26-Apr-2012, 4:20 PM
Quote:^Two days later, I'm still listening to the same song. Apparently one of the traits of autistic people is the ability to listen to the same song on repeat for hours (or days, or weeks) at a time. I am living proof of that! My neighbors must hate me. Well, at least I'm not on an "I Should Be So Lucky" binge right now...
Perhaps this autistic tendency only shows up in my tolerance for long musical recordings, sometimes exceeding two hours. By contrast, I find it torturous to sit through many books, which is something I've fallen short of explaining except by concluding that I have a deep personal, spiritual, and/or what have you, connection to music. No other medium seems to excite me as much. With that said, I still find listening to songs on repeat boring, and this erodes my appreciation for albums where all the songs sound alike or for bands without particularly distinctive styles. My Asperger's traits started to confuse me when I inspected them, and sometimes I still don't understand why my report seems so overall inconsistent. Perhaps it was when I started to think of myself less as developmentally disabled and viewed myself as normal that I became more normal, and in some ways, I'm still catching up, which could explain this inconsistency which music seems to display the most starkly. With time and grace, though, progress will be made. (We ought to make an autism spectrum disorder thread. In addition to the many of us who have come out, Chuck told me his son was on the spectrum.)