Here is a benefit that can make your Aspergers seem to disappear — making it as easy for you to communicate as a supposedly NT (NeuroTypical) “normally wired” person.
Benefit #5: You can go undercover!
How would you like to be with people who just are not able to detect that there is something slightly different about you? Is that possible? And people who are not the members of your ‘star-trek chess club’?
Consider this: You are in 6th grade, and there is a new kid from Brazil in your class. Enrique speaks no English, and no one in the class speaks Portuguese. For the first day, he becomes the center of attention, but because communication is so difficult, most of your classmates just give up and fade into their old cliques.
But, you, have more patience than they, and hey, those classmates don’t talk to you very much anyway. So you and “Henry” start talking. Slowly at first, but you and he get along quite well.
You see, Henry has no sensitivity to those social-emotional queues that your classmates do. Your ‘social ineptness’ means little to him. And after a while, you can talk with him on many subjects, not just your favorite: dinosaurs — you may even find his fascination for the local trees which are so different from those of Brazil a topic of mutual interest.
So here is another Aspie advantage: with a little flexibility, you can fit in very well with groups of folks from other cultures. In fact, I find that here in Honolulu, where I live, that there are so many cutural heritiges that I can interact with, that I can thrive without feeling the vacuum. In fact, I only feel the vacuum in strict mono-culture environments.
Try it out. You might find you are able to move from culture to culture with more ease than our normally wired neuro-typical friends..
