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Being autistic and random stuff

stickygirl said:
So Auties - did you survive Christmas? It can be a difficult time.
I managed to avoid hugging till the end of Boxing Day and had seen other people hugging all day, so when it came to my turn I'd gotten used to the idea again. So that was a win. I'll always hug my Mum though - of course.
Driving home my bf assured me we had said 'thank you' to everyone we should have said thank you to, though I'm still worried I might have missed someone.
I didn't say anything embarrassing, so far as I can recall.
I may have spoken too loud at times, but tried really hard to avoid monologuing, apart from that one story so I feel bad about that.
I'm not bothered by foods touching each other on a plate. Some people struggle with that