AS getting worse?

Post Reply New Topic

Has anyone else felt as though some/all of their AS symptoms are getting worse?

I feel as though I have been getting steadily worse since mid high school which was the last time I spent most of my days with other people. I spent most of my time at college immersed in a special interest (01-04). After that I took a year out, and whereas most people would travel / work during a year out I spent it mostly in my room studying special interests. I think this made my auditory sensitivity even worse not to mention eroded a lot of my limited social ability. I only just made it through grad school, partly because I had a terrible working relationship with my superiors and would answer them back / challenge their authority as though I was a peer and not a student. I was diagnosed with AS last year and since then I stim a lot more; before I would just bite my nails, but now I rock and hum and tap, etc. At times I feel my head is so busy I just want to run away and escape or hide under my desk. Other times I have to put on noise cancelling headphones and listen to familiar music. Colleagues at work joke that they are not 'noise cancelling headphones' but rather 'people cancelling headphones' -- which is funny but at the same time I start thinking about how I didn't previously need such headphones.

I'm 28 now and feel like I'm overwhelmed every day with stimulation, I stim a lot, and struggle to work during the day when it's busy and instead get most of my work done in the evening when it quietens down. Why do I feel my AS is getting worse? I'm tempted to look into medication but I'm worried they will fix the bad parts of AS but also take away the good parts (e.g. dedication to special interests). I'm also worried about what may happen if I acquire dependence or resistance to them, and what would happen if I were to discontinue them. What to do?

Maybe since your diagnosis you are subconsciously taking on more symptoms of AS as part of some sort of over-pathologizing

How about this radical idea? Try taking off your headphones and spend a little time studying your co-workers--what do they talk about? What are their likes and dislikes. Figure out pleasant things to say. Hopefully, getting to know them better will allow you to relax a bit and actually get some work done during the day--without having to resort to meds.

Hopefully, you can get to the point in which you can get your fair share of work done during the day, so you can devote your nights and weekends to special interests.

Just to say, I completely relate - it seems like my AS symptoms have 'gotten worse'.

But really, in the past two years or so, I just moved into an age group where it was less acceptable to be 'different', so I began to notice it and it felt like a problem. Thus it coming across like my AS was getting worse.

http://web.archive.org/web/200502090843 ... istic.html

It seems things have gotten worse for me over the past few years but this is probably because I'm more aware of my symptoms.

Could it be that when accept them and stop trying to hide them and "act normal" the symptoms seem to be worse?

I know I'm getting worse.... avoiding more situations, being afraid to leave the house etc.

Also, I have had a few periods where I got worse (probably others, but these I know for sure):

Once during 2001-2003 when I was burning out (very extended, probably beyond 2003, but 2003 was the last burnout).

Once in January of 2008, when my grandmother was dying (and had died) and had lost a lot of my ability to socialize at all and refused to interact with people who did not live in the house.

And since November, when the noise level around here skyrocketed, my sensitivities increased, and some of them changed. I had many more shutdowns than I usually do (and I tend to have them semi-frequently), and I started showing more "autistic" symptoms, which is what prompted me to look into the possibility that I was autistic in the first place. It may be that my symptoms also intensified when I self-diagnosed and then when I was officially diagnosed, but I do not know since I was under a lot of stress which also makes everything worse at the same time, and I can't be arsed to try to separate the effects now.

I don't seem to be any less autistic than I was several months ago, though.

Hormone levels and stress levels both solidly make me feel "more autistic".

I feel more autistic now than I use to but that is primarily because I don't get to recover from my day as much as I used to.

I used to have time when I would come home from work or school and I could go into my room and close the door and persue my special interst or just have some quiet time. Now that my life has changed with have children and also a busier work schedule I don't have that same recovery time. This has led to more shutdowns and even hitting myself when getting stressed. It had been a long time since I had done that and it was what led me to discussing thigns with my doct and eventually getting diagnosed.

I am now trying to get myself on a better schedule and finding ways to find recovery time so that I don't shutdown as much.

The other thing that has happened since being diagnosed is that I am no longer afraid to hide my symptoms when I would get home from work and my wife is much more understanding about them. Before she always thought she was walking on egg shells around me (not knowing what would set me off.) We now know that alot has to be keeping a schedule and she tries harder not to randomly change the plans for the day. She also will take care of the kids a bit more when she starts noticing that I am struggling.

I started having many more problems late grade school.

By highschool I think I just 'broke' myself. The marginal thread I was surviving on broke. I can't handle things much at all anymore. Before I would internalize things and now I seem to act more externally to things like stress, people, and change and have little threshold for dealing with it.