any aspie's over 50

Post Reply New Topic

I self diagnosed when I was 44 and diagnosed formally at 48. I worked as a Clinical Chemist for many years (mostly long hours on the weekends when no one was there, which I loved). I performed most of the technical work while my supervisor handled the people part of it. That worked well until she retired and I was expected to do all of it. I had to step down because of stress after 2 weeks and it was downhill from there until I quit 6 months later. I haven't worked since. I have been married for 21 years (many ups and downs with one separation) to a very extroverted NT and have 2 NT kid's that are also very outgoing. They all are involved in everything. This has showed me that being a NT extrovert makes life a hell of a lot easier (I am so glad for my kids). How my husband and I got together initially is that he thought I was extremely attractive and I was attracted to his social ease (I could use his as a shield in social situations). We met in graduate school.

I have always experienced anxiety and depression but it seems to get worse with age. My husband is very supportive (thankfully) but I try not to burden him too much. I have no real friends, just acquaintances. I wish this were different. I am immersed in a NT world. Some parents use me to help deal with their Aspie children, which I am glad to be of help. But this is all getting old. I'm tired. I cry a lot. I am on 2 antidepressants and 1 antiseizure drug all of which quit working after a while. I don't want to give up on trying different medications but my psychiatrist wants me to: he says that there's a point when I should just accept it especially since there is no cure for Aspergers. As far as giving up on life, I haven't. But I look to my future and ask "is this all there is? Am I going to continually get worse?

I went from having many goals and successes to wondering if I have anything to look forward to?

I feel like very much alone.

I'm not over 50, but i've heard on this site the social juggling gets tougher as you age.

I got very little amount of autistic people to talk to in my daily life too, but being here really compensates for that partly.

I'm over 50, and I find that I care less and less about socializing. I have more important things to do with my time than decipher incomprehensible social rituals that may or may not be of use in the near future.

Yes, it does get harder. Maybe it's the fact that my social problems keep accumulating.
Thank you for posting. Maybe i shouldn't have made the subject 'aspies over 50' there are not many people over 50 on here.

Oh, yes there are! You just have to find us!

I've seen quite a few, enough to have their own section here on this site for 30 and up:

In-Depth Adult Life Discussion
In-depth intelligent discussion for the older adults who have been living independently. It's recommended that you are age 30 and up and have the experience of living independently or in long-term partnerships. Adults younger than 30 can participate but we ask that you respect the maturity level of this forum.

A lot of my problem is that my family is so social. It's hard to avoid it. I keep really busy usually. I just want to be doing more of things i enjoy

I'll check it out. Thank's

Lousy psychiatrist!

There may not be a cure for Asperger's (afterall, merely a difference), but there damn sure is for depression. Yeah, and a good doctor has the patience to keep trying and tinkering with medication. Really, you might be better off with a good internist or family practitioner who, yes, can prescribe antidepressants, than stuck with a damn psychologist.

PS. I am 47.

guess i should have said more about that. I got on antidepessants in 1994. Saw a family practice doc for that until nothing was helping and they sent me to a psychiatrist (different from thw one i have now) i tried about 7 or 8 different antidep at the highest dosages. Nothing really helped. So, i quit seeing docs about it for a couple of years until i hit a terrible crisis due to my then unknown aspergers. So i went back to my regular doc who referred me to my current psychiatrist. There's just no psychiatrists that know much about adults with AS. He had me start seeing a psychologist in the same office who has taken time to educate himself about AS so he could help me

Maybe i should just change my medication cocktail more often? I see my docs in a couple of weeks. At least my docs communicate about me a lot. My psychologists told me i was one of their toughest patients when it came to finding drugs that worked.

After looking at the list of possible side effects and doing a search for personal experience here on WP, I recently decided to not take the Citalopram my MD had offered. However, I am finding St. John's Wort and "Calm" (a magnesium supplement) very helpful.

I do not know why life seems/becomes tougher as we age, but I sure do know it does. For me, it feels like being nearer the end of a long run and finding it becoming increasingly difficult to cheer myself along ... and even the spectators who used to help a bit are now gone ... yet I do continue on ... and yes, I also sometimes do shamelessly try to be a poet and so on ...

Whatever helps, eh?!

Yes, it is like the end of a long run. My family keeps me going even though it's been all uphill lately.

I exercise at high intensity for an hour at least 4 days a week (lately more) and that hasn't helped much which is puzzling.

I'll just keep plugging away

DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT A DOCTOR.

That said, yes, I think so. As I understand it, it's kind of ping ponging back and forth with feedback. That instead of clunksville logic (it 'should' work, therefore we're going to pretend like it is working, that kind of thing). As I understand it, biochem's just so complicated, nothing is guaranteed to work even when it's a good decision to try it.

And also, as I understand, some people have had significant improvement with dietary changes; other people hardly helped at all.

