Hell.. my daughter impressed me last night.

equalsql

She is 17 years old and has ASD but by God she know this planet backwards.
I sat next to her last night while she tried an online quiz that lasted 15 minutes where she needed to enter as many country names as possible.  She typed in 195 (from memory) in 10 minutes (there are 197 in total)..and not only that she told even told me the capitals of each one as she did it. It was bloody impressive. 
She's always been fascinated by maps and is better than any satnav when she's out in the car with us. She even knows where all the speed cameras are. One of her ambitions is to journey on every motorway in this country.  

And to top it all off not only does she have perfect pitch and an amazing singing voice, she was described by her music teacher as one of the most gifted natural musicians he had ever encountered.

Of course the downside is that she has all sorts of problems related to the ASD in that she just doesn't understand the world we inhabit.
So she's dropped out of collage and become a recluse.

Every silver-lining has a cloud..

frankus

The problem with the path less travelled is it's riddled with doubts, it makes growing up really tough (as you no doubt know), but when grown up it means you're one tough individual and that combined with smarts makes for a super-hero.

I hope she gets a handle on things, reality is she's probably got a very good handle on the world and struggles accepting other people's daft views.

I hope she doesn't become a recluse for the sake of the rest of us, we need brains and talent to lift us and make us better people

Axe_meister

They can surprise you can't they.

I have two ASD kids, Step Daughter (16) without official diagnosis, and Son (10) who has been formally diagnosed.

Both are musically gifted with perfect pitch. My daughter can do the rubiks cube in 18 seconds, not quite discovered 
my sons absolute talent yet, but he's bloody good on drums, and playing Halo.

My son had a major breakthrough at school with his peers by "coming out" that he had ASD. Made relationships
so much easier at school.

holnrew

Impressive. 

WezV

When I used to work in schools we had a lot of parents that automatically expected an ASD diagnosis to come along with a special gift.

Sometimes it does.   Sometimes it just means you can name all the pokemon (like an 18 year old lad i supported).   He still had a really fresh perspective that made me questions a lot of assumptions I had about the world

another had taught himself to play the banjo.  He had a great sense of humour, but used to really piss of a lot of teachers for his awkwardly direct questions.  They told me he had behavioural issues, the only issue was their inability to react to an on topic question that's come from a different perspective to theirs

holnrew

I'm being assessed for it on Friday. If I do have it, it must be mild because I'm not amazing at anything really.

equalsql

holnrew said:

I'm being assessed for it on Friday. If I do have it, it must be mild because I'm not amazing at anything really.

You may be amazing at something that you're not aware of. My daughter doesn't think she's good at anything..but this is obviously not the case. She has little if any confidence even when shown what she's achieved. 

DLM

holnrew said:

I'm being assessed for it on Friday. If I do have it, it must be mild because I'm not amazing at anything really.

You makes oi larf reet good, though, Holn. *hugs*

frankus

One of the things I have to remind myself of and it's not easy, is all those people I think are stupid for not understanding .. regular expressions or agile or z notation or ... [pretends to run out of stuff] aren't idiots, far from, it's really easy to forget that because by forgetting it I don't need to squirm about the immodesty of recognising I'm good at those things.

Odd thing is, after allowing myself to be good at some things, I stopped feeling quite so inadequate at the things I'm not great at, just by allowing other people to not be good at stuff, I could be not good at stuff AND THEN I started to realise that meant they had other talents that'd be well worth finding out about and encouraging..

... and if that sounds stupidly obvious to you then, guess what