autism disovered in old age

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I've dicovered finding out about it late in life can bring up a lot of memories of how confusing it is to go through life not knowing why you are different. And it can make you reexamine expeiences you had in the past.
Those of us who are older will never know if life would have been better if we found out earlier, and since we can't change the past, we just need to work on how we can make the present and future better.

I am not looking for a therapy. Late in life I discovered the key for understanding my life. Initially, that is in the sixties, I was attracted to psychoanalysis. So I read Freud and his followers. Freud at least was a good writer of crime fiction. But what a disastrous influence he had in western culture and in therapy. I began to see clearer when I met ethology, Lorenz, Bowlby and, finally evolutionary psychology, cognitivism and modularity. It was a copernican revolution, with respect to freudianism and its frames. I had been horribly mistreated in my family. But now I can see that human beings (and animals) have an extraordinary relisience and that no childhood trauma can really destroy a person well endowed by nature. Now the problem is to make sense of life. Of a short span of life, but still Life (capital letters). No resignation!. Even if you had to go to tha scaffolds, you should exercise all your focusing capacity to extract all that ncan be extracted.

How much a persons diagnosis effects them I believe has to do primarily with how much and how early in life they had come to terms with and accepted the fact that they were different.

I knew I was weird when I was around 10 years old.. after much introspection and consideration I just shrugged and said "Ok Im different thats how I am and who I am to hell with conformity if people dont like it thats their problem" and havent looked back.

My diagnosis didnt come as a suprise at all and the only difference now is I know what to call it and that there are others like me which was very comforting.

wow, what a wonderful thread!

in reading this i've gone through the whole gamut of emotions with laughter in the lead!

amazing insight people.

when i realized i was an aspie, i discovered a lot of understanding that had been missing in my 40 years on this here rock. i have stopped trying 'to do the right thing' and simply focus on being myself, as many others here have stated. it would be hard for me to cast off all the people i've known into the sea of superficial mumbojumbo because in some odd and wonderful way they have brought me to my current level of self awareness. yes looking back on my life before i knew about my situation has brought some sadness, but it has also brought a lot of 'gholly! gee whiz!' too. most importantly for me, it has allowed me to truly laugh at myself, IN EARNEST! i have become much more patient with myself and fond of my unique (peculiar) quirks.

Loneliness. It's like if you weere walking a tightrope and your fellows, relatives or "friends" couldnt see your effort and your strain. Nobody can imagine the plight of the psychical handicapped if he is not himself a psychical handicapped. And if he is himlself in that plight he can be of little help to anybody. We are all egocentrics for the reason that we are struggling on a raft in a sea in tempest. What we see in others is a means to stay afloat, not someone to protect, (at least in turns: protect ad be protected). Anybody who meets a limp man knows that he belongs to a universe governed by differente laws. But the psychic limpmess is not recognised or known.

I've been trying to get my parents to understand for 20 years or more, that I get nervous when the radio's on in the morning. Although they know I'm an aspie since more than ten years, they don't get it. How would total strangers get it then?

I sent to 7 or 8 "friends"a sort of autobio message, where I stated what my life has been really, apart from my formal accomplishments (two books, university career, essays etc). Something very similar to the life of Fritz Zorn (has anybody read his stunning book "Mars"?) except that Zorn's life lasted 32 years, while I am already 73. Moreover his career as a scholar was (I believe) much more outstanding than mine. Zorn attributed the shallowness of his life to the environment, swiss bourgeois society and family. He was one more victim of psychoanalitic theory. But the mood that he expressed was a perfect rendition of autism.
After going public this way, these persons never made a hint that they received this message and disappeared from the landscape of my life. I understand them very well. My message amounted to some sort of appeal for help. And no layman can give help here. They dont kow how to deal with me. Personally i doubt that even psychiatrists can help. So nobody is around anymore. I prefer this than going on in the exhausting effort of pretending to be normal. There is not much time before me and I would like to spend this time in something true, if the word is not too ambitious. Let my relationhips be with the grocer, the newspaper vendor, the supermarket cashier. In these relationships i often see some real traces of sympathy, and I appreciate them. For the rest I live of books, movies, art and music and this is a consequence of privilege, which I do not despise, even if sometime I feel somehow guilty of not being able to share this privilege with the immigrant woman who keeps my hous clean. |to follow, maybe|.

