Who are the autistic adults?

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Hi I am a seventy yo male gay hiv positive living in Portland. I just became self diagnosed a few months ago. I will be probably diagnosed soon, but I know anyway. I had a career with the Feds but changed a lot and took early retirement.
My partner and I are very close, we take life easy, and enjoy cannabis and relaxing in PDX. I am okay with it, I function well but socially a complete nurd and geek. I am a high level geek, science, history, war history, and geology and climate and weather. I have great mechanical aptitude and love my hyperzision and visual spatial abilities. Actually the tv shows Good Doctor and Atypical were my first clue to my makeup. It looked like my brain in another person. It was so revealing and now after six months, we both are okay with it. There is the allergies from hell, milk, chocolate and simple food tastes, but generally our friends just don't care much. It is a sad thing that some autistics suffer much and are misunderstood but here in Portland we go to a coffee shop in town that lets dogs come in and several autistics are regulars. The atmosphere of Portland is conducive to live and let live. Thats my story in brief. Rick

I'm 56 and quite good at certain things... unfortunately it took me a very long time to find them. Despite the fact that I'm starting my own small, not-so-lucrative company, I live with the constant fear that things could collapse for me at any time. I've always depended on other people to bail me out when I screwed up (in the eyes of society), so I don't think I'd do well at all if left totally to myself. And the older I get, the scarier that is; it's much easier to walk away from mistakes and start over when young.

I was one of those that fell through the cracks even though I was obviously different and formally tested in 3rd grade. The outcome was that I was at a 9th to 12th grade level but I would get stuck a lot; my whole life I get stuck and frustrated. My family members knew I was ASD/ASP but could care less. They were focused on their work and living life, so they left me in a room to figure it out, for a long long time. I wish I never went to public school, I wish what Mr. Asperger knew in the 40's, made its way to American psychology before the 90's. It would have been a lot better life. The last high range IQ test I took was a 153. My Autism doctor who has it himself is around 160; he thinks I am above a 160. Though if it is true, I really could care less. I wish I had a normal life and friends.

I hope I'm not out of your age range of interest. My AS mother was quite eccentric, but very careful to not be called crazy. She had many superficial friendships that she would travel to renew at reunions. I failed school and left home at 17, with a general knowledge level over college grad levels. I understood my Gr. 11 physics so well that I was able to complete my education to my own satisfaction at the library. I have won prizes for innovative engineering and lectured to graduating engineers, but never developed the business connections to make it pay.
I can socialize when appropriate, had a series of girlfriends, and then one bad, childless marriage. That was followed by probably my best relationship, but I'd learned enough to be the one to end it for the first time. However, now I get too bored to bother with most people. I've never had a TV, and can't discuss pop culture. As well as not knowing about AS, I was deluded my whole life by not knowing how separate and distinct IQ and EQ are. My former score is two or three times higher than the latter, so I thought the socially adept easily understood math, but just pretended not to for fun. Learning that involved a series of misunderstandings that were quite traumatic for me, involving years of recovery and ongoing disability.
My advice is to find a partner who is willing and able to trade help with technical things for help with social things. When I try doing favours and then asking for them along that line, most NTs don't understand why I need help with "obvious" details. In general, they are not very receptive to technical help, either. The familiar seems safe, inefficiency pays, and advice is an insult to one's supposed intelligence.

I am one of those. I've never worked. I've never driven a car. I've had less than a handful of friends . I met my wife who was nearly 22 years older than me in psych hospital . Since she died in 2005 I've not had a similar relationship with anyone else .

I lead a very basic lifestyle . I'm lucky enough now to get good support from my stepdaughter and granddaughters . When I didn't have that support I was living in a mess , and basically self neglecting .

I am a 71 year old Aspie. I self-diagnosed myself around 2 years ago. I took an on-line test and scored 38 out of a possible 50 on the Autism Spectrum Quotient self test. [Scores in the 33-50 ranges indicate significant Autistic traits (Autism).] Generally I consider myself an Aspie and do not relate myself as autistic because autism is treated and views as a disability and I consider myself different but not disabled.

I obtained a degree in nuclear physics and worked for 40 years and then retired. I retired about 10 years ago. I married in my middle 20's. I have been married for 45 years and we have 2 children and 5 grandchildren. I have a Yin-Yang marriage. I am an extreme introvert and my wife is an extreme extrovert. Together we join our individual strengths together to form a very good union. I could care less about the social aspects of society but my wife interprets the social world for me. She is my guide. Many times there was an old saying that "my wife is my better half". [I think this phrase had its origin a couple thousand years ago with the poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) and later by Statius.] And in my case that saying holds true.

I became financially independent around the age of 19. I worked my way through college. I believe work is critical to developing independence and an education focused solely on acedemics does a great disservice to Aspies.

Maybe the most important thing to know about me is that I am happy. I am happy with my life and what I have accomplished in my life. I didn't even realize there were others like me until 2 years ago. And it grieves me that most Aspies at least those on this site express a high degree of hurt and pain.

A few other things about me is that I have an INTJ personality. I also have mixed in with this an INTP personality and in a sense my INTJ protects my INTP. INTJ is like the trait called Wisdom whereas INTP is Intelligence. So wisdom can always step in when all logic fails.

Also because of a hard knock life, I have developed a fairly thick hide and became a non-conformist. From my perspective the end goal of every Aspie should be to become a nonconformist. And I am very much an out-of-box thinker.

My special ability is pattern matching. I can recognize patterns that may have been missed by others. I see this in my offsprings. My youngest daughter could assemble the hardest of puzzles called the Impossible Puzzles in a few hours. I let my grandchildren take Mensa practice tests on the Internet and they did very well, perhaps even better than myself.

One of the differences between myself and the younger generation is that I do not rely on any type of drugs for socialization. I have never used amphetamines to control my behavior. [Society didn't even know the term Asperger's Syndrome when I was a child.] I don't use alcohol, narcotics or psychedelics drugs.

Anita Leska wrote:
It saddens me to see the great number of therapists who prescribe medications to end the meltdowns – they also end a clearly thinking mind. I think of all the genius minds of our times that are now believed to have had Asperger’s: Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Thomas Edison. If they had been placed on mind-altering drugs, I truly believe they would not have created what they did.

I personally feel that the introduction of prescription drugs would have desensitized me to the pain when I really needed to feel the pain in order to develop many of my personality traits such as stubbornness, tenacity and steady resolve. From the brutality, I evolved my sense of compassion towards others in pain. I also visualized imaginary worlds, better worlds much better than the real world.

Another author wrote:
It is sad that the practice of giving amphetamines to children grew to such widespread proportions bolstered by the apparent “success” of behavior that was made more compliant. Rather than assuming that this drug “fixed” some as yet indiscernible medical condition, a more likely thesis might be that the drug accelerated physiological function that resulted is less dissonance with neurological function. However, no one was really interested in the real explanation as long as there was a mechanism for making children more compliant. This “cure” seemed to substantiate the view that an unknown physical defect was fixed with medication.

In a way, a big enough hammer can force a square peg into a round hole, but only at the expense of breaking off the corners.

So perhaps the practice of labeling kids with the trait ADD or ADHD and then prescribing a treatment of amphetamines to make them compliant may in fact be a very harmful approach. If you deaden the Aspies ability to disassociate (daydream) under stress, then you may have succeeded in making the child into only the empty shell of what they could become.