Social Interaction

Traits

Like most people with AS, social interaction is not one of my fortes. It is not as if I want to avoid socialising altogether. A lot of my free time would be spent on going for walks on my own, or doing window-shopping – wandering around some shops, often with no intention whatsoever of buying anything. In fact, I have never been very sociable by nature.

In school, I hardly ever seriously participated in team sports. Any time I did participate in, for example, basketball or soccer, when the ball happened to come my way, I tried to get possession of it, and try to score, very often in circumstances where one would consider it unrealistic to maintain possession of the ball, taking it up to a position where one has a good chance of scoring, because one is going to be tackled and dispossessed. Looking back on it now, playing in team sports did not agree with me. As I see it now, it is all about knowing what to do at the right time; where to run for a ball, when to run for it, when to try getting past an opponent while in possession, when to try dispossessing an opponent, when and to whom to pass the ball, and when to attempt to score.

More often than not, I passed lunchtime doing work on computers, often writing programs in Basic (they were microcomputers at that time, before the PC arrived on the scene in the early 1990s), that is, if I could get to a computer ahead of others whose sole intention was to play computer games. The majority of the time when I was writing programs, they were to generate mathematical curves, similar to those generated on banknotes (please note: not that I was trying to make forgeries of banknotes, or condone this activity).

My deficiencies in social interaction have failed to prevent me from partaking in occasional social gatherings, for example, on office nights-out with my colleagues before Christmas, or on golf outings to which my company occasionally receives invitations, the latter being an opportunity to get out of the office for the day.