A Question for Older ASD Folks

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Have you found that as you've gotten older:

1. you've gotten better at interpreting people's emotions and responding appropriately to them so that you no longer have to study people to learn appropriate reactions?
2. your special interests have fallen away and not been replaced? (I just don't have the energy, interest, or memory for special interests anymore.)
3. you no longer remember how you thought or felt about things back when you were a child? For example, I know that I was picked on and bullied for being weird, but I don't remember whether I had trouble looking people in the eye.

for me:

1. Not really, I seem to have got worse, or I'm surrounded by people who are particularly difficult to understand.
2. I think I've just given in to my special interests and I'm submerged in them now, because the world seems so horrible and scary, and I have no friends, so I spend all my time in my special interests now.
3. Yes I can only vaguely remember how I lived as a child but I think maybe I have rose-tinted spectacles now and see my childhood as better than it was. However I do remember always being fairly popular and not being excluded like I am now. I never had problems making friends til I was in my 30s or so.

So I hope my answers are of interest to you?

Thanks for your reply, @KitLily. I do find your answers interesting, as this is still all so new to me, and I haven't heard much from folks my own age.

I think that some of my own challenges have worsened as I've gotten older and tons of therapy has helped me to shed so many of my dysfunctional masking behaviors. But at the same time, I no longer study other people to learn how to act because I spent decades studying them already.

I'm 20 years younger than you and yet I've answered yes to every question you've asked.

It's so refreshing to read you.
It's very rare that I relate to something about autism but it's so much what I feel that I have absolutely nothing to add.
Thank you for writing, you don't know how good it made me feel.

Edit: Oh no, in fact. If I have to be honnest with me, I still struggle with interpreting someone’s emotions but get far better (I don’t get some people in WP sometimes and IRL too).
I tend to overestimate myself and not be very realistic about my abilities. Don’t trust me actually .

1. I'm not sure.

2. I have fewer strong interests than I used to, but my strong interests that have fallen by the wayside are mostly due activities that once brought me great joy becoming frustrating and depressing.

3. I am okay with eye contact as an adult, and probably was as a child. But I couldn't tell you at what age I first felt like an alien among humans.

There seem to be lots of 50+ people on Wrong Planet so I hope you get more answers

Welcome Onekarf..hope you enjoy your visits , to this Planet .
Spend a bigger part of my time doing my very oldspecial interest which was/ is health supplements , Mainly
Nootropics .. but am defo. feeling the years today ..Now leaning towards anti inflammitory supplements .
When your fe3ling your health issues as many older Aspies seem to , little harder to get alot of interest in extracurricular activities ...

1. (a) you've gotten better at interpreting people's emotions —I don't think so
1.-(b) and responding appropriately to them —maybe
1.-(c) so that you no longer have to study people to learn appropriate reactions?
1.- so that—I don't know...I've gotten better at using humor to lubricate social interactions

2. your special interests have fallen away and not been replaced? (I just don't have the energy, interest, or memory for special interests anymore.)
2.-your spect—It varies. I've lost interest in some.
2.-your spect—Others still interest me but I can't find much time for them.
2.-your spect—Others linger for a long time.

3. you no longer remember how you thought or felt about things back when you were a child? For example, I know that I was picked on and bullied for being weird, but I don't remember whether I had trouble looking people in the eye.
3.-you no longer rem—I remember very little of anything.

1. I was personally very introverted from the start, and mostly got better and better and distracting people from my presence over the years. It's been a massive problem in terms of getting an appropriate diagnosis, as the criteria don't adequately address that topic. (All cluster-A deficits are required, but not all of them are going to show if you're not interacting with other children outside of specific school contexts with specific rules) I had been getting better at interacting but at an increasing cost. Right now, I can't really even do it, it's just too much work to calculate in my head what's going on.

2. This hasn't really changed, I'll have one thing that I'm more interested in than anything else and that will get all my attention. But, I'm ADHD, so it tends to be rather fast bright burns before switching to something else. And all my interactions involve it in some fashion, although I've stopped being an info dumper in recent decades.

3. I can't remember much of what went on as a child, in part due to being pretty checked out from what was going on. I've got at least one dissociative disorder, which makes this rather tough for me to remember. I'm also prone to completely forgetting how I said or did something if somebody asks me. For the life of me, I can't remember what I used to think "deceptively simple" meant simply because somebody asked me what it meant, now I can't for the life of me remember. And that applies to a great deal of things that I used to think and most of my older opinions.

When I first mentioned to my wife that I thought that I might be a high functioning autist, the first objection she raised was that I am so attuned to the emotions of everyone around me. She mentioned that I immediately notice any time that a corner of her mouth moves even just 1/8th of an inch.

But then I pointed out that, while I notice every single little indicator like that, I have to ask her what it means. I have to ask her whether anything is wrong. So perhaps I am just extremely accomplished at noticing my audience, but without the inherent understanding of what those changes/movements actually mean?

So I came here to ask that. But I was so full of adrenaline when I created my first two threads on Wrong Planet that I created unnecessarily long wall of text that perhaps weren't very clear.

Onesnarf....have found it not uncommon for Autists to be intuitive with their abilities to pick up nuance..
zespecially in longer term partners.. It borderlines very much like intuition, or what passes for that.
Have found some Aspies get on frequency with some people quite well..Some better than others , Some extremely better...like the appearances of being like a mind reader. Have found very few other Aspies and people whom appear like that. Personally have had 4 beyond friendship level interactions , Where we knew each others minds .
Last one was my late hubby. RIP.

I'm sorry for your loss, Jakki; especially since it's such a treasure to find someone with whom you are able to bond so closely.

I also very much appreciate what you've shared. As others have stated here and elsewhere, it seems that diagnosing this thing is kind of messy, especially perhaps for folks who've spent decades learning to compensate for something they didn't even know they had.

That's usually what gets a schizoid misdiagnosis. It's a comprehensive mask that covers all, but still a mask.

1. you've gotten better at interpreting people's emotions and responding appropriately to them so that you no longer have to study people to learn appropriate reactions?
I'm sure I'm better than I used to be, but I'm still often guessing in the dark when it comes to assigning emotions to people and knowing how to respond. I seem to get on with people quite well if I like them though, so I guess I must be doing something right.
2. your special interests have fallen away and not been replaced? (I just don't have the energy, interest, or memory for special interests anymore.)
I do seem to have less enthusiasm for things than I used to, including special interests. It's harder to develop interests when most of the new things that could happen to it have already happened. And I think I gradually acquired the wisdom that special interests could interfere with my life if I did them all the time - I tend to specialise so much that nobody would be interested in what I was doing, and my interests would draw me away from people. I also have less company than I used to, and self-motivation isn't easy alone.
3. you no longer remember how you thought or felt about things back when you were a child? For example, I know that I was picked on and bullied for being weird, but I don't remember whether I had trouble looking people in the eye.
Memory of my childhood is probably more blurred than it used to be, but it's not that marked.

Thank you for your input, ToughDiamond!

I also think that I'm coming to realize that I don't necessarily really understand the emotions happening around me, I just have gotten super-good at noticing that people's faces are changing, and so I will ask them "what's wrong?" (if it's my wife), or I'll just modify my behavior (if it's people at work, etc.)

Hard to say. I am pretty sure I have gotten less autistic over the years. Yeah...better at reading folks in some situations.

But it astounds me how much folks misread ME.