If you had the chance to cure you're Autism would you?

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I am unsure, although I might not, because I don't know what could happen if it did get cured, and plus my autism is part of my personality and it makes me who I am today, so I probably would not cure it if I had the chance

No

Meanwhile, there are NTs with the interest in physics, astronomy and space who have much higher executive function who become actual physicists, astronomers and astronauts.

If you want to be a scientist or go into space, being ND is a colossal hinderance.Having to work harder than anyone else to do the same things is about right. The job market and education are both competitive. In theory, you could have an equal chance against NTs if you worked twice as hard as them. In practice this doesn't work because the NTs are already working as hard as they can. The NTs are already giving 100% to compete against each other. You cannot give 200%.

Yet your boss or your professor will judge you on the same criteria he judges NTs. When you give your 100% he'll interpret it as 50% and then tell you to try harder. You won't get graded on a handicap. Even if they think they're aware of AS, they think it's nothing more than social awkwardness and hypersensitivity to sound. They have no idea about executive function problems.

Being judged equally with NTs is the worst part. It's the invisible handicap. If I was in a wheelchair no one would expect me to walk. With AS, people expect me to work just as fast and just as organized as NTs. I work as fast as I can and then they think I was going slow deliberately. I forget to do things and then they think I avoided doing them deliberately.

Life isn't fair but they will always judge you as though life is fair.Case in point. A wealthy family and a supportive mother? It's like if Alice and Bob are both born in the same year. Alice comes from a wealthy family and has a supportive mother. Bob has neither of these things. Alice goes to a good school in a good neighborhood. Bob goes to a school in a poor neighborhood with disinterested teachers. Alice's supportive and well educated mother tells her what she needs to do to get into university. Bob's uneducated mother has no idea how to get into university. Alice has a career as a pathologist. Bob has a career as Wallmart shelf stacker.

All who see Alice and Bob will think their respective jobs are solely a result of their own efforts or lack thereof. People will say Alice and Bob had the same chance in life and Alice worked hard and Bob slacked off. If Bob mentions that he went to school in skid row, people will say "stop making excuses, if only you had studied harder, you still could have gotten straight As even with clueless teachers" yet if Alice also studied hard and also had the best teachers, wouldn't she do better still? If Bob mentions that Alice's mother made a detailed education plan for her but Bob didn't quite know how to work the system people will say "Stop making excuses, you could have figured it out for yourself".

If you failed something for a legit reason, people will say you're making excuses. Statistics show that people are much more likely to graduate if their parents are graduates. Your parents can guide you if they've been there before.

I posted my Alice and Bob story on Y!A and they didn't get it. They said Bob should just try harder. But what if Alice and those like her are already giving 100%?

NTs think emotionally. In their minds Bob is the underdog, hero of a thousand movies. In their emotional view the underdog can do twice as much in half the time if only he's plucky enough. The attitudes I saw on Y!A are typical of our culture.

Wealth makes a lot of difference too. Let's say Alice and Bob both get into the same uni course. Alice's wealthy parents pays for her tuition and living expenses. Bob has to work his way through college. Alice and Bob both attend the same classes. Class lets out at 4PM and then Alice spends 7 hours doing her assignment before going to bed at 11PM. The next day she wakes up at 7AM after 8 hours sleep.

Bob gets out of the same class at 4PM and then spends the next 7 hours working as a waiter. He knocks off work at 11PM. He then spends the next 3 hours doing the same assignment that Alice did in 7 hours. Who do you think got a better grade on their assignment? Bob or Alice?

After 3 hours work on his assignment Bob goes to bed at 2AM. The next day he wakes up at 7AM after 5 hours sleep. That morning Bob and Alice both come into the same class at 8AM. Who do you think is able to pay better attention in class, Bob, who slept for 5 hours or Alice who slept for 8 hours?

The professor will still grade them equally. After Bob fails and Alice graduates, people in society will still judge them as though they had an equal chance. They'll say Alice is a hard worker and blame Bob for slacking off.

Temple Grandin was also lucky enough to have a special interest in a career related field.

If your ND + poor background+ undiagnosed for most of your life like I was it can feel like life is against you in every concievable way. Despite this I did manage to do ok. But at a huge price in stress and anxiety, self incrimination and guilt. In the end it flattened me. Which was part of what led to uncovering I was ND.

