Census of people in the spectrum

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“Pretending” requires a tremendous effort and the amount of energy available decreases with aging. You still can cope with the situation, but you better know in advance what you can do to have a rich life in old age. A rich life for old people should be a goal for everyone when they get there. And it is possible, it should be within reach, if not easily at hand, for all strata of the population. That’s not what happens. Old people a confined in ghettos more o less decent in relation to their wealth or the wealth of their families. But still even decent accomodations are indecent fot their ghetto nature, their reliance on paid carers, the insulation and abandonment. “Elective affinities” are squeezed in forced coexistence. Imagine that all your social life is constrained to the people you see in a condo. In a condo your “mr opposite” is not all your life. Imagine that at a point of your life the condo becomes all there is of your sociality. And many old people have the alternative between maintaing their condo situation with enormous difficulties or being taken to some hospice or asylum. What if you are autistic?

Even here nobody would like to be ghettoed.

I am 53

I dislike the word "diagnosis" as it is a perjorative and implies some malfunction or illness - I would prefer "identification" as an aspie

I self identify: in my case it was easy

It was difficult being AS before AS "existed"

But then I see the younguns on site talking depression, rejection, anger - all the things I had as a youth, plus meds. They are fluent in pills. And so far as I know there is no pill to confer emotional fulency. Then I think that benign neglect may have been bertter than the current diagnose-place into a box-drug them mode of dealing with AS.

I think that perhaps we oldies have learned acrtoss the years some skills in dealing with the real world as AS, and this wisdom could be inparted to the youth As of today.

Anyone here for aspie indepencdence?

aspie power!

Nutbag we've tried imparting wisdom on the younger set here. But since they are teenagers they know it all and you can't tell them anything. They having lived a mere 15 yrs or so are experts on life and those of us that have lived 30, 40 or 50 years are clueless and just do not have the life experience of a teenager ya know.

60, motors, other machines, and later IT, I have views on living through it, maybe it took more effort, but we did not get the worst deal around. I have seen a lot worse than mentioned here.

To sum my life up, I was a teenager till forty, by the time I became a young adult, say 43, my peers had married, had careers, children, joined every group in town, and I read all about what I had missed in their obituary. There were a lot of them, it seems some mature early, and die early.

People always said I looked younger than my years, an aspie trait? With age the old folks are more relaxed about me, so many of their friends and family are gone, they will now talk to anyone. They have white hair, I have a few, have lots of medical conditions, take lots of pills, I drink a lot of black coffee, they are run down, one foot in the grave, and old, worn out, 56.

I met a musician, he played around New Orleans, he was 83, told me he lived the life, spent every dime he made, and at sixty started a recording studio and ran it for the next twenty years, he still taught music, to children who's great grandfathers played the Quarter in the 30s. as he had taught their parents, and theirs. He knew more IT than I do, up on everything. He did have to adapt to age, he said he had to eat before spending a night drinking.

67 years is an average. Cars kill teenagers, then suicide, homicide, wars, till 30, 30 to 40 is a free ride, 40 to 50 is hearts stopping, cancer by sixty, and if you get past that, you are a stastical shoe in for 80 to 90. From the year of her birth, my mother should have died at 55, that was 33 years ago, still going strong.

If we depend on professionals, they will do whatever makes money. Stats are hard to come by. What happens to us is important to everyone here, and 16 more joined since I logged on.

I once asked what is the secret of getting rich, and the best answer I got was, "Live twice as long as other people." I think that might be us, I do not know from looks, but you seen a lively bunch of coots, geezers, looking forward to a long dotage.

The wisdom of time comes to me in words, late bloomer, and what I read here, says, it took longer, but I got there, and I am not done yet, just starting.

An online data base, same questions, mostly I think the over 40, but I always hung out with older people. A family history, milestones reached, some health questions, unlike other seniors, new ventures planned, goals, for I think we will find we live long, become successful late in life, and have twice or more the retirement to plan for. 80s and 90s is normal for my family on both sides. Healthy till the day they died.

Youth is wasted on the young, the old live off the energy of the young, and we can offer them an understanding they can get nowhere else. As someone said, the first thing I do is check the exits. We need a plan. I do not want to shock you, but no one gets out of here alive.

I like science, I want to see some graphs, I hear all this AS-NT stuff, lets get some facts on both. We are different, and I think it might have problems, and advantages.

Inventor--You bring up something I experienced as well, and still experience: late blooming.

I feel like a young adult at 46. I can't understand why people are already acting like grizzled "old people" in their forties, and complaining about their pain in the butt kids. Or dressing old, or not considering forms of exercise because only young people do it. I kayak. I hike. I live in a town where there's quite a good size minority of older folks who do these things, so I am not completely out in the cold, but I find people dismissing such activities as being for young people baffling.

So, these younger ones here at WP with their sensitivity and family difficulties and with the stereotyped views of relationships and pwning each other just have the same immaturity we went through. Someone came up with the 2/3 rule--if an Aspie is 30, they are really 20, if they are 21, they are emotionally 14, etc.

Depending on the depth of a person's AS, I think that's true in general. I have read some things in the women's and men's forum that make me wonder "how old are these people?" Then I have to remember--they're Aspies. Or the oversensitivity to on-line comments that ends up in a locked thread due to everyone freaking out. I've now developed the habit of checking profiles to see how old some people are, and am surprised in a lot of cases, though after a moment I realize it makes perfect sense.

I am also of the mind that AS is really just a difference natural to the human experience, and the problem is society's, though we bear the burden of working within that framework. Some factions tend to medicalize AS, from parents to the government, etc., and maybe that's not a useful construct, as it implies something is wrong with us. I don't think there's anything wrong with us that acceptance of us as human beings and helping us to adapt just as other more "normal" people are helped couldn't help. I agree with what Nutbag said.

I also have noticed the older I get, the less I care about what other people think, as what I do is nobody's biz. I also have less patience for the less than accepting nature of others. Is this part of what you were talking about, Paolo?

I need a refill!!

Metta, Rjaye

When I took my degree, that was a nonsense degree forced on me by my parents, I had a background feeling that I was “special”, inept to face other people in a competitive jungle, I was an hermit-crab without shell, I knew that, but I also had an harrowing life in my family, if it could be called a family. Split families are very common, but mine was a muddle glued together by its very tensions. So I had to flee, flee at all costs, put distance, geographical distance. And I was not equipped for an independent life; and even that year that I spent in the US I was with some people who were more interested in my father than in me.
I fell into alcool and drugs for years.
In some corner of my mind there was the obdurate feeling that there should be a turn in my life. And in very gradual way I gained some little foothold in life. But even this was undermined by a basic lack of understanding of my real problems, which were more serious that my family experience; against a family you revolt, against a social handicap in sociality you do nothing.
I have always been alone, and longing for people, like having been shipped to Mars and abandoned there. I live on the Earth like a stranger, “an anthropologist on the Earth”. It’s only since two or three years that I found the key to understand my life, and though it’s late I am determined do make the best of this gained clearmindedness, whatever the time left.

Paolo - i wholeheartedly support the idea of a Seniors' Contemplative Corner. There ARE issues that we face which are particular to older Aspies. My father was posthumously dx'd AS by my psychologist - looking back I see that his life in later years could have been made easier. Similarly, my mother is somewhere on the spectrum - she is very frail and poorly and in a nursing home. Because I had the information about AS I was able to find the quietest, calmest home for her (some are extremely rowdy places) where the nurses seem to intuitively know how to treat her with careful attention to her great dislike of being touched.

There's also the massive issue of how to get GPs and other health care professionals to accept your dx gained in later life: their thinking is generally 'You can't possibly be on the spectrum - you've managed until now (i.e. 40, 50, 60, 70 etc) so you can't possibly have anything like this.' There needs to be much more research about older undx'd Aspies and our support needs later in life. As you point out, it gets harder and harder to keep on pretending as you get older (personally, when i was dx'd a year or so back, I stopped the act... it was very liberating in one way, I became authentic for once in my life, but it also means that my life has changed completely: I simply do not want to work and play with others, I can't face endless strangers and now refuse to try to understand all the office politics etc. What support or understanding is there for people in this situation? = NONE)

Also, there's something that others have identified here: at 45 I feel like I am only just growing up - I feel on the brink of real adulthood, having pretended all my chronological life (yes, I've done marriage and motherhood and all the usual 'grown-up' things that go with it, but I was never really all there. (And people somehow instinctively knew this). But my point is that we probably have the potential for whole new careers in front of us as 'developmentally adult' (those newly arrived at adulthood in later life, as distinct from 'chronologically adult'). I feel that I have mountains to learn still. I suppose I'm at the stage of an NT 25yo who is becoming stable enough to settle into a career. Where is the support for us?

These and many other issues are going to become more and more pressing and pertinent as more and more adult Aspies are accurately identified. I would hazard a guess that the numbers are actually huge - eventually we'll find that every other family has an ASD member. We need to be forcing discussion on all these things with the establishment/policy makers etc. We should start a Grey Aspie Power movement!!

Yes. May be I am addicted to the Web now, but this doesn’t harm as smoking or liquor. Moreover the Web keeps your brain alive, both hemispheres. Most old people can’t live without crosswords and TV. Here you can better enrich your experience, get some useful information and even be a little creative. And there is some dialogue, some exchange, some possibility to rant and having someone listening or even consoling you somehow. Unfortunately when you reach old age you are not going to be an magician of informatics. But I would advise all people over sixty to practice the Web. Everybody would like physical contact, face to face, body to body, intertwining of hands for a little time, even if many of us have always been frightened of intimacy. Intimacy, taking turns in life, mutual aid without having to beg, or even ask: shall we have to dream of these things until the end? It’s a little sad to say this, but I would prefer loneliness forever than assistance from persons who, you know, don’t really love you because they don’t know you, not being their fault.

Edit: that was yesterday. I was gloomy because i spent the whole morning having my laptop fixed, and that implied having a sortie out of my burrow-bubble, having it damaged (the bubble, not the laptop) for a while (but it's never the same thing as before after repairs). I'll proceed after this with my posts about the general theory of autism (! !), and other highbrow, abstruse considerations.

I enjoy reading your "highbrow and abstruse considerations" Paolo, but it is also good to hear how you feel about day-to-day things. It is a way to get to know people, by how they feel as well as their thoughts Glad your computer is fixed now.

Sometimes I feel like Kafka who, in one of his letters to Milena (his lover for a short time) says: “it’s like the biblical dove, she has been sent out of the Ark, didn’t find anything green, she goes back to the dark Ark.”
Some other time (now for example) I rely on this formula which seems a good recipe (I don’t like the word recipe but for now I will use it): you must see the time you have before you, like the time that Japanese people condemned to capital punishment have: they don’t execute them immediately, they keep them in prison, sometime for 10 or 18 years, then they suddenly decide to hang them and they do it without forewarning, they just come in the morning and get them. It's like an exercise in acrobatics, the more near the end the more the exercise is difficult and challenging. So you can put passion in your performance and even have fun. Now I am having some fun.

But I want to put a question now. I have gone to see “The Painted Veil” a good film with a rather conventional story of a good doctor treating Chinese people in an epidemic in the 20s, being betrayed by his wife. I enjoyed it even if I prefer more gloomy things. At some point someone says of Shanghai “ oh, it’s full of life". I have no doubt that Shanghai or any other great city in its suburbs (Calcutta or New Orleans before Katrina) is (or was) full of life. But could someone say of Wall Street or of the City of London, or Beverly Hills: “it’s full of life”? I have been for two months in the Puertorican zone of New York in july-august, and it appeared to me "full of life"; I liked it. Great nostalgia for these people in the streets in summer.

I apologize I am digressing. Perhaps because I am a little manic now.

It is interesting, the image of cities being full of life. I met a couple of friends in London a few years ago, they are originally from Venezuela. My friend's husband said he was disappointed and asked me 'where are the real people of London. London is full of people, tourists, but there is no feeling of life'. I wondered if it was a cultural difference to him, that maybe he felt that British people are rather reserved by nature, compared to his culture?

(Mania, yes I understand that. I go with it now, and even enjoy it. When I was younger it frightened me, the feeling of it, of being 'carried away'. One lives and learns )

Yes markets, markets in the open are full of life. Not megastores, not supermarkets. And the streets, in summer in popular neighbouroods, when children play outside and folks are mixed black and white, even here in northern Europe they are all mixed now. And kids are much more inclined to mix and enjoy together, icecreams, sex, skateboards, playing some instruments, they are little nice beasts. And beasts are better, much better than brokers and officials. Play is all the same thing and is life, for beasts and kids. Not the Maldives, but Coney Island.

I'm 34. It will be a struggle for me to get DXed, if thats really what I want and need. It was nice to listen to all of your feelings, especially about true adulthood being delayed. That really struck a chord with me. I've always felt that way.

Thank you.

56 here, I like the idea. I'm more then overwhelmed with some of the younger posts. It isn't that I don't want to or wouldn't try to reply, there are so many I wouldn't do justice to them. Even if I could get out something that might be a help. Sometimes you just need adult time. I don't want to be Dear Abby.

Careful with the Viet Nam stereo types, paolo, I get really pissed at those. They're still my brothers and sisters. I have a boyhood friend dying from Agent Orange as I write and the only way he can get help to keep himself and his family going is through a lawyer. I had a meltdown in the middle of a crowded store (and I was on valium to even handle the crowd and the car to get there) when I heard the news from his brother. It took me 3 days to stop crying. You have no idea how many friends I lost to that f***ed up mess. I still can't look at the names on The Wall. I am not a happy camper. Sorry, it does get me worked up, but I won't delete a word of it.

Lol, all the more reason for an adult area. How many of the young uns' can relate to that time period. Good idea.

postpaleo

I would be delighted to support a more senior aspie corner. I am 47 and undiagnosed, although my half brother, father and neice are confirmed aspie. I have severe communication problems especially when I feel stressed, like now. I have just read through this thread having ignored it since it first appeared. It has been most enjoyable reading it and I identify with so much of what has been said. Thank you Paulo for suggesting both a senior corner and a married thread.

Yoyo