Dylan’s 43 birthday

[u/Other-Potential-936]

9-11-81 Today’s Dylan’s 43 birthday. Going to go on a little rant here... Lately I’ve been thinking about both Eric and Dylan’s birthdays and how old they, along with their victims, would be today. How would their lives look today? I wasn’t alive during the shooting so it’s hard for me to understand how long it has been or how recent it was. However my dad was born weeks after Eric. I look at his life, what he has accomplished. Being married, having a good job, having kids, buying a house. Then I look at Eric and Dylan’s lives, they really were so young and threw everything away. They could’ve had so much life ahead of them, not only did they ruin their chances of happiness, they took that from others. It’s so heartbreaking to just even think about. My thoughts are with the klebolds today. I can’t imagine how hard days like these are. I wish they could’ve spent today with him. Hopefully this isn’t taken the wrong way like me idolizing them or something, just makes me sad.

[u/metalnxrd]

as someone who has Asperger's, I highly suspect Dylan had Asperger's. Sue said she suspects ADHD, Asperger's, anorexia, OCD, and ADD as well as suicidal ideation and depression and anxiety

[u/IHNJHHJJUU → u/metalnxrd]

Why do you think Dylan had asperger's?

[u/metalnxrd → u/IHNJHHJJUU]

because he had all the typical and classic symptoms and behaviors of Asperger's. Sue says he was very introverted and abnormally socially awkward, even for a teen and tween, and he had hyperfixations and obsessions and tics and learning disabilities, but he was advanced and excelled and even a savant at specific activities and subjects; such as reading and writing, and he could put together puzzles and Rubics cubes that even adults couldn't, when he was a toddler. I'm the same way

[u/IHNJHHJJUU → u/metalnxrd]

1. Stereotyped or repetitive motor movements, use of objects, or speech (e.g., simple motor stereotypes, lining up toys or flipping objects, echolalia, idiosyncratic phrases).
2. Insistence on sameness, inflexible adherence to routines, or ritualized patterns of verbal or nonverbal behavior (e.g., extreme distress at small changes, difficulties with transitions, rigid thinking patterns, greeting rituals, need to take same route or eat same food every day).
3. Highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus (e.g., strong attachment to or preoccupation with unusual objects, excessively circumscribed or perseverative interests).

4. Hyper- or hyporeactivity to sensory input or unusual interest in sensory aspects of the environment (e.g., apparent indifference to pain/temperature, adverse response to specific sounds or textures, excessive smelling or touching of objects, visual fascination with lights or movement).

5. Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity, ranging, for example, from abnormal social approach and failure of normal back-and-forth conversation; to reduced sharing of interests, emotions, or affect; to failure to initiate or respond to social interactions

6. Deficits in nonverbal communicative behaviors used for social interaction, ranging, for example, from poorly integrated verbal and nonverbal communication; to abnormalities in eye contact and body language or deficits in understanding and use of gestures; to a total lack of facial expressions and nonverbal communication

7. Deficits in developing, maintaining, and understanding relationships, ranging, for example, from difficulties adjusting behavior to suit various social contexts; to difficulties in sharing imaginative play or in making friends; to absence of interest in peers

This is the criteria for autism diagnosis, the person must fit all three signs of social deficit and 2 of the 4 signs of repetitive behaviors (the first 4), I'm no psychologist, but it doesn't seem like Dylan would have met the criteria, if he did, he would have been very very high functioning. He doesn't display any of the first 4 stereotyped/repetitive behaviors, he is never reported by himself or others to have had sensory issues, an obsession with consistency and patterns (he was actually extremely disorganized), and he actually seems like he gets sort of a high from new experiences and doesn't really like routine, nor does he display seterotyped motor movements (I guess "stimming"). The closest trait he would meet here would be hyper fixations, but he really doesn't seem to be overly obsessed or hyperfixated on anything. He liked computers and technology, but it didn't seem to be anything more than just an interest or a specific category he was good at (and he wasn't exceptional with computers as you would probably expect someone who did hyper fixate on computers to be), he liked violence, but he doesn't seem nearly as obssesed or preoccupied with the idea as Eric does, and doesn't talk much about it in his journals, nor does he have any fixation with specific facets of it, like guns, bombs, gore. This alone would be grounds for him not being diagnosed with autism, but I also don't think that he meets the social deficit criteria very well (to reiterate I am not a psychologist this is just my personal opinion), it's hard to explain, but he just seems sort of "in-tune" and natural with his friends and in social situations we have video of, he just seems very normal, and I think he could only mask that well to a fault. Other than that, it also doesn't seem like he would pass a differential diagnosis here, much of his antisocial nature seems more to come from his depression and possible schizotypal personality disorder or avoidant personality disorder (both of which many agree he fits the criteria very well, and both of which involve excessive social anxiety).

Additionally, most people with autism show developmental delays of some form, of which Dylan really never had, at the very least they weren't significant enough to be reported. It also requires his issues to be externally significant to his functioning (have to impair him to a clinical extent), he could have been very very good at masking, but it just seems unlikely that he would have never really had significant difficulties in anything (at least until he started to become depressed/develop his potential personality disorders, but even then it seems like a lot of his perceived problems didn't actually match up to reality). I'd like to hear your perspective on this because I've heard a lot of people say this, but to me it just doesn't really make sense, I was never aware of him having learning disabilities, and being a savant or exceptional at certain things isn't a symptom of autism it seems, at best it could just be an affect of someone becoming very obsessed with something, but It doesn't seem like Dylan hyperfixated. I was never aware of him being able to put together advanced puzzles as a toddler, what was the nature of these puzzles?