Tell HN: AS, my story.... | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: AS, my story....

20 pointsaitoehigie8 comments

Until a months ago, I had always thought that I had AS (due to a now faulty self diagnosis, in retrospect). I had always had the symptoms of someone suffering from it, i.e. social awkwardness, inability to develop relationships and friendships, compulsive behaviours, etc. All until a few months ago, when I got a day job that forced me to interact and interface with a lot of people for at least 11 hours a day, 5 days a week. To my surprise, I noticed that my social skills has greatly improved, I now know what to do in most social situations, I have developed some close relationships with people, I am now more outgoing, more assertive, and more vocal. All this have gotten me thinking, most hackers who lack social skills blame it on AS, and resign themselves to fate, but I think that it can be 'cured', I got into programming because of my character makeup, and the more my programming skills improved, the worse my social skills became, it then became a vicious cycle, which has now broken. Maybe I never had AS after all, maybe I did, but the thing is this, social skills, developing relationships etc can be learned and with practice, you can change and become a better more wholesome hacker.

I've self-identified as having Asperger's since I heard about it, despite being relatively normal socially since high school (about 5 years before hearing about AS).

Social skills are absolutely skills. They're learnable, somewhat teachable, and definitely not fixed at birth. A diagnosis of Asperger's isn't a life-sentence of nerddom.

The difference is in how easily you can learn those skills. I had to painfully, laboriously, slowly observe people and pay close attention to acquire my social skills. Nothing came naturally - at times I was thinking "That's totally illogical. Why do people ask 'How are you?' when they don't care about the answer?" I'm told that most normal people pick this up by osmosis. Plop them in a social situation, and they'll have an intuitive feel of what to do.

For an analogy, it may be good to compare to another skill. As a kid, I always had an intuitive feel for math, such that I could rederive trig on the car ride to a math competition (nobody in our school had had it yet, since we were only 7-9th grade and competing in a high school league) or place in the top 10 on the geometry section of a big math competition despite never having had formal geometry instruction. I assume this is the same sort of intuitive knowledge that most people have of social situations. But since it's expected that people will find math hard and people easy, there's a whole institutional structure for instructing people in math. Similar support structures for instructing people in social skills are often stigmatized - why can't you figure it out on your own, people think.

Similar support structures for instructing people in social skills are often stigmatized - why can't you figure it out on your own, people think.

I believe that some of the stigma associated with systematic study of social skills is guilt-by-association with the self-help movement. A poorly socialized person in the grip of a self-help author is never a pretty sight.

Break that association and I think that general acceptance of teaching social skills would improve.

Maybe people feel a lot more unique, important or special when they call themselves AS instead of plain shy, or ADD instead of lazy - or even call themselves "depressed" when they have plenty of reason to be sad...

It's also potentially better for less ethical doctors to diagnose their "I-want-to-be-sick" included patients as this or that - after all, they use to get comissions for drug sales in many countries (and taking Prozac or Ritalin, even if you're a "normal person", won't kill you anyway)

I know why the above was downvoted. But here is a subtle point in there. AS is classically over diagnosed. A lot of my friends were diagnosed AS at school. The vast majority of them had an epiphany moment that "cured" it in the last few years.

It makes me mad because a minority of those friends really do have a problem. So many people are told they are AS it negates any benefit of diagnosis.

I spent about 15 years sitting in cubicles owned by large and small corporations, and all that time I thought I didn't have much social skills.

I spent about three years trying out real estate, and found ... my social skills really were not very good. But to my great surprise I found that I really like being around and talking to lots of different people.

Amazing how your current life can tend to define your life.

This is why diagnosis can be hard. Some people don't have social skills because they've never learned social skills. I had trouble learning social skills, but I didn't have many of the other symptoms. Taking one of the self-diagnosis tests from my perspective as a teenager, I would have been diagnosed. However, the problem was that I had different interests than my peers, and I had a different sexual orientation that I had difficulty in accepting. Once I found "my people," my social skills improved dramatically.

AS does exist, but not all people with poor social skills have it.

I have AS and I know from experience that it is not something that can be "cured". The thing to do is recognize that dealing with people and social situations is not something that is instinctual, but must be learned. This is probably why you feel more outgoing and social: you have had to work at it and eventually you became proficient.

For me, I can get along with people perfectly well, but it does take a lot of mental energy to do so, and I still have to form sentences in my head before I can say them; it does not happen automatically. I also have to pay close attention to body language and voice inflections, in order to know what people are really trying to say.

I would venture to say that there is no such thing as a cure for AS or other forms of Autism. It has more to do with how the brain is wired than it does with inner beings being trapped inside a metaphorical cage. You are doing the right thing by engaging with other people and learning how to deal with them. But you should also know that AS can be a strength too.

not the interesting actionscript story I was hoping for...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com