Aspies Are Different

This blog was started more than two years ago for the purpose of trying to explain that an Asperger mind is different from a neurotypical mind.

To this day I don’t seem to have made a dent, at least on most of those who comment. With some I do. Or maybe they already felt that way. I have received some very nice feedback on some of my posts. And a lot of negative feed.

Perhaps it’s the negative writers who feel more compelled to say something. Only yesterday I got a comment that was the same old, same old. The writer reminded me once again that Ryo Kiyan was told repeatedly by his bosses and by Miss M herself to stay away from her. And yet he didn’t. That, said the writer, is stalking. Since Ryo refused to recognize that it was stalking, and since he didn’t obey, he was not a good person.

I lived with Ryo. I knew him all his life, and happen to know he was a good person. I also know he didn’t think like you or me. His whole mind worked differently because it was an Asperger mind. What seems obvious to us never occurred to him. And what seemed obvious to him would not have occurred to us.

In his mind, he was right to try every which way to carry on a dialog with Miss M, to get her to see that he meant well, that he liked her, and wanted to be her friend. It seemed to him that those who would try to prevent that happy state were wrong. If he obeyed them, he would be wrong, too.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Ryo was a very stubborn person. You and I know it’s better to be flexible, but stubborn is the way he was and he couldn’t help it any more than he could help having Asperger’s syndrome. He saw things his way, and if anyone saw it another way, it meant they didn’t like him and didn’t like anything he did. Imagine having to go through life with that attitude. But that was all he knew and he didn’t understand any other way.

Fortunately not all Aspies are so stubborn, but they are different from non-Aspies. Those differences manifest themselves in many different ways. There’s an old chestnut that goes, “If you’ve met one person with Asperger’s syndrome, you’ve met one person with Asperger’s syndrome.” You can’t expect them all to be the same and you can’t expect them to be like non-Aspies. They can’t be. Their brains are wired differently. They have no idea what it’s like not to have Asperger’s syndrome because Asperger’s syndrome is all they’ve ever known. And there’s nothing wrong with it, until they clash with non-Aspies.

Aspies can do many things that non-Aspies can’t. They can focus on things that non-Aspies don’t even notice. They can take a huge interest in something non-Aspies don’t care about, learn everything there is to know, and talk your ears off about it. Because it’s hard for them to put themselves in other people’s shoes, they can’t understand that other people might not share their interest.

That inability to grasp where other people are coming from is why Ryo had no idea he was scaring Miss M with his persistence. That’s why a mediation session (which was his idea, no one else’s) might have helped in explaining him to her and her to him. It would have been a lot cheaper and easier than the kangaroo court Sullivan County held and might have had a happier outcome all around.

So you see? Aspies aren’t so dumb after all. They are only different.

Incidentally, my young adult book “Under Cover” has been recommended by All Romance eBooks. I’m not sure why, since “Under Cover” is not really a romance, even though it has some romance in it. Mostly it’s suspense, but they seem to like the book enough to recommend it. I hope you will like it, too, even if you’re not a young adult.