This seems like a place where I might feel belonging

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I'm a 62-year-old male, married, continuously employed, and in some ways very high-achieving, but have always struggled terribly with social skills and what the psychologists call executive function. Recently scored in the middle of the autism spectrum on four different self-tests. I've been amazed at how many things in other people's stories resonate with me. Hoping to find others here who have some shared experience. One of my traits is over-sharing, so here is what is probably too much about me.

Both of my parents may have been aspies. I was slow talking, but then started in whole sentences. I liked to rhythmically, self-hypnotically gently bump my forehead from side to side against the wall by the refrigerator (it felt good). At age 5 in kindergarten, I was referred to a social worker for correcting the teacher. I was hyperlexic. Read all the Sherlock Holmes stories and Sir Walter Scott's long novel Ivanhoe at 7, but have always mainly preferred nonfiction. At school, I was the bullied, clumsy gifted kid. In early adolescence I saw a movie about an autistic child and definitely identified with him, but nothing came of it. I started college at 15 and graduated at 19, with very limited social engagement the whole time. Almost didn't graduate, because the second semester of my senior year I basically stopped going to class and stayed holed up in my single dorm room obsessing over my honors thesis on the sociology of knowledge, which I had also convinced five professors to accept for my grade for the semester. Managed to avoid all supervision of the thesis till I submitted it at the absolute last minute. It was a very eccentric document.

I worked for 12 years, then went back to school for 3 years, this time for a 2nd bachelor's in computer engineering that I never finished. Around the same time I became temporarily obsessed with politics, and spent most of my time on that rather than my studies. Was on the verge of flunking out, but got a temp job in 1995 that became permanent, which I have held ever since. I became technical lead on a major software project, but experienced great social difficulties. A small handful of people at work recognized high value in what I was doing, but others said I was too detailed, too abstract, too loud, talked too much, and interrupted too much in meetings, so I never got the promotions I thought I deserved. I built a niche for myself as the single deep expert in a specialized area, mainly supporting the system I had designed. Support-oriented work was a nice fit, because I'm good at design, assessing relative priorities, and using reasoning and encyclopedic knowledge to troubleshoot, but not so good at planning and executing to plan.

I was married briefly in the 80s, then had no relationship and did not go on a single date for 25 years. Then I was contacted by a former co-worker who had at one point been my closest (only real) work friend. There had been some attraction then, but she was married at the time. Anyway, we got married in 2016. Almost didn't survive 2017. My wife is formally diagnosed as bipolar, and definitely has some issues of her own. At the time I thought that was the main source of our issues as a couple. But very recently, I have begun to realize that my own ASD has been a major factor as well. In a nutshell, she continues to believe that all my apparent inconsideration in the moment (of which I am only beginning to become aware) reflects intentional, conscious, long-term attitudes. She attributes attitudes toward her to me that utterly horrify me, then acts like I'm trying to gaslight her when I try to explain that that is the opposite of how I really feel. (Why is she still with me? Well, it took her 20 years to leave her previous husband, who was grossly abusive. And in spite of everything, she knows that unlike that guy, I really love her and will make sacrifices for her.) In recent years we've generally gotten better at minimizing negative spirals, but we just had another incident two days ago, which ironically started with me trying to share with her what I am learning about ASD. She said I always justify myself (which is true, but only when I am feeling judged) and this was just another excuse for my bad behavior.

I self-identify as a tender-minded, feeling-oriented, but at the same time highly- to hyper-rational person. Myers-Briggs test years ago called me Introverted Intuitive Feeling Perceptive type -- extreme on the introversion, and strong on thinking as well as feeling. But others in general have tended to see me as a usually Spock-like character who at times could also be rude and overly emotional.

Nothing is more important to me than the few people who are close to me, and I have all sorts of social concerns about the world, but I hate having to participate in groups. I have intense social anxieties of many kinds. Very poor at face recognition and body language. Apparently I give off a lot of signals that are the opposite of the message I want people to get. This is very distressing to me.

