Headspace is an app for meditation and I know some people will say it is hard for people with Asperger or ADHD to focus long enough but this app learned me it is not about having a quiet mind but make it focus on something else while you relax. The reason I love this app more than other meditation apps is because you can learn to focus doing certain aspects of like stress and so on.
WaterMinder helps me drink water and other fluids as I am really bad at remembering to drink stuff plus it recently started to use it to become more healthy and drink more water instead of just drinking cola and so on all the time.
The last app I will mention is Moodistory which is an app which you can use to journal how you life is by giving smilies, add icons for what you did doing the day and write down everything you want. I like it especially because you can make it as simple or advanced you want
Before I go today I want to say sorry the apps are all pay and none free, maybe I will find some awesome free ones for another time.
Today I want to share some myths about Asperger’s and answer what I think of them compared to me. Since all people with Asperger’s are different I will tell if I am different from others with Asperger’s according to the myth
1. People with Asperger’s syndrome do not have emotions or feelings.
Answer: I have plenty of emotions and feelings, sometimes I might even get it stronger than NT people.
2. People with Asperger’s syndrome have no interest in social interaction.
Answer: I like spending time with people but often need a break afterwards while I can get sick if way too many people in one time like in a mall on Black Friday.
3. People with Asperger’s syndrome do not have a sense of humor.
Answer: I have no humor… Of course I do but sometimes I do not get the jokes as quickly or laugh at other things.
4. People with Asperger’s syndrome are not interested in sex.
Answer: I am interested in sex, nothing more to say to that.
5. People with Asperger’s syndrome do not speak.
Answer: I, sometimes wish I did not speak because my mind sees a connection fast and sometimes it is not nice connection. Fx my uncle and cousin was one time talking about if there were cell phones back when my uncle was a child and without thinking I yelled “Nope they was first invited by the time he reached menopause age. But there are people with Asperger’s who does not speak.
6. People with Asperger’s syndrome are all geniuses.
Answer: I am not clever but not stupid either.
7. People with Asperger’s syndrome are mentally retarded.
Answer: I am not clever but not stupid either.
8. People with Asperger’s syndrome cannot have normal relationships or live independently.
Answer: I have been having 2 girlfriends and I am living pretty independently in an apartment. Of course my parents helps me a bit like you do with normal kids but doing fine on my own and have planned trips to Japan on my own before.
9. People with Asperger’s syndrome will never be able to hold “real” jobs.
Answer: I have work part time (25 hours) at IT company which takes 45mins by train to get there so maybe I am not able to work full time but I am doing my part and I love it.
10. Asperger’s syndrome disorders are extremely rare, and easy to spot when they exist.
Answer: If you know what to look for then there is plenty of us, but since it is not called Asperger’s anymore we are rare I guess lol
Have you ever felt a person was acting like you in a movie or series before? Well that kind of thing happens for people with Asperger’s as well and since I have watched a lot of movies and series it have have happened quiet a lot. I have picked 2 series and 2 movies which I have watched which all have an Asperger’s character in the, but before I start I would like to say that some Asperger’s do not like the way the people are acting in them but to me, it is not a problem as we are all different just like ‘normal’ people are different. Anyway my picks are: Adam, Atypical, Extraordinary Attorney Woo (Korean poster) and Mozart and the whale
Adam
The movie Adam is a movie about a guy named Adam who has lived with his dad all his life but he has died and now Adam has to live on his own but he has no clue about everything and to make things more interested a cute girl named Beth, moves in the apartment. This movie was the first time I watched a movie with Asperger’s and I loved how they explained things like we do not like strangers so much, we have routines and prefer to stick with them, we do not always know what to say and sometimes it comes out wrong. I love how they show him growing in the entire movie from not knowing when to stop talking about space to help a women in the end. I highly recommend it and so does my former headmaster as Asperger’s school here in Denmark as I showed it to her and she decide it would be a movie for the teachers there to watch. I also recommend watching it twice because many of the events have two meanings and I did not notice them before I watched it again.
Atypical
The series Atypical is a series about an a guy named Sam with Asperger’s who have live his whole life where his mom has taken care of all his needs while his sister sometime tease him but also cares about him. This one shows that we not always know what to do about thing and how to feel about people as he falls in love with his psychiatrist because she seems nice to him and in the end she hates him for ruin her relationship with the father of her child. They also shows that we sometimes goes on living our lives like nothing happens even when his parents breaks up because of his moms affair. Sam finds love even he is not sure what love is and his girlfriend does a lot of cute things for him even that his sister is a bit against her. It also show we sometimes have a subject we really care about and for Sam that one is penguins
Extraordinary Attorney Woo
The series Extraordinary Attorney Woo is a Korean one which compared to the other is following a young woman named Woo who is the first Attorney trainee with Asperger’s who loves to talk about whales and law. She has a few learned things from her father like wait a few seconds before entering a door after knocking and such. Even I am not a woman like in the series it hurt me a bit to see that people if they love us they sometimes get bullied for it as I exercised it myself with my first ex. I am also not as clever as she is and I do not think I have a memory like hers even it is pretty good at times.
