Self Profile for new WP

Post Reply New Topic

Assuming some functional changes in the new WP are permanent, I have decided to provide a self-profile to compensate for what has been dropped from the profiles made available to users by the site software.

Gender, Age, Diagnosis:

I am a 62-year-old male who doesn't know whether or not he has AS.

Please see my introductory post for some reason to think I might be on the spectrum. (Well don't as it seems WP has lost that post, may it someday be recovered.)

After over a year of membership, there is a bit I'd like to add.

When considering all the commonly identified overt symptoms of AS, I believe I have overcome many over the years through conscious learning. Because I've learned social skills in my fifties and sixties that most people develop in their teens and twenties, with minimal effort, doesn't make me "normal". As for sensory issues, I have never had a sensory problem that I would consider disabling. Neither has my son who has been diagnosed with more "severe" autism and is officially "disabled". In my case, sensory problems have just made it harder for me to enjoy certain social activities such a rock concerts, nightclubs, or marijuana. I also have a dislike for brightly lit rooms but I can certainly tolerate them.

At this time in my life I have nothing to gain from a formal diagnosis. In fact, I have seen a few members suffer because they were diagnosed as children and now cannot escape the label. In my case, I have had to live up to an expectation that I am fundamentally normal and am probably better off at this time in my life than I would be had I been diagnosed, although some aspects of my earlier life might have been easier for me.

I have also benefited from a great many undeserved advantages such as parents who could support me financially when I needed it and a couple of lucky breaks in my career that have allowed me to be a Java developer at my age. I am also lucky to have been married for almost 3 decades to a woman who has had to tolerate a great deal.

Joining WP has been an eye-opener for me when I see how much difficulty AS has caused some people, more than I might have suspected.

One other thing. When I joined I believed my experience would make it possible to give helpful advice to others, but I have discovered that on a forum like this, it's almost impossible to know enough about a person's situation to help them (or at least to tell them anything they haven't already heard).

You are just a youngster! I value the presence of other seniors on WP, being one myself (older than you, though same cohort).

We grew up in such a different time, one that so emphasized conformity, that the regime we were schooled in was one of "conform or else". So we did adapt as best we could, because we had to. This probably did give us some advantages as well as the obvious disadvantages. The system wouldn't adapt to us in any way; we had to adapt ourselves to the system.

There was also a price to pay for that, of course, though what I notice about the Seniors on Site - the SOS! - is that many of us appear to have had careers, married, had families, and gained qualifications and we didn't regard these things as unusual for us. We no doubt found they had their challenges at times, though we didn't suppose that we were failures because we were on the spectrum; we didn't know that, and so our self-identities did not include that. We knew we were a bit different, though I didn't see myself as inferior because of that, and attitude and belief about oneself makes a huge difference to what you will attempt and achieve.