I see myself as simultaneously extremely detail-oriented AND holistic in my thinking. Except specifically in areas of social communication and executive function, I am very much a big-picture person. I just expect the big picture to have very high fidelity to all the details! This may be the hardest thing of all to convey to another person in conversation or business communication. Normal people want concrete examples (which to me are usually redundant, because they are already implied), and they want easy, simplified sketches of an easily consumable "big picture" that I think can only be a lie. I tell them it requires patient development and dialogue. But I feel like normal people usually don't have the patience for it, and indeed don't understand dialogue.

To me, every dialogue should be a safe space in which anyone can say what they really think or feel without fear. But many people don't like that kind of honesty. And I believe in the golden rule for interruptions -- if you have a question or urgent response to something I've said, I want you to interrupt me with it (hopefully at the end of a sentence). And I naively believe that others ought to have the same understanding. Otherwise, it's alternating monologue and not dialogue. I also have trouble with other people's long monologues, due to my issues with losing track of things in working memory.

I never had trouble with metaphor or inference in general, but my mom used to tease me for being literal-minded. I am very deeply attached to the principle that as much as possible we should actually say whatever it is that we really mean, and really mean (and follow through on) whatever we say. Normal people frustrate me no end, because they don't take that seriously enough. I feel that my wife ignores the careful qualifications in everything I say, and my always implicit openness to dialogue. She often judges me for bad social pragmatics in the moment instead. Many others do the same.

I am always far more comfortable in conversations that "have a subject". Intense interests not shared by others have been a mainstay of my life. At different stages, it has been dinosaurs; World War II; Star Trek; underground and ethnic music; social criticism; relational databases; archaeology; functional programming; and rewriting the history of philosophy. I have always loved nature, and for over 20 years have been relishing slow artisanal regrading with rake and hose on a steep mountain property in the redwoods, which my wife and neighbors say is tractor work. For the last four years, my favorite thing has been writing a philosophy blog.

When I talk with someone about a subject, I become completely immersed in the subject. My individual self-awareness disappears. It's all about the true, the good, and the beautiful, right? What's this thing about social pragmatics? To me, nuance and context in the subject are what we should be concerned with in talking about a subject. We respect others in conversation by picking up on and responding to the nuance and context of what they actually say.

Ethical reciprocity is extremely important to me. I understand genuine caring for others as something that is demonstrated over the long term by all that we say and do. I think respecting others calls for NOT presuming to mind-read their thoughts. I tend to regard the whole mind-reading thing as a scam that perpetuates social conformity.

OK, there is a lot more, but I'll pause for now.

Last edited by notSpock on 27 Jun 2023, 1:09 am, edited 2 times in total.

Welcome to WP!

Welcome to Wrong Planet. It was a long introduction but I read it. You have many Aspie characteristics and I can see similarities to myself. Don't be too harsh on yourself. There is a reason why this site is called Wrong Planet. It is because we deep inside feel like we exist on the wrong planet. Life is strange. There is a reason for that. The human brain has a left dominant side and a right support side that exist in our skull. The right side is normally the sleep brain. But humans can die, (the left side can die and the right side can come on line and become the dominant brain). The left side can recover and a brain flip occurs. They are very different brains within us. Human beings are some of the most complex beings that have ever existed.

Welcome to WP! I hope you find it to be a good fit for you.

I'll recommend that if a conversation here gets uncomfortable for you that does not mean you should leave WP...just leave that conversation.

And explore the planet but follow the posted rules and remember that you are under no obligation to monitor all of the conversations in all of the threads. Just find conversation areas that interest you.

No, it's not too much about you. This is a support site, and you didn't share any identifying info.


So, when you were in school studying math and other technical topics, you didn't find it helpful to have concrete examples, or to have a simplified summary at the beginning to give you a general idea of what a given topic was all about?

If indeed you don't find this sort of thing helpful, that's unusual, even among autistic people.

But we're all different. As the saying goes, if you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person.

I haven't figured out how to reply to a reply, so I'll do it here.

On the question about examples: This will be an indirect answer. When I was young, I learned mostly by voracious reading on my own. School was a tedious requirement, accompanied by dangerous social situations. I have the memory for information that seems to be common to many aspies, and also spontaneously analyze and synthesize a lot.

