Dave Spicer is the autistic member of the Board of the Autism Society of North Carolina.

Are there any AS adults who can explain why it's hard to ask for help?  I'm sure some of it is because of the difficulty with communication skills.

As a kid, I saw everyone around me doing all kinds of things, including many things I had a very hard time with or failed over and over at.  Since I didn't know I was different from them and no one knew why some things were so hard for me, the only explanation was that they must be right; that all I needed to do was try harder and I would be able to do the things too.  Since I was "just like everyone else," that must have meant that if I wasn't doing some things very well, it was because I didn't want to or was choosing not to, not because I couldn't.

While I don't specifically remember being ridiculed for asking for help, I'm sure my increasingly age inappropriate tears of frustration and anger didn't help thing any.  All of us got locked into this one way of looking at things which was that the only possible reason I wasn't doing the things they wanted me to do was that I didn't want to (despite being perfectly capable of doing them if only I would apply myself and get motivated).  In this view of things, there is the risk of "trying" to communicate what is going on - without having the words to be able to describe it - and having