I hope you will include "us" in your relationship peramitors...After years of struggling with fantasies of suicide I have a deep appriciation for people who have remained "sain" over a long life.My fear of a "long life" has always been fear of sucuming to my own escapist "insainity"or worse,sucumbing to the insainity of this world(ie,,,it would start seeming logical...genicide,Bush election,Reality TV...sure ,that sounds good...give me a large plate of that and a side of "war with Iran"...actually,could you make that to go....I dont want to miss American Idol)should this start sounding palatable to me....I beg the aspies of the world put me out of my misery...one shot between the eyes ,please....

I second that Krex

Just snipe me from a rooftop somewhere while Im out buying a latte to take home to sip while watching "Desperate Housewives" or whatevers popular now.

I have a few older relatives who may have been candidates. One was an aunt who died of TB in her late 30s. She lived in her own little world and was often accused of being deaf on some occasions and being praised for here extremely sharp hearing on others. She very naive and also resented changes to her routines. But whe she died in the early 1950s at a time when autism was hardly heard of and would of never been diagnosed with the condition.

I may sound kind of strange but at times I was believing I may of even been a reincarnation of her as she died just before I was born.

She may be a strong candidate for many of those who are not only diagnosed late in their lives but also well after they died.

Paul

It's not easy to explain how in my particular way i desperately love life. Some times i see on the streets some grey dressed men who talk about the reorganization of a line of production or some other senseless enterprise as if it were all that matters for them. No I have some sense of pity for this people, if not outright repulsion. No I don'think there is anything sane or sensate in the activities of privileged people in the western "civilization".
I am sure this enterprise pruducing garbage at best and death at worst is doomed in not the very long term. A society which has the possibility of destroyng the planet is profoundly corrupted even if nukes will never be used. Already WW 1 has been the proof of a maddened world.
But I love people on edge, people desperate, and animals and trees and flowers and five years children. |so that's it for now|

Paolo - I wanted to say hi and, like you, only had the dx later in life. It brought relief and understanding at last - but also many regrets. Mainly I wanted to say how much I agree with you about the awful hegemony of Freud and his followers. Psychoanalysis has very perniciously infested the world. I think many are victim to it. It was when I had the dx that I realised I'd been barking up completely the wrong tree all my adult life. AS folks are primarily neurologicaly/physiologically challenged NOT psychologically challenged - thinking positive thoughts is not going to change my world in the way that it changes NTs' worlds. My clever psychotherapist friends STILL don't get this distinction!

Lupin you've just articulated all the conclusions i am currently reaching! I'm not diagnosed and have only just realised I'm an Aspie. I have spent years searching for answers to my 'psychological problems'. From the ages of 21 to 25 I trained and worked as a psychiatric nurse. This was part of my searching. At the age of 34 I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. I have seen so many psychiatrists and counsellors and not one even considered that there might be a neurological basis to the problems I had functioning in the world. I was getting close for a while when I asked a cousellor if there was a possibility that I had something 'a bit like dyslexia but more far-reaching' but she just made out that I was trying to 'merge' with my dyslexic husband. She clearly had no knowledge of ASDs. I am now realising the extent to which the psychiatric services are certainly 'barking up the wrong tree'. Hopefully this will change in the near future.

TGIF. Thanks God it's holidays' end for aspies and other insulated people. August (in Europe at least) and Xmas holidays are atrocious for us. Everybody travels, enjoys, rests on a beach or in a wood. This is normal, it's OK. After all they spend the rest all the year in senseless but exacting activities. But when they are back they discover you exist and make a call or write a letter or an e-mail to narrate their adventures. They dont even ask you how you spent the holidays sparing you an embarassed answer. This is only an outburst. No serious matter. As for me, I read for the second time "The stranger", of course quite independently from other people.

Do you think Camues was an Apie?

When I was in college my favorite classes were psyc,philosophy(most over my head),literature...
I thought it would be a good job,to read everything written by an author and then give them a psyc DX...Dont know who would actually pay me to do this...put seemed like it would be a fun job...Probably as accurate(or inaccurate) as the current method of 30 min sessions with someone asking about"and how do you "feel" about this"....my internal dialogue was...."feel?I dont "feel"...I think...."....never got to far in therapy....

Christmas is a financial and sensory nightmare.....yuck!

scrulie, yes, this ignorance on the part of psychiatrists etc is very poor isn't it? Just think how many of our ASD brethren have been horribly misunderstood and misdiagnosed all their lives (my father for one, he died without any of us realising that he was AS despite humungously obvious and weird behaviour) . I suppose we should be grateful that we managed to make our own diagnoses at last.

Do you still think the BPD diagnosis fits? Or will you try to get a revised AS diagnosis?


paolo - totally agree with you about holidays.They are horrid. I have never been able to understand why people do them anyway. Well, in Europe we've now got a nice clear run through until - phhutt! - bloody Christmas!