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| Woman exhibits absolutely no abnormal behavior, is diagnosed with Asperger's. by Zseni 02/01/2007, 6:17pm PST | ||||
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| Kiriana, a 24-year-old graduate student, is enamored of details. She's also easily absorbed: A week ago, she worked on the puzzle for 10 straight hours, without pausing for so much as a sip of water.
Girls are generally recognized as superior mimics, says Tony Attwood, a pioneering Asperger's researcher. Those with AS hold back and observe until they learn the "rules," then imitate their way through social situations. But for a girl like Kiriana with undiagnosed Asperger's, her ability to manage her symptoms better than a boy can be less than a blessing; often it's a curse that keeps her suffering in silence. "Girls can fake it quite well," says Liane Willey, a psycholinguist with AS who describes how she assumes different personalities when switching social gears in her autobiography, Pretending to Be Normal. Kiriana's similar strategy amounts to remembering and rehearsing scripts. When she walks into a clothing shop, for example, she pulls up a mental dialogue box: "No thanks, I'm just looking," is what one should say if a saleswoman offers help. But as Attwood points out, such playacting is not intuitive, and is therefore exhausting. Incessant puzzling wasn't necessarily an academic boon: Practicing for the math portion of the SAT, Kiriana says, "I would ponder the logic instead of just using shortcut strategies." The diagnosis was the only one that reconciled, as she puts it, her special talent for being smart and stupid at the same time. "In this very small world of Asperger's," she says, "that's normal." "The things most people think of as fun are work to me," she says, citing the complicated dynamics of relationships and social interaction. "To me, fun would be reading a textbook." Kiriana gets rushes of happiness, pride, and guilt, but abstract concepts—patriotism, for example, or spirituality—don't rouse her. "I do cry," she says, "but it's usually out of anger or frustration. Rarely do I feel true sadness." She did feel terribly sad this year over the death of Slinky, her cat. For as long as she can remember, she's had a need for rational understanding, to take things apart to know how they're put together. That kind of thinking has helped her become an ace science student, a precise artist, a forceful writer—all in spite of, or maybe because of, her Asperger's traits. Zseni says: Kiriana is totally different from everyone else in the world. I'm going to buy her a WoW subscription and set up a profile on Kuro5hin for her so she can be with all the other people who defy normal human understanding. |
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Woman exhibits absolutely no abnormal behavior, is diagnosed with Asperger's. by 02/01/2007, 6:17pm PST  Re: Woman exhibits absolutely no abnormal behavior, is diagnosed with Asperger's by 02/01/2007, 6:41pm PST Okay hm. NT by 02/02/2007, 6:17am PST Man this article pisses me off. by 02/02/2007, 9:38am PST if we didn't have fuzzy, questionairre requirements for disorders, how would I NT by 02/04/2007, 3:36pm PST |
