Howdy dowdy, everybowdy. I have a question for my fellow Aspies and ASD...ies (lol): Does anyone else hate reading on the whole? I'm not exactly referring to reading posts or comments on this website or reading the extremely helpful and informative articles written by the AE Team. What I'm talking about is just reading long walls of text in just about any sort of context - whether it be for personal research, as an academic assignment, trying out a book that's been recommended to you, just about any situation where you are required to sit still and read a long thing of text with over 10,000+ words in a single setting. The reason I personally hate it has nothing to do with dyslexia or eyesight problems or having difficulty understanding written words. For me the issue is maintaining focus and concentration on the words I'm reading, absorbing the information or ideas contained in the text, processing said info and data in my brain -- without very quickly losing interest, getting distracted by something more appealing, or CONSTANTLY going back and re-reading the text to make sure that you've fully absorbed and processed everything. This is why I generally don't read lengthy articles, social media posts, or read books that people say I should check out - it simply costs me WAAAAAY too much of my time and mental energy that I often don't have enough to spare. It was definitely a problem when I was in high school and college, where they would have you read entire chapters of like 20+ pages in a single week or sometimes expect you read an entire book with over 500 pages. I think I flunked several classes in college due to this problem. And before you ask, yes I have tried using audiobooks and text-to-speech software to help me with the reading, and it didn't really speed things up for me at all. I still kept rewinding the audio or going back every couple of minutes because I still need so much extra time to process all of the information and data within the text, and my mind can't help but wander in different directions when I need it to sit still and pay attention. I actually have a similar problem with watching television series or videos on YouTube - I have to go back every couple of seconds to make sure that I got everything. Can anyone else here on AE relate?

Posted by FairWarning at 2022-10-21 16:50:13 UTC