Finding this out about myself makes a huge difference for me. Until then I had no understanding of why I struggled when everyone else seemed to excel. I have a high IQ, yet I couldn't stay in school after high school. As you pointed out I could never be a scientist or astronaut.

I managed to make myself succesful in business for a while but kept running into problems. Why weren't my peers having the same problems as I was? I did what they did, or so I thought, but I didn't get the same results. I had to work so much harder despite being 'brighter'.

Now, armed with the knowledge I am ND I understand why. I am beginning to understand what I can realistically expect from myself. I understand better where I should focus my attention to utilize my strengths and minimize the impacts of my weaknesses. The knowledge I am ND is still very new to me, so I am still learning what it all means for me. But now I have a framework to better understand things already I feel less stress and anxiety.

The obstacles I need to overcome don't seem as overwhelming and the ones that are still overwhelming like the hypersensitivity I at least understand why they are how they are and that I am not crazy, I am just different.

Maybe it is only because of the newness of the knowledge I am ND and the fact I struggled so long without that knowledge (40+ years) but finding out I am ND, uncovering the source of my struggle... being able putting a name to the beast is one of the best things that has happened for me in a long time.

To be clear I am not saying being ND is the best thing, rather I am saying after all these years of struggling finally knowing I am ND makes a huge difference in my ability to cope in a NT world.

As the saying goes, knowledge is power. It likely won't make things easier to achieve. But I no longer feel like I have to blame myself when things don't go smoothly and that makes a big difference for me. I no longer need to waste all that energy blasting myself when I 'screw up'. Instead that energy can be used to adapt, learn and move forward in a direction that works best for me.

Disclaimer: still learning how to express all of this. And everything I say is strictly from my own personal perspective.

It comes up a lot in threads I've participated in, Forester; people who were diagnosed young seem to have a very different perspective than those diagnosed later in life. Even a few years can make a difference. Your attitude on this matter is pretty common for someone diagnosed at that stage in life, from what I've seen.

There are a few people on this forum who were diagnosed about as young as I was (Ezra is one of them and posted earlier in this thread). I've noticed a lot of them have a similar attitude to me; that autism is this burdensome, unpleasant thing that we're stuck with. How intensely this is felt varies from person to person. For me, I have a deep hatred of it. I've always known about it, and that's given me plenty of time to get upset about it. Learning more about it hasn't been a wonderful revelation, it's been the gradual realization of how hard autism f***s me over.

So there's that perspective thing again. Maybe if I'd been diagnosed later, I'd feel more like you do.

I do think if I was still me but a teen or twentysomething autistic today who was diagnosed very young I would present as severe with numorous co morbids. Getting labeled early would mean reading and hearing about all the negative stuff and all the things I can't do most of my life. That would be bad enough but a lot of things expected from you growing up today from multitasking, team work emphises, so much sensory stimulation would be difficult to damaging. Even without all the other stuff 25 to 40 hours a week of ABA would probably drive me literaly insane.

I've noticed even the difference between being diagnosed at 5-10 and 10-15 has on perspectives. It's huge.

I never had ABA, as far as I can recall. I've certainly had about 25 years of people telling me all about my autism, and even the most positive ones upset me now... more than the more negative ones, to be honest. I have had to fire therapists for being too complimentary of autism. I go "nope, you're not acknowledging my problems. We're done."

I've seen parents doing the other thing, not discussing autism with their child and just letting them loose into the world with no help or medication so they can "lead a normal life" and "not use it as a crux". To be honest I would rather my parents knew about it back then and were open with me about it. To this day I do not really discuss it with anyone, it's an open secret since everyone knows I am off, boy I sure disappointed my family and some of my peers (the rest knew me for being slow and dimwitted)! Not becoming a great inventor scientist millionaire like they thought I would be when I was doing my little professor nonsense in front of them. Can anyone relate to that?

I never was the little professor, just a little dweeb. but I got the impression from my parents that I disappointed them just the same. i'm the only one sans college degree. school never agreed with me.

