Bill Gates Has a Sadz About His Divorce

My almost-adult son is extremely smart and possibly on the spectrum. He has genuine emotions but just does not always get the nuances. So out of concern for me, he tells me to step wearing makeup because the time for me to look pretty is over. He means it to help me save time—no need to fix all that work mom.

However, he gets the big things. He gets that an affair is wrong and hurtful.

I’ve seen the Youtube claims that Gates’ fidgeting and gaucheness look like ASD but it doesn’t really add up. Be careful you don’t get your head ripped off by autism advocates for that one.

You’l probably aooreciate this as a member of the meducal profession: I worked in environmental health for ten years and remember the moment when autistic self-advocates started rethinking their own trend of posthumously diagnosing dead celebs like Einstein, Mozart, Van Gogh and Michelangelo as Aspie based on the thinnest of pretexts. When this fashion opened the door to shill researchers speculating that Hitler, Ted Bundy and various historical fiends were spectrumy, the dx-in-absentia trend died down a bit.

For the record, even if Mozart acted like a trypical rocker at times there was no way Mozart’s father could have dragged six year old Wolfgang around Europe in a covered wagon to play for the crown heads of Europe if he was ASD, nor could he have written the many socially observant letters he penned as an adult. Van Gogh was a brush-licker and his schizophrenic-like symptoms were likely mediated by ingesting lead, cadmium and mercury in oil paint. Michelangelo left behind history’s largest trove of written correspondence with friends and lovers of both genders in which he expressed keen social observations that pretty much rule out ASD. Einstein, like all the above, had celeb tantrums but otherwise, again, had lifelong friends and lovers and made keen social commentary, etc. And Hitler was a meth-head, thus the twitching.

I read a really memorable essay by an adult self-advocate and researcher who wrote that dead-celeb hijacking by other self-advocates was a bit like how past lives afficionados were somehow always kings, great beauties, heroes and geniuses in past lives and never bums or mass murderers. She argues that a very small minority of Aspies even show savant abilities and, though she understood that celeb-hijacking was a reaction to the bullying that many on the spectrum experience– a kind of PR campaign to borrow glow through association– that didn’t make breaking the Goldberg rule (that it’s unethical to diagnose in absentia) justified. It also creates a dangerous public perception that A) the vast majority on the spectrum (40% nonverbal, 20% more barely verbal and 85% unable to ever live independantly) aren’t severely disabled and don’t need aid, protection and funding; and B) that every asshole can claim ASD as an alibi which increases the public association between ASD and assholery.

She argued that the latter is actually deadly since the GAO reported in 2014 that hundreds of affected individuals are killed every year in schools and institutions by punitive restraint and seclusion practices merely for disruptive behavior and the public can’t be made to care– likely to the extent that the public has been trained to link ASD with dickishness.

Anyway, when narcy cheater-pants Jerry Seinfeld tried to use “mild ASD” as an alibi for typical entitled celeb behavior, the advocacy world tore him a new one and he recanted. And no one on the spectrum wants to be associated with Gates, blech.

“Asperger’s” is not used anymore. It’s no longer an official diagnosis. Mostly because Dr. Asperger was part of Nazi eugenics programs.

FYI, I am autistic (“high functioning” if you want to put it that way, though I have issues with labels of degree, since one can function well in one area and yet struggle terribly in another, whether or not it is something that other people can see) and I do not have “trouble” feeling emotions. The claim that autistic people don’t feel emotions is bullshit. We do. Often with more intensity than neurotypicals. We may express them slightly differently than neurotypical people do, but we do express them. My ex husband emotionally and verbally abused me because he didn’t think my emotional responses were intense enough for his liking. It was EXTREMELY damaging and hurtful to me to have my ability to feel emotions called into question. My son is also autistic, and is sweet as can be, and expresses his emotions just fine. We are very honest people and really can’t conceive of deceit. The fact that someone can smile at me and be nice to me and yet be stabbing me in the back is such an alien concept. I do know that that probably contributed to my abuse. I tend to take people at face value because I really can’t pretend to be nice to someone I dislike (I can be polite, but that is not the same thing). I really don’t trust anyone anymore because so many “friends” were nothing of the kind, in spite of the “expressing” their emotions in what is considered to be the “normal” way.

