RB,MZ,
Thanks for your words. Posting here, for many of you seems easy like it is just your natural conversational voice that is being transposed - easy, natural and without much effort. For me it's more like writing. I need to go back and proofread, edit and fix much of what I write. It takes me a while but I get my point across. Clarity is an essential courtesy for any thoughtful communication so it's OK, I don't mind taking the time, especially here.
You are sorely mistaken if you think it comes easy for me- a long post can take several hours sometimes, especially if I'm citing sources from several places. These are like homework assignments for me, the difference is that I'm doing them because I want to do them. There is enough stimulation to keep my interest. It takes a lot to get my attention sometimes so a lot of small talk leaves me feeling bored and frustrated. It's fun sometimes and I love our nonsense threads as much as the next guy but I like it that we have more too. Editing takes the majority of the time, and even after doing it two or three times, I still find more mistakes after I post- I have to read it
again.
I suspect a good many of us are able to express ourselves more eloquently here, where we have unlimited time to proofread and edit our words. I just watched a documentary on autism, from the point if view of an autistic woman who is high-functioning enough to have learned how to type. She has a machine that she can take her time and type into, and when she's done, she presses a button and it speaks her words for her, since she is too jerky and unfocused to really speak much. She still needed 24 hour care and always would, but she was living in an apartment and attending college with the help of an aide.
When someone else was reading her words aloud, you'd have thought they were coming from a college professor. So fluent and elegant were her words that they read like poetry, but to look at her, she was a midget by height, her face looked like someone with Down's syndrome, her teeth were jagged, she limped noticably, she carried a set of plastic spoons with her everywhere she went, because her "tweak" was that she liked to play in water at a sink with the spoons. No one would ever know how alert her brain could really be at times, and how much she actually understood about her position in society and how abnormal she really was.
One of her aides, a girl who had been with her for seven years was leaving, and she was inconsolable and even became angry. None of the other aides could get her to accept it and she finally said "I just don't want my life to be a living hell when you're gone." The two of them went out to the porch to talk alone, but she ended up just telling the girl to leave her alone, she was too angry. No one knew why.
She finally typed into the machine when she was alone that when you're attracted to a person, but you know that you will only ever be seen as a person with autism, it breaks your heart.
It sure made me want to stop whining about dyslexia, but they share so many symptoms, to varying degrees.