Another thing that only makes me wish there were treatment for the negative symptoms at the least.
The other day at work, I gave someone new the password of the wifi when he asked me "what is the password for ____?" then my coworker stepped in and said "actually you should have told him to use the other wifi closer to where he will work tommorow". I thought about this then asked my coworker "did you ever make the same mistake and were told to do the same thing?" she said "no". I asked whether she was thinking about it and realized it and told me right when she stepped in and she told me no. I asked further and she said she just did it instinctively, she was thinking about something else and she said she would just know she had to say that without any thought, she never has done so before and was surprised I did not just naturally think that.

It seems were are cut off from some sort of natural "instinct" or from what we know subconsciously, we have to retrieve information before we make a decision. Imagine how much easier our lives would be if we had "instinct". The post on dopamine makes sense, whether the guy is right or not, he did point out how we autistic people are cut off from this natural asset, hence we seem slow or dumb (although we are much deeper thinkers and buy into less cult-like nonsense as a result since we always have to examine every single thought we think and notice the inconsistencies or paradoxes). I noticed I have some "instinct" if I take a large dose of Xanax and more cognitive empathy but I am less deep, I ignore things like homeless people, I don't ponder why society is set up like it is and just fall in line with the crowd a bit more and so on.

The ideal human being would have all of the depth and deepness of an autistic person yet be able to function without thought when it is called for. Neurotypicals can achieve this with deliberate thought but we cannot remove, but they can add.

While I wish I was diagnosed before age 55 I do not think I would have been ready for a diagnosis until my late 30's to early 40's. While looking back there were definite signs, after a tough peroid from 2nd grade to first two years of college by the time I was your age things were going fairly good. Good enough that I doubt I would be diagnosed even under today's expanded criteria.

Yeah, I'm kind of disgusted that parents do not tell their children about their autism.

As for mine, I've never gotten the impression they're disappointed. They're very supportive, but sometimes I wonder if they're frustrated at how hard it is for me to move forward in life. That may be projection, because I am frustrated.

I don't tell many people about it either. I pass very well, almost reflexively; people don't pick up on it and just think of me as quirky. Inside, though... it really screws me up.

Again, I pretty much agree with your assessment of autism.

Until several months ago, my father consistently refused to accept my diagnosis. He admitted that I'd received the label, but he described it as, in slightly nicer terms, an error that was useful for obtaining services. This would arguably have made us disability bums, who are some of his least favorite people, but he still treated it this way. He treated it this way when he introduced me to my last therapist, even as he rattled off a list of autistic symptoms so obvious that it would take five or six other disorders to explain them.

My mother has always been open about my autism, even if she sugarcoats it a little bit. Her problem lies with ADHD, which was incredibly difficult to discuss without receiving a lecture about how stimulants can kick your face in. She shares the same obsessive traits as me (yay autism genes), and she immediately envisioned all the worst possible side effects, which I interpreted as anger because of how she expressed it. It took me months to convince her to look for an evaluation, and months for her to convince my father to consent to one, during which she continued to hype up the risks of those drugs. It got so bad that I assumed she would reject any prescriptions offered, perhaps running me through months of therapy and SNRI treatment instead. I was absolutely amazed when she accepted my first Vyvanse prescription, and even more amazed when my father consented as well. But even then, she wanted me to split my first 30 mg dose in half, providing further evidence, I thought, that she wasn't really willing to do s**t. I (somehow) convinced her to let me take the whole thing, as was originally prescribed, but she kept up the cautious junk for several more months, attempting to convince me that my natural state really wasn't that bad. In retrospect, her hesitation was motivated more by anxiety than malice, but that scared me almost as much, because I was forced to conclude that my own mother was too nervous for me to trust her. I perceived some fear of me using it as a "crutch" as well, which I exaggerated to a point more horrifying and judgmental than either of them ever intended.

Some interesting points were made in this thread. Should you tell your kid he's autistic? There's a good chance that, with that knowledge, he might feel like he's supposed to fail when it comes to relationships and supposed to fail at keeping jobs. Obviously, this is crippling and no effort would be made on his part to fix those issues.

In my case, I examined my life a few years ago to see why I didn't turn out like the rest of my family - they meshed into American society, had long time friends, had wives and husbands, had kids, kept jobs, go to office parties (or parties in general), funerals, weddings, all the stuff that I basically shun.

For all intents and purposes, and held up against the "normal" American dream, I'm a failure, a man with severely crippling depression. I wonder if I knew as a child that I'm autistic that not achieving what others do is okay. Maybe I'd be happier. Who knows?