We struggle with social interaction because neurotypical people have so many unspoken rules of conversation and behavior that make no sense to us because they often involve insincerity. We are called rude because we don’t fake niceness very well. We don’t talk circles around what we are really trying to say. We don’t have an issue correcting erroneous facts regardless of the “status” of the person who has made the error. Do y’all “express” emotions better, or are you better at putting on a show? I shouldn’t have to jump up and down and clap to show that I’m happy. I can smile quietly and my happiness is at least equal to yours. My ex cheated on me with a woman who expressed her emotions like a 2-year-old. Completely over the top (like the jumping up and down when happy, or stamping her feet when angry). I guess it was what he wanted, even though he knew what I was like before he married me. He said I wasn’t “bubbly” enough. I can’t stand “bubbly” people. They exhaust me.

A lot of the social “awkwardness” of autistic adults is due to the fact that we were bullied, shamed, and shunned as children (and as adults) for being different. Both by other children and by adults. We talked too much. We didn’t talk enough. We used big words. We seemed arrogant (this is apparently what stating simple facts is seen to be by some neurotypicals). We have stims, or our tone of voice is a little flat, we don’t look you in the eye. We played with our toys differently (or in my case, didn’t really play much at all – I studied things; I knew that Latin name of every butterfly in my Simon and Schuster guide by the time I was 4). We know “too much” information about our special interests. For me, I also wasn’t “girly” enough (not interested in hair, makeup, nails, boys). So we avoid socials situations due to that trauma.

Socialization is also hard because of sensory overload. If there is more than one conversation going on in a room or at a table, I have a lot of trouble focusing on the conversation I am actually a part of, because I can hear the other ones just as clearly, because I can’t filter sound very well. I also take a little longer to process things, so trying to keep up with a rapid conversation is difficult. I don’t always know when it’s my turn to speak, because of trouble reading “social cues”, and so sometimes interrupt or talk over people by accident. This is considered rude, as if I do it on purpose. I also can’t always tell if someone is interested in what I’m saying or if they’re bored. So I tend to keep quiet in a group. Neurotypical people seem to read things into what I say that aren’t there at all. I mean exactly what I say. But I guess they have a lot of subtext when they speak? So I’m always getting misinterpreted and then people get angry at me for things I didn’t even actually say, and certainly didn’t think. After awhile, every conversation becomes frightening because of how often these things happen. We apologize a lot. Sometime for just existing. We overexplain so that we aren’t misinterpreted (see: how long this post is). It’s all a trauma response.

Please take care how you speak of autistic people. We are fully human and feel human emotions. Autistic doesn’t equal abuser. Autistic doesn’t equal cold and unfeeling. Most autistic adults weren’t diagnosed as children because the criteria were so different when we were kids that it wouldn’t have been recognized. My mother, thankfully, saw that I was different, and nurtured that, and defended me to other adults when she needed to. I have a lot less trauma than many autistic adults. I’m working hard to make sure my child doesn’t let others bully and shame him for the way that he is.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

I am not relating BG’s cheating to possibly having Asperger’s. I mentioned it with reguard to his difficulty with feeling/expressing emotions. People with Asperger’s have more trouble with social skills

Funny you say that. Stbx is only 4 yrs older than me but he had been married and had kids before and i was a 21 yr old virgin. I was stupid and trusted him and just thought all he needed was my love to make things better for him. BIG mistake. 32 yrs wasted on that selfish pos. I do feel that had I not been so naive that I wouldn’t have committed to staying with this man child. My parents were very good to each other gave and loved and are still going strong after 56 yrs. I ignored red flags in the manchild.

My thought was, I really thought I knew him….I obviously did not. Together since 18, married at 23, divorced at 62.

Exactly. I don’t have one single memory I can look back at without wondering what was really going on that I missed, misunderstood, or overlooked. My entire personal history has been lost.