up in Norway but moved to Canada when I was six. There was a language change that happened when I was very young. I remember sitting in my grade 1 class in Canada, not knowing a word of English. The kids in the class would put up their hands to answer the teacher's questions, so I did too. Of course, I had no idea what the teacher was asking. Once I was embarrassed because she had asked me what the answer was and I just sat there dumbfounded. I didn't know the language. I did learn English fairly fast my parents tell me. By about halfway through the school year I was fluent, but I always had a great deal of difficulty with reading.
I need to digress just a little bit. I remember my teacher's name as Mrs. Bailey. She was in her last year as a teacher before her retirement. My guess is that she was 64 years old when she was teaching me. She would be about 94-95 as I am writing this tonight. I hope that she is doing well.
My mother has for the longest time rejected my ASD. I think it is something that she is embarrassed about. The image that your child isn't 'normal' doesn't sit with her very well. Her response to my diagnosis is guarded, like she doesn't believe it. There is absolutely no blame on my parents at all. I will talk about my birth in another post. It is necessary to emphasize that there is nothing wrong with how my parents raised me that makes me what I am today. She has become more accepting of my 'ASD' now, but at first she did not want to believe it. She would say things like "You're social, you get along with people around you." I would say "It's an act, it's not natural, I have to pretend so I can appear to be social. The reality is that I would rather be by myself almost all of the time." I would point out how I answer questions literally, ie.. 'how are you?" My mother would say that that is a culture thing, you always answer that question like that in Norway, and you are Norwegian. Well, I grew up in Canada, so that doesn't really make sense. I seem to be able to refute my mother's arguments that I do not have 'ASD' quite easily every time.
It is easier to see the arguments that I have ASD when I list them. Here they are.
1. I tend to answer questions that are meant to be non-literal, literally.
2. I imitate the social behaviors of my 'successful' peers rather than react intuitively on my own.
3. I have had to learn social 'rules' rather than just naturally pick them up through practice.
4. My reading comprehension while going through school was far behind my peers of equal age.

My mother's arguments against my ASD are not sound. She has recently come to accept my ASD.
1. That I grew up in a different culture.
2. My reading comprehension was low because I didn't know English very well.
3. I do get along with people around me. (no doubt my compensatory behaviours did fool her)

There is one thing that I learned that should be number 5 on my list. I learned a new language when I was young. This by itself is not that spectacular. However one side effect of having ASD is that you are very good at 'imitation' of new languages. I do not speak English with an accent like some of my family members. This by itself doesn't mean that I have ASD, it's just one more piece of the puzzle and I definitely I have complete puzzle. There are things about Norwegian people speaking English that definitely make them sound like English is not their native language. I speak English as if it is my native language, and it is not. I do not make the mistakes typical Norwegians make when they say things like. "I went to the store to buy three things." ie. "I went to de store to buy tree tings." Completely different. I also make the common errors that English speaking people make when referring to Norwegian things. For example, I say the capital of Norway is "Oslo" (Ahz-low) and there are couple of Norse Gods named "Odin" and "Thor." If I were to say them as a Norwegian, I would say that the capital of Norway is "Uslew" and the gods are "Ewdin" and "Tuer". Thor sounds like the number '2' with an 'r' on the end. Oslo with the 'ew' sound of the number '2' but the opening syllable rhymes with "bush."

I think the key is that I can use imitation in more than one way. I will imitate my socially acceptable peers in order to appear normal. Maybe I should try acting? I can also imitate the proper pronunciation of my second language (English) as if it was my first language. So well that I will often mispronounce the common words of my first language as if it was my second.

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