Mozart and the whale
I do not know what to say about this movie other than it is pretty unique as many of the characters is having some kind of diagnose and that the main character wants to take care of them like I wanted in real life. I felt I needed to share the movie because it was so unique with all the characters.
Honorable mention
Rain Man is a great movie with Dustin Hoffman, I would not say his character Raymond is having Asperger’s but damm this movie has everything and it came just at the right time when the world needed to see us. He has many of the special things about us like needing a routine and how people watched us back then. I cannot count cards or anything like him but I would like to say thanks to Dustin Hoffman for playing this character
Conclusion
As you can see there are many movies with Asperger’s and other types of people and like I said at first not all Asperger’s like the portrait we have on movie but I feel each of the movies I mentioned has a bit of me inside them as I have in them. I know it is just movies but sometimes movies learns you something about life too. Go watch them if you want to understand a bit about our world.
Autism ( or specifically, asperger’s syndrome) is not that famous in Indonesia. I mean, it is not well-known here. I am sorry i need to say bluntly, even word “autism” widely used by people for joking. So when i heard word autism, i just knew about “ohhh that is special condition” period.
But life is a journey. Destiny brought me to meet one special friend. Call him O, i mention initial only because i haven’t asked his permission to mention about him here. He is a person with asperger’s syndrome. Since beginning he said it, i started to feel interested in asperger’s syndrome. But i didnt really find info about it. Until we became closer and i felt “wow this guy is different. He is quite difficult”. Because the way he acted and treated me were quite different from other friends i have. I felt hurted often. Felt difficult to understand him. But deep inside my heart, i believed he is a nice guy. And then i decided, i need to learn more about asperger’s syndrome. I need to find out why he treats me like that. I didn’t want to give up with this friendship. Beside that i really love challenge. I felt challenged by O and his characters. So i collected articles about asperger’s syndrome. Read and learned about it.
We talked a lot about it. He taught me about anything related to asperger’s syndrome. So many and maybe i cant explain it perfectly but he taught me so many important things that affected my life after knew it, in good way of course. What a precious life experience i learned from him. Life changing events. I feel grateful for that.
He showed me his good characters and traits that he has and mostly related to asperger’s syndrome. And i need to admit, i started to think, people with asperger’s syndrome are very nice, unique n interesting. I admire some of their traits.
Finally we reached next stage of friendship that was better than before. I was very happy, admired our friendship. We started to know each other better and less conflict.
More i learned about asperger’s syndrome and aspie people (people with asperger’s syndrome) , i could understand “ohhh being unique and different is sometimes not as easy as we can imagine” . I got conclusion, mostly people with aspie got bullied. I thought about it and felt sad. No. That happened because people dont understand enough about asperger’s syndrome. It is not fair. They face difficulties in life that they don’t deserve just because people don’t know much about them. So i told him about my idea. Let’s make a book about friendship between aspie people and neurotypical people. Make more people aware about asperger’s syndrome and accept the differences. Let’s tell readers and people about our experiences. And he agreed.
Unfortunately other destiny brought us into different way of life. So we walked into different path.
But sometimes it is life. You need to lose someone or something, in order to get more space for someone or something new in your life. Maybe something better or more suitable for you. And unexpectedly, i met Jesper after that.
I didn’t know that Jesper is an aspie, in the beginning, until i found it later. Ohhh my … ! I felt so happy. Yeay. I had thought maybe it is my destiny to have aspie people surround me again so i can learn more about asperger’s syndrome.
I remember O told me. An aspie is an aspie. So i wont find other aspie that same like him. Every aspie is unique. He is correct 100% and i finally proved it.
Jesper is having different characters with O. It means i need to learn again about him from zero. Ok. I love it. I love the process and the challenge. But because i have experiences from friendship with O before so it is bit more easy than i had with O.
O and i have very different characteristic but with Jesper , we share some similar interests. Walking, watching movies, travelling, old songs, and some other things. I told Jesper about the idea of making web or something similar like this. But Jesper didnt feel interested before. He said hey so many people already did that. But i told him about an aspie is an aspie. Plus we can make based on our experiences that i believe different with other people’ experience. And i told him about his dream become kindergarten teacher to help kids with asperger’s syndrome (autism). Until one day … he said yes. Hahahaha. I don’t know what made him finally changed his mind hahaha. But here we are. Yeay 🥳.