--------------------------

And then depending on your job situation, I mean, I have had job situations, this low-grade persecution, merely because I'm a little different and make people feel uncomfortable, often because I'm particularly good in one area (I wish people would develop their own areas, or fine, be generalists, no problem), but they seem to feel the need to criticize me, and I'm viewed as the person hurting 'group cohesion.' And then there can be a more active criticism and maybe something awkward happens and once officialdom labels you a certain way, wow, it's tough. It's almost no win. But just this being excluded. When even otherwise decent people are afraid to talk with me, because then they might be labelled, too. I mean, it's brutal.


And it takes me a very long time to wrap my mind around it and process it. That, whatever the professed values of the organization . . . when it comes down to it, such values seem to count for very little, let's say that. Yes, people can act this way. Yes, people can regress to junior high. It's sad, and it's damn unnecessary.

Last edited by AardvarkGoodSwimmer on 24 Nov 2010, 2:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It's tough isn't it? But it's nice to know I am not alone. I have just really suffered in the employment arena. One person I worked with was jealous of my degree and my knowledge so much that she continually hounded me. I didn't get it until much later since I don't understand why people do things that are very hurtful as adults (like they're in junior high). because of my social impairment, I depend on my husband a lot even to the point of asking him to come to Jazzercise with me (it's quite a large group and everyone wants to know about you. I let my husband talk when he's there) I hate depending on him so much because he may not always be there.

As far as diet goes, I eat lots of fruits and nuts and stay away from starchy foods. That seems to help me.

I'm wondering if you may have done with chemistry what I largely did with philosophy. Okay, I studied academic ethics, utilitarianism, Kantianism, so on and so forth. I thought I had real contributions to make, and I have, and I do. But because there's so few jobs in the field, it's primarily one-ups-manship. It's not really like you have teammates and people on your side at all. So, the whole thing ended up feeling like a burden and an obligation.

What's kind of helped is going oblique. I sold furniture which worked in some ways, a different kind of serious person. And I worked at H&R Block, and because I took it seriously, it's like I kept ahead of the curve on both the tax regulations themselves and how the Block computer system worked. Now, the company only wants to technically inform their customers of the negatives of the loans and bank products and not really inform their clients, and because of that, H&R Block is an unethical company, straight up. I will say that flatly. But I had a conversation with the office manager the beginning of one season, and although he was not initially supportive because it seemed to add another complication to his job, he kind of reluctantly agreed with my informing my clients. But as the season went on, I think he saw that he got fewer complaints from my clients than other people's clients, so I kind of won him over. Plus, I was kind of a go-to person on the computer. That season, I felt good. Other seasons, not so much. But I kind of liked that I could excel in this very rough environment. And I got good at face-to-face interaction with clients. (at another tax place, one of the older preparers told me I was "too nice" to the clients. and the office manager there said many of the customers could barely figure out a checking account. Well, one thing I've learned in my writing is to assume my reader is slightly smarter than I am. It's just that he or she just doesn't happen to know what I'm writing about.)

Anyway, I like the generally idea of being open to meet other kinds of serious people.

I just turned fifty in July, and no, social skills and making friends has not gotten any easier for me as I get older. I was forcefully reminded of this just over a week ago when I finally realized that the band I had thought was a going concern the past year and a half had actually died six or eight months before. A neurotypical person would probably have recognized this much sooner. For most of my life I didn't have a clue why my experience of life was so different from everyone else I knew of. I learned of Asperger's and I self-diagnosed in the late 1990s. Since then, I have been officially diagnosed three times the past ten years.

There are some other groups of people in the neighborhood who will talk to me, even call me over when I pass by on the street on my way to the corner store. They sometimes ask or even beg me to sing a song or play guitar for them. They are all younger than me, in their twenties or thirties, and apparently more like normal people with normal lives than I am. Still, they are casual acquaintances at best, at least for now. I might hang out with them sometime in the future though I doubt any of them share my interests in science, history and philosophy. What I would probably do is play guitar for them. That is something I enjoy doing and something other people enjoy watching me do.

In that corner store and also on the street sometimes groups of teenagers recognize me and applaud me. I am known as "The Bicycling Guitarist" and am a local celebrity for my habit of riding a ten-speed bicycle while playing guitar at the same time. I'd feel really weird hanging out with teenagers, even though as some others have also expressed in these forums I still feel like a teenager myself in some ways.

I have never had a job, never had close friends, and have had several bad experiences with my love life and relationships. The past six years I have learned much about eastern philosophies such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. Some of what I have learned has helped me understand much and cope better. Learning more about Asperger's also has helped me understand my experience of life better. Still, as I was so rudely reminded last week, I suck socially. That apparently hasn't changed and maybe never will.

On the other hand, more is being learned all the time about how the brain works. I'm not saying that Asperger's needs to be "cured." There are definite gifts associated with it; it's not all bad. The bad parts of my sensory and social issues though do suck, and if some remedy can be found by medical science someday that will be wonderful. Who knows?