I never considered reading to be work; it was always effortless and enjoyable. I enjoy reading advanced things I don't fully understand, just to glean what I can. I enjoy reading things in foreign languages I don't fully understand, too.

On the other hand, I have generally done far less well at anything that DID require a form of practicing. Perhaps this is an executive function issue. It has taken me most of a lifetime to become even moderately open to the idea of practicing anything. Exceptions would be foreign languages and programming languages, but in general, my brain seems to be wired to want to use explicit logic as much as possible.

In 3rd grade, I had a teacher who would assign the same long set of boring math problems two nights in a row, "for drill". I utterly rebelled against that. Public school math was totally obvious to me. Doing the problems once was tedious; doing them twice was just unacceptable.

I did more than the required advanced math when I went back to college the second time, but my performance was very uneven. I really enjoyed differential equations, but abstract algebra and analysis were unexpectedly HARD. I didn't have good study habits, because I'd never needed to learn them. I kept re-reading all the axioms and definitions and theorems, expecting that it would magically lead to insight on how to apply them. I actually chose introduction to analysis instead of advanced calculus because I imagined that doing proofs would come more naturally to me, but again, proofs of nontrivial things are HARD. Later I got interested in very advanced interactive theorem proving software, which was also extremely HARD.

On the other hand, in a work context, most of the relevant logic for the advanced data modeling I do (any given piece of it) is pretty simple. I am apparently exceptionally good at assembling a large, coherent picture of interacting things and alternate conditions, and finding abstractions to simplify it without loss of fidelity. Here I am back on comfortable ground.

If I have just said that all X's do Y in a context of simple logic, I mentally rebel against the need to give an example of an x doing a y. I think this has something to do with a variant of literal thinking. At any rate, I tend to be intolerant of anything I perceive as redundant.

Redundancy is bad in some contexts (e.g. in source code) but good in other contexts (e.g. in disaster recovery planning).

Many people find things easier to learn if they are explained in multiple ways, redundant though this may be.

Both points absolutely valid, I completely agree. Any kind of failsafe system requires redundancy by design, and when I want to learn about something I read somewhere between three and 50 books about it.

But in a sense also, these are both different kinds of redundancy from the one that I react negatively to. In a system that is redundant by design, each of the "redundant" components is necessary to the design. When I read 50 books about something, no two of them say the exact same thing. Both of these are different from doing the exact same homework over again, or the way that the result of a composition of two things necessarily follows from the definitions of the two things.

And again, the mere fact that someone (me) reacts negatively to something in no way establishes that it is objectively bad. To me, that's "obvious". But this is another kind of thing that I may get in trouble with. Something may seem so obvious to me that it goes without saying, but sometimes maybe it does need to be said. I'm way better at knowing the difference than I used to be, but still don't always get it right. Philosophically I don't even believe in obviousness, but this kind of emotional response is independent of that.

Now I've also demonstrated my tendency to quibble. It drives my wife crazy, but I honestly believe it has a use.

I love the username! It's so cool that you found someone to love late in life. I will send you well wishes for your continued understanding of ASD and that your wife will be more receptive to it in the future. I observed that this post shows how deeply you think, representative of most if not all of this community

Thank you for the kind thoughts. I have been very impressed by the insightful people I have encountered in this journey.

Well let me see if I can pass on some useful information. You talked about your wife.

My wife is formally diagnosed as bipolar, and definitely has some issues of her own.

Bipolar is a problem for many people on the site. There is likely a method of treating this condition. One has to look at the method used by groups like the Seal Team to treat it. Many people experience stress in their lives. Stress builds up in the body. It builds and builds and builds until it finally explodes. In a way humans have multiple brains. When stress brings a human to extreme level, even a small amount of additional stress it explodes, our brains switch players. It produces an effect normally referred to as bipolar.

In general, ND experience much more stress then the average NT, as a result we experience this condition at a greater rate. But some NTs also deal with stress overload. For example, such as those in the Navy Seal Teams experience this problem also. They have developed methods to vent stress overload. They can stand in life and death situations and remain calm and cool. It is part of their training regime. The same methods that work for them will also work for NDs. So if bipolar is a problem, that form of training is a solution.