Reply #142: Thank you for that excellent description of the "balancing act"

[Mr_Spock]

that so many of us face. I get SO frustrated with the psychologists, psychiatrists and others who are taught a very rigid system of diagnosing people with "disorders". Unfortunately this "disorder" is best described as a set of stereotypical ways of thinking that are expressed in different aspects of our lives and appear to other so called "neurotypical" folks as "odd" or "abnormal". Both you and I are VERY capable of expressing ourselves here in writing (you better than me), but both of us have issues with our face to face interfaces. We are both acutely aware of our conditions, yet from your other posts it is clear that I can more easily appear relatively "normal" amongst my piers. Does that make me a failure or a bad example for other Aspergers people? It makes me very unhappy as I sit here feeling like I have to defend my ability to function (pretend) relatively normally. Discounting all of the pain felt by someone who is in this in-between place is such an awful thing to do - I have an indescribable instinct to want to lash out and beat the living shit out of these people here who insist on arguing whether it is a "disease" (like it matters - just another way to attack my level of functioning) or arguing about the definition of "dysfunction" and what does that mean (like I want to split hairs about this).

"What this often results in is someone looking very successful in all areas while in their head they are performing a massive juggling act, like juggling seven balls while tap-dancing.

Thanks so much for this very apt description. I am trying to control my anger toward the instigators in this post. They are even worse than the knuckle-heads I have had to deal with when growing up because they have some knowledge of the issue, but they see things from their own very narrow perspective and by applying their limited standards are further bullying by personally deciding based on their limited experiences what should and shouldn't be considered "pain". The only thing worse than an ignorant person is a person with limited knowledge who has decided that they know all there is to know. I thank these folks for causing me a great deal of angst and pain - perhaps I should stop dedicating my life to appearing "normal" so that I can provide for my family (which, incidentally, I don't live with - I wonder why that is?). :mad: