autism disovered in old age

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We live in an affective void, like stray dogs. We approach the others in a hesitant way to ask for nourishment, affective nourishment, ready to fly when we realize that others are not really attached to us (they will never know whom we are) and are moved only by some sort of flighting compassion. But compassion we dont need. We need that other rare commodity that is love, when we ourselves are probably incapable of love. So we are only beggars, like gipsies. But gipsies have their own tribe, while we are forced to adapt to the rarefied air of empty space. Perhaps monasteries were peopled by the likes of us, not by believers.

Long before I ever heard about AS....I questioned by ability to love...I knew how to "obsess" over someone and for the longest time I thought it was the same thing,but could never figure out how ,I could stop having "feelings" for there person...just seemed ,one day I awoke,and felt no connection to them....it was as painful to me as it was for the poor confused people who had put their hearts in my hands...I wondered if that made me a psychopath...but I new I had no joy in hurting them...I had not "obsessed" over them to get something....as a last resort I would have to resort to psychology to explain the feelings(or lack of them)....I was an "addict" and wanted to go get my "fix" of casual sex or alcoholic excitement....I was adopted and had just never learned to "trust" or fear of abandonment would make me push away before I could get hurt....or when most desperate for an answer...I am an alian and this just is not the right "species" for me to connect to.

Most of the time I would deny any need for human contact...but the fact that I can spend 12 hours a da
reading and responding to this forum...would have to beg other wise.It truely perplexes me.I seem to have a need for people to like me as I am...I already know I will not change to get this,it wouldnt count,but I do one to feel conected...I just cant figure out why I need this.It does not seem logical to me.I can understand what happens when I have no human contact...I have tried that...I float of into the abys...it is very,very frightening...it remiinds me of most of the existentialist writtings I have read..
Those guys had to be at least a little aspie..

Paolo...I enjoy reading your posts....you are not alone....miles seperate the material world but not the world of thoughts and feelings...these are non material and transcend the laws of time and space...
if I was there instead of an ocean away,perhaps I would share some coffee with you,but what we all can share with each other through this forum is invaluable for me...ideas,memorys,frustration,and the existential angst that connects us all.

Paolo, you really should write poetry, if you don't already. Your writings are very moving.

I second that Dalebert

As a child i lived by myself, apart from my family. There was the inside of my home which was fraught with litigiousness between my parents, and vicious verbal attacks from my father. I was made a scapegoat for an unhappy marriage. I also resented being treated like a toy by my elder sister. There was a perennial pervasive anxiety in my house, especially on the part of my father, about dangers being everywhere; some of them were real (the war, sicknesses, racial persecution), some were imaginary (germs in vegetables and fruit, for example) or dramaticaolly exaggerated. The outside of the house were the courtyard, the roof, the balconies, where i preferred to live, listening and looking from the windows and from the balustrades to what happened there. Carpets being beated, gramophones playing often the same record again ad again, kids playing. These things were all good for me, witnessing that life was non all the "inside" inhabited by madness. Even now carpets being beaten in the courtyards in the morning bring me back to those happy moments of childhood. And sometimes I was left alone in the house and these were happy hours, some time days. On holidays i could stay on the beach or walk in the woods and there i ate salingerian bananas in great quantity, i was happy.
There is a capacity for plenitude in childhood never to be lived again later, but leaving sediments of force in your mind. Memories that help you bear the drudgery that follows in later years. a kind of motivanional fuel, so to speak, that even now is not entirely consumed. This too is Life.

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Yes, there is a task when you discover an unsettling new perspective on your life. There is an entire vast territory to be explored. Make your DX, but not to claim the privilege of the maimed, rather to keep it as a starting point for exploration, for reorganization of life, of your life, but also of life in general, at least of the perception of life, with a fallout of new meanings. It's the fascination of revelation. A difficult labour. When the frame changes, all the representations enclosed in the frame change. It's a radical restructuring. At first it may give you pain and anxiety, but then you may discover the charm of an entirely new landscape to discover and admire. "Old men should be explorerers" wrote T.S.Eliot in the Quartets. I have never been sure of what he meant. Perhaps it had something to do with our task now.
As i am inevitably bookish (books and movies are my main nourishments now), I want to cite a difficult book: "Frame Analysis" by Ervig Goffman. It's a philosofical book, but very profound and revelatory. It is about the organization of perception through the frames. The frames were discovered first by Gregory Bateson. One very important frame is the piece of wood that separates the painting from every thing else in the wall. That, for now.

Thanx again for continuing to post, Paolo. It rings very true for me, that this understanding about myself is going to be traumatic, but it is definately a good thing. Knowledge is half the battle. I don't feel like I know how to "fix" things yet, but I do know about the "why" now. I've been working so hard to learn how to fit in and have been so proud of my progress, and yet my anxiety has been growing because I'm swimming upstream all the time. I'm going to start looking at things a new way. How can I adjust and do the things that are necessary to function amongst NTs without sacrificing too much of myself knowing that my needs are very different than most? That's the question I'll start answering for myself. I feel like I've been acting under a delusion that I could morph myself into an NT, but that' because I didn't even realize I was that different. I'm not officially diagnosed as AS and will find out soon, but one thing is certain to me. I'm not an NT.

I always longed for affection, ties, bonds. But what does it mean to have love for somebody? We take these things for simple and intuitive, defined by common sense. But attachment is often distorted by a desire for control and by sexual attraction. It’s not so easy to detect the real foundations of a relationship. Communication is always partial, we can never be sure to understand the other person in its complexities. Thinking about this problem in these days I came to one conclusion that may be banal and simplistic but, after all, seems to me to make sense. There is a kind of measuring rod: the strength of the desire to protect, protect not possess the other. Unfortunately I have to say that in my loneliness I do not see someone I could want to protect and this is my extreme indigence.

Thank you Krex for what you say.

I often have difficulty understanding if what I am feeling is love...even the desire to "protect" can be selfish for me ...I want to protect because I do not want to lose what my boyfriend or cat gives me...
I would hurt if they were hurt but I hurt when I see how hard the lives of Iraq peoples have it since the US invassion and subsiquent civil war...There is something else I feel that happens inside my body/brain....when I look at my cat or my boyfriend..mayeb it is mearly a chemical release ....seratonin being uptaken?....it sure feels nice...."a rock,a tree,a cloud"(have you ever read that short story...I forget the Author but I felt their message....sometimes we have to start small to understand real love...human love is just to complex and has so many layers....I have often questioned the "reality" of a God...but then wonder....what is this capacity to feel "something"just by looking at a certain rock,petting a bunny,watching my cat move....it feels deeper then "appriciation" and doesnt fit my understanding of "psychological Darwinism"...feeling love as a way to get our selfish needs met and create a bond so others will be ablidged to take care of us(seems like that would be useful for survival of our genes and out tribe....but why do I feel it for a rock,tree,bunny?Thats why I believe in the possibility of a higher power who gives me the gift to have these occassional feelings...it certainly is a gift....whatever the cause...

There is an image which I could not tansfer here (a pity) of a man with a dog in the flood.
The man in New Orleans is retrieving his dog after Katrina. The man is serious and determined, the dog has complete confidence in his protector.


I like very much this image which make me think of larger interconnections of life. Some time animals eat other animals, sometime they establish incredibly strong bonds. The beauty of flowers is an instrument for making insects cooperate in impollination, but is beauty all the same.


I think about this question in this period. What is love, and what is beauty for which we long so much?

"I hurt when I see how hard the lives of Iraq peoples have it since the US invassion and subsiquent civil war"
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So in your opinion they where better off getting tortured and killed prior to the invasion.

the highest murder rate of any US city in 2002 was that of Washington, DC, at 45.8 per 100,000 inhabitants. That means you're 4.27 times more likely to be murdered in Baghdad as you are in the most dangerous city in the US.

According to Wikipedia, Baghdad's estimated population as of 2005 is 7,400,000. That makes Baghdad's murder rate 195.41 per 100,000 residents.

The murder rate for the ((( whole country ))) might be less per 100,000 people than what we put up with in cities in this country.

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Since the Saddam Hussein regime was overthrown in May, 270 mass graves have been reported. By mid-January, 2004, the number of confirmed sites climbed to fifty-three. Some graves hold a few dozen bodies—their arms lashed together and the bullet holes in the backs of skulls testimony to their execution. Other graves go on for hundreds of meters, densely packed with thousands of bodies.

"We've already discovered just so far the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves," said British Prime Minister Tony Blair on November 20 in London. The United Nations, the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch (HRW) all estimate that Saddam Hussein's regime murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people. "Human Rights Watch estimates that as many as 290,000 Iraqis have been 'disappeared' by the Iraqi government over the past two decades," said the group in a statement in May. "Many of these 'disappeared' are those whose remains are now being unearthed in mass graves all over Iraq."
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How can you people just let the liberal press control your minds and blindly believe everything they throw at you. Most of the country of Iraq is a peaceful place free of the terror they endured prior to the US coming to their rescue. Sure there are still a few hot spots that get platered all over the evening news.

If the news media just reported on what goes on in the worst neighborhoods of America to people that didn't live here, this country would appear to be a hell hole if the only thing reported was the worst of the worst from the meanest hoods in America and never any news from Bugtussle where people never lock thier doors and the only crime is littering.


{{{ shudder }}} liberals

If "Rain Man" was made to make the public understand the tragedy of autism, it failed completely. The problem would have required an intimistic existental approach. But Raymod-Hoffman is only a virtuoso performer and Charlie-Tom is only Tom Cruise. Strict adherence to ritual agenda is only seen as a oddity good to impress a superficial audience. So are Raymond's mnemonical capacities. No expression of the suffering, no attempt to dig at the needs of ritual adherence, that is a need to feel at home somehow and allay a desperate anguish. I talked with several persons who had seen the movie. Nobody saw it as the representation of a somber piece of humanity, but only as feat of Dustin Hoffman.

In literature Kafka and Fritz Zorn are perhaps the best descriptions (from the inside of tormented souls) of the autistic condition. Read, if you can, "The Burrow" the last novella that Kafka wrote. Of corse there is much in many other authors, especially poets: Ann Sexton, Plath and writers like Beckett, Yates, Camus, Robert Walser and many others.

I thought I was the only one who read Plath,nobody ever mentions her as a good poet,yet her poetry and "Bell Jar" were the only things that made me feel "not alone"...Kafka and Camus didnt come until college...but I could not believe that their were others describing my internal experience.You are so right about "Rain Man"...I havent seen any of the latest movies which "deal" with AS but I am a bit apprehinsive....For me...even good movies can not come close to makeing me understand/feel,what a book can...I'm not sure why,but words have always held more power for me...movies tend to skim the surface of the skin...(not to say I havent seen powerful movies,but it just doesnt seem to reach me in the same place.

I would be interested in any suggestions for movies that you have found interesting...

In “Good old neon” David F. Wallace explains in a vivid way the degeneration of self, or perhaps the built in structural weakness of self. “My whole life has been a fraud”. And there is also a disturbing paradox, because how to get rid of the fraudulent condition, this mortal sickness of your soul, if your self-denunciation might be a part of the fraud? Perhaps one should accept to be condemned to silence, as the character of “Persona” by Ingmar Bergman and the protagonists of the films of Kim il Duk, the Korean director.
The strength of the feelings might be our only salvation: not the perfunctory kisses exchanged at a funeral, but the passionate hugs of mothers and her children, when they discover that they are of one flesh, in the face of loss or of grave danger. Rarely I have experienced the happiness of a hug, certainly not with my mother. So the representation of feelings in the movies are a solace for me. Sometimes you find the representation of feeling without the physicity of the hugs, like in the splendid trilogy of Apu of the great Indian moviemaker Ray (“Pather Panchaly”, which I have seen dozens of times) and in the cinema of the Japanese Ozu, where they never touch each other, but there is so much force of feeling!