I feel grateful for Jesper’ presence in my life. So far we have beautiful friendship. Sometimes misunderstandings happened but i think we never fight. He is very patient friend. Always by my side in hard or happy time. He did many things to help me or simply, to make me happy. He has so many good characters, i.e honest, sincere, blunt and funny. I think i need to make new post, special, under topic Jesper in my eyes. Hahahaha.
Sometimes i had frustration time. When Jesper treated me differently from what i thought he would do, in some certain conditions. But it helped me to be patient and tried to understand him more. Many things in life that he haven’t experienced it. So i think it is normal that sometimes he doesnt know how to do. But he is very humble person that want to learn. So we learned about many things together and i think we are happy to explore and discover things in life. I can see clearly, he made so many progress in his life lately. I am proud of him.
One of plans for this web is we will share our friendship experiences between aspie and neurotypical. We hope to get more new friends. Both from aspie and neurotypical people. We will learn more with other aspie and neurotypical people. Maybe we can share our experiences too. Have discussion. Sounds nice. Hahaha. But no judgement. No negative vibes. We learn together here. We make mistakes here.
Suddenly i remember about Atypical series on netflix. About Sam and Paige. Thanks for Kay, a friend that told me about this series. I watched the series right before i met Jesper. This series quite helped me to learn about asperger’s syndrome or autism.
This is link for atypical series on netflix in case you are wondering or feel interested in.
I believe things that happens in Atypical series , most likely happens in an aspie’ life and their friendship or relationship with neurotypical people around them too. From what i heard, sometimes, aspie feel bit hard to understand about neurotypical, social interaction and social clue. O said because the aspie’ brain wired differently. So let this journey begin. I hope at least a little clue can be found here. For aspie n neurotypical. Let’s celebrate life and differences.
I felt that the first post I wanted to do here on my new website which I have created together with awesome Ria, is going to be the story about how I got my diagnose and how it changed my life.
WHAT
Before I start my story I would like to tell that I have Asperger’s and I was diagnose pretty late at 18-19 years old and I am 33 years (Soon 34). I am not much into the new terms for Asperger’s so to me Asperger’s is the name of diagnose even some people might prefer other terms. The way Asperger’s effect me is that if stressed I can get sick with mostly puking and/or headaches. I can get stressed by as simple things as go to work, go to the mall with too many people or a simple phone call. I hate phone calls, meetings, and too many people in one place. I prefer talk to people one-one or texts which is also how I managed to do my job which is being a supporter at a local computer firm and have done so for soon 10 years. I am very happy for my work place. guess that is what you need to know about me.
HOW
Well the story starts when I was born as already when I was just born I was very clumsy and having problems with normal stuff but because Asperger’s was not a normal thing in little Denmark in 1989 then no one knew I was different so my parents was doing their best to help me in life and I have been doing many things over the years like fx almost getting tested for allergy, when I said almost the doctor only noticed that my sickness was not fitting a period of allergy on the time I was about to get tested. Thank God for that as I am scared of needles. I also got MR brain scanning where I almost fell asleep and a trainer for my being clumsy. All of this attempts happened until I was 18 years old and got to try a psychiatrist. Until I had always felt weird and I have been teased and bullied a lot doing my child hood. I was not so ‘clever’ on that so luckily did not learn what it was before 16 years old and I am not saying I am the best kid in school because how can you know a thing is bad as a child when it happens every day and no adult tells you it is bad. The teachers and my parents only discovered it because I was almost killed by a class mate who almost broke my neck. I was sad the days I was sent home to find a new school because I did not understand it was bad what had happen. From there life got better but I continued being sick with puke and headaches every time I started new school or place.
WHEN
Like I said I got to join a psychiatrist at 18 years old and we started talking. I do not remember much about what other than life, my family and such things but I do remember them asking me if I was fine with a Norwegian as psychiatrist because they felt he could help me. He could as he was the guy giving me my diagnose. I also remember him laughing when he told me that I had it because Asperger’s really enjoy dinosaurs, space and military in a certain order and I did as well even without knowing it. It was the best day of my life to finally learn why I was like this and I am happy to know.
WHY
The reason I got my diagnose was because I had always felt different and out of place and had a hard time doing anything about it. As I first got my diagnose in high school I did not get any help in primary school at all but in some ways I am happy for that as I fear I would been teased and bullied even more. My life has not been 100% happy just because I got my diagnose as for 1 I tried to become a kindergarten teacher to help kids with needs like mine so when I could hear them say “No one understand me”, I would look them in the eye and say “I know exactly what you feel and think because I have the same and life gets better” to make them feel better but to make a bit long story short then the kindergarten teacher school never understood me and force me to quit instead of trying to help me.
NOW
Now I am working hard in computer company working 25 hours a week, having a boss that helps me and cares for my problems and all of that was possible because Denmark has an awesome school named ASPit for people like me, who helped me, learn computer stuff and get a job.
You but different 