Getting older, then labels change

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I am an artist and have been a wanderer around the globe for nearly 30 years...and I keep arguing and always to have the last word, I realise. But I have my friends (a GP even who is also an artist) who tells me to ignore these autism boxes and labels engineered by his colleagues he says. The pharmacy industry, huge business he argues...I have lost my daughter and mother last year, and I barely survived it, by the skin of my teeth. A long process, and now life, my own seems irrelevant...What do you do, even as an artist, I keep struggling and the prospect of having to settle down in loneliness, scares the hell out of me..I have only done arts and teaching English, but even the latter is almost impossible without a BA...I only got TEFL. Anyway, i am deviating. I wanted to say that occasionally I come back here after long absences now because now I get even hurt by colleagues who tell me to go and see a shrink, that I am borderline or a combination of borderline with narcissism, that I am crazy.

I have broken with my family and only saw them with trepidation at the cremation service of my beautiful daughter, who like my son had a strain of autism, and even my mum, from where we all got it. my eldest sister's son is not Aspie but plain autistic...he does not talk a lot, and he is still with my sis but he could not live on his own. Only last year she told me he was autistic, and I got upset about it because i am his godfather and she never wanted to tell me about it. In the early 80s, she had gone to see a child specialist and of course about aspieness many people were still in the dark. They told her that he was not ret*d..and that is what she told her siblings and my mum who was then already divorced from our dad.

So now, also my friends have said that I had improved so much from what I was 8 years ago,occasionally I relapse, I have to be myself, I keep saying and listen to my GP friend and others who say it is a label and should be proud of my uniqueness of an artist...that is true, but at age 57,I am now totally alone living in Asia on my own, and faraway from where I grew up or my latest port of call in Peru. But I am also member of the LGBT community, now being an artist, and gay, and Aspie is too much to go through as a social outcast.

My mentor and friend broke up 2 years ago...and I feel I am back at square one from when I was 25 living alone, not easily making friends. Now being ridiculed and humiliated by borderline and so on, remarks. My mentor and friend, a lady, says that Borderline is a word they use nowadays for Asperger, in the US...I don't know, but every night I wonder what I am still doing on this planet...I miss my mother deeply and my daughter...

I have a son who rejected me...so basically I am staring at a big hell hole for the coming years and a black dog at my heels...My entire days I sit following Facebook messages, comments on my art...etc...I am hooked and bored with it at the same time,doing that to avoid going out in the heat...I have painted 25 works of art in 7 months only here...but I cannot stay here forever...procrastinating decision making which country to move to where I would feel better. I dread Latin America for its machismo and homophobia and hate towards us...

Sorry..there is so much more I could tell...but it has been too long already

I appreciate the Churchill reference... that beast really gets around. Sorry I don't have anything useful to say. Just wanted you to know that your post did not go unnoticed. I hope you'll stick around for the better replies to follow.

Quote OP:
My mentor and friend broke up 2 years ago...and I feel I am back at square one from when I was 25 living alone, not easily making friends. Now being ridiculed and humiliated by borderline and so on, remarks. My mentor and friend, a lady, says that Borderline is a word they use nowadays for Asperger, in the US..

I don't live in the USA though it would greatly surprise me if what your former mentor/friend said (as underlined) was true, and I wonder what her motivation for saying this to you was. Please bear in mind that friends (including former friends) don't see us as objectively as they like to think. Knowingly or not, she misled you, for what reason only she can know. Now let that hurt go and move on. You deserved better, especially from someone who was supposed to be both mentor and friend.

I agree. I do live in USA, and I have never heard "borderline" used in place of Aspergers/autism. In fact, it would only obfuscate the current "borderline" usage as shorthand for borderline personality disorder, which is a totally different diagnosis.

I have trouble posting an answer, the tab always crashed. I wrote 2 paragraphs and I lost it. This is another

Sorry for the confusion I may have caused here. My mentor does not insult me or calls me Borderline. She came to my defense trying to soothe my mind, basically telling me to ignore my colleagues who call me that and other names, by saying that is probably what is now fashionable a word for NTs to call Aspies with.

I get even sadder when i realise that because of Aspie coloured glasses I could not see through the antics of my daughter who had, I think also had Aspie traits. Was I too busy obsessing about myself and did not see the other's needs. It takes one to recognise another, they say, and yet I was blind to see. I could see or guess it in my son, but both his mum and himself, like my sisters do when i see my mum is the source (or her mother was) genetically for what I see in her that is so similar. I read that Aspies have a very strong connection with their mums. I was unable to cut the umbilical chord until her last breath. I wish I had understood and see all this earlier. My siblings instead refute my 'diagnosis' of mum because I am no doctor, and even refute my Aspieness, for they still have a concept of autism as the non-verbal withdrawn hand flapping autistic person, and would find that shameful a label to put on our mum. No, my mum was not like that, but had severe social communication problems with neighbours and even her won family. I was stunned one day, at the hospice where she resided since her aneurysm in 2002, which put her in homes ever since, of how bluntly she told a nurse that her voice was something she disliked. I think that was a hurtful remark to the nurse who took it professionally.

At one point, 3 years ago, i told the head nurse that I think my mum was Asperger, but it has never been taken on board by no one...Anyway, I still get thrown out from art groups, for just asking colleagues why they do this or that, or as recently asking why one would exhibit in Iran as a woman and accept the dictates of a dictatorial Islamic theocracy of her wearing a hijab. Within minutes she rebuked my questions only later to tell me that others had warned her for me and that I was crazy and a mix of Narcissism and Borderline. My webmaster called me that already years ago. Just when you think you 'upgraded' yourself (until I had no more energy to keep the appearance up of being normal) and trying to be pleasant and sociable, even on Facebook, it is the NTs that show the least sociable attitude towards me. When I relapse into a behaviour or demeanor my friends do not like, I get the comment that I had reached so far and was good and all, but I am too egocentric to keep it up because 'I need to be myself as an artist too, or it is part of my artist nature, etc. I fall from one side to another and lose control and consistency, but more so , I get weary.

SO, finally my mentor and I split up. She is the only person in my life who held it out to travel and live with me for 8 long years, for which she thanked me, because she learned a lot from me she said, including how to travel the world. But I am gay yes, i fathered 2 children, but that is another story) but she yearned for affection from me, which I could rarely give. She agreed that we 'use' each other. She was giving me sexual satisfaction-she being active and me passive- but that did not last...so, we split and she fell in love with a girl and the girl with her. And we miss each other on a platonic level...but for me, my life seems over. What can a 57 year old expect but decay of the body, i have already enough to cope with depressions and physical aliments like rheumatic arthritis, which I can only take my mind of when i paint..even painting had been impossible for 3 years because of lower back pain (I had a slip disc)...anyway...I count that maximum I may, if I am lucky, have another 10 years of life. My GP friend said..."we are old and ugly" he plans his own suicide at age 65 with morfine overdose. He lives like a hermit in Thailand, treating 3 paraplegic patients in his private home with his won money...admirable, but he is not happy...I asked if I could go with him...Everything in my life seems deja vu now.

Reading what you have written, I found myself wondering whether you ever had a chance to learn as a child about social and conversational boundaries from an adult who had good boundaries themselves, and if you are not taught where those boundaries are as you are growing up, you may cross social boundaries without ever being aware of this as an adult.

I think many of us here did have poor role models in that respect, (often because of baffled unsupported parents who were also on the spectrum) and many of us seem to have compensated by teaching ourselves what we needed to know but did not yet know - from novels, from films, from books, from good friends if we were lucky to have them, from teachers and special people we happened to meet. Some of us learned from trial and error, though that was probably a more painful learning curve.

Boundaries are not discussed a great deal here on WP, except in terms of mistakes people make, and yet the issue is a very important one in terms of lifetime skills that affect all our interactions with others. If this rings any sort of bell with you, there are some good starter articles on the net which are not hard to find on Google.

PS I am quite a bit older than you, and ageing has not been all downhill and negative. I am less stressed than at earlier stages in my life and have much more free time to indulge my interests.

I have been called a cry baby since I was born. My grandmother and father bullied me over it. I developed bronchitis and later asthma and many allergies. I read years later that asthma is something psychological, a need for air, for breath and love from mum. Overly sensitive and I read how autistic people cry a lot as babies and toddlers. Overly sensitive...my father laughed at me for that. Get over it NTs say...I cannot, it is still very deep and sore...

Then I heard and read of how epilepsy is common with autism or has connections. my daughter, who did not want to grow up, obsessed with animals and Disneyland, where she died of a sever epilepsy seizure, a condition she hid for her boss, friends, and colleagues. Her brother has a more severe epilepsy than she had. I come from a dysfunctional family where my dad beat the s**t out of my mum. He tried to kill himself twice, and I saved my mum from his clutches at age 13 when he tried to strangle her.

My entire life has fallen to pieces, now that both my mum and daughter have gone, and my son does not wish to see or talk to me for 10 years already. Something I had with my dad, too. He says I was never there or a father for him...I left him with his mum to save him from psychological damage or psychosis from the verbal fighting between his mum and I. Something his sister later understood and accepted.

Oh, there is so much more hate and grief and what have you...which I have tried to explain to others and him...but he does not want to hear...Both his mum and he chucked me out of FaceBook.

Last edited by Loborojo on 01 Mar 2017, 2:22 am, edited 1 time in total.

It sounds like all the pain in your life has congealed into a deeper sort of soul sadness that is very painful to bear. I wonder if there is anyone in your life who could really listen to you share this, I mean just listen - with acceptance and respect for your sharing. You sound so alone with this.

I need a long hug, but I wonder how long I could bear it. No I am definitely alone here in an Asian country where hugging unlike in the West is not common to see or do.