Aspergers Syndrome Blog------On Social Interaction Copyright Robert Fullarton 2013

I myself am the epitome of the character, the diagnosis and the prognosis in whole. I have sought for a company to understand me better than the common man and woman. I have refused to see the overrated importance of football –as a mass adhesive-, refused to see the importance of fashion, technology and our modern fear mongering analysis of the financial sectors. I am different genetically, psychologically and ideologically to my common peer and almost all Aspies are in many different ways and gradations of life. I first came across the Dublin Asperger Social Group through finding an Internet video, which further outlined the work and the life of a Mr. David Jordan who helped to found the group back in 2003. Both David and many of the group members had broken away from Aspire, the official society and social group for Aspies in Ireland and helped to form this new social group, so to create an new environment of understanding, tolerance and mutuality. David himself, a doctor in Geology, a passionate collector of minerals and rocks, an avid astronomer and reader of philosophy interested me, upon my first meeting with the group. We simply talked for two hours about philosophy and literature. I had suddenly decided on the spur of the moment one day, in an effort to change my monotonous life, to call and get in touch with David, with the number I had been given off Aspire.

Although my symptoms were affecting me greatly, I found a pleasant and rather understandable atmosphere in the Dublin Asperger Social Group. For the first time I did not have a sense of any judgment being passed on me for being different, for being my self, for being over nervous, unconfident, shy and for thinking differently to everyone else. Met new faces, heard new stories, made friends and learnt that with each case of Asperger Syndrome, there are the obsessions, the eccentricities, the symptoms of mental health difficulties and often a sense of sociaphobia that entails the disorder itself.

Over many conversations with my friend David, I gradually built up a great-accumulated knowledge of the disorder of itself and David’s story, which was often strikingly similar to my own. He had suffered for years with a crippling panic disorder, suffering up to seven panic attacks a day –at the worst of times- feeling his nerves melt away at the sheer noise and the brashness of the crowd. His story was one of trying to understand himself and why he felt so fundamentally different to the common man and woman on the street. His neurochemistry like my own operates like a jolt of recurrent energy, that accelerates and drives at a velocity that is twice as quick and profoundly more conscious than your average human being. The mind of the high functioning Aspie is technical, it is analytical, it quantifies and calculates the statistical, the numerical, the linguistical and the factual world of information and knowledge and with this intense intake, there will be the often-apparent ineptness, which Aspies find with socialising. Aspies are great with facts and figures but not with people, this is often the case. However with the group –which meets up every Sunday in Dublin city centre at approximately four o’clock in the evening- there is a candid display of understanding, mutual experiences, stories and approvals met. What I felt was empathy and sympathy from my first experience with the group. I have met members from other countries who have hooked up with the group –ranging from Australia and England, to Poland and Lithuania- and have found this all to be a cathartic learning experience. I finally had accepted my Aspergers Syndrome, but still my nervous disorder continued to cause me great pain and misery on a daily basis.

As I stated earlier with David’s case itself, about his crippling anxiety and the daily routine of panic attacks, he once told me that when he was younger, in the throes of sorrow and disorder, he called out simply and yet instinctively “why does there have to be males and females, why cant there be people!” I find this statement to define, truthfully the estrangement with which Aspies and other minorities in general have faced. A generalised stigma, a reluctant effort to understand and a society based ignorance often follows the image of those do not prescribe to the normative of the everyday. Not only does this statement suggest the implementation of socially made boundaries between the sexes, but the alienation felt between Aspie men and women in general and it can even sum up the feeling no doubt for Aspie girls and NT men.

Where an individual is born, and where he or she does not fit the stereotype, there will be confusion and there will be trouble, no matter what. I have learned much from my friend David and been great advice from the venerable lessons of a man that has had to learn the hard way like myself. He is the chief organiser and often the mediator and the adviser to many members of the group, if any troubles, confrontations or domestic issues arise. Each member has a mental health problem, this nearly always entails, it results from the anxiety that comes hand in hand with Asperger Syndrome and indeed I believe that the sense of rootless identity can drive a human to ruin unless it is filled with an occupation, a therapy, a creative form for administering energy and a way to pursue activities and fulfilment. Anyone who suffers from a mental illness should seek the fulfilment of his or her personality. For every illness suffered, the individual must reach out and seek similar people, social groups and organisations. The catharsis sought is only met when the alienation of the heart and the ideal is overrun. But I believe that this is very problematic, very difficult and very much onerous for the duty of the recovering individual to pick themselves up and not to fall victim to all the snares and open traps that lie in wait through the cream of the crop, the elite and the social climbers which we all see as the strutting peacocks, the black widow spiders and the raving bulls which run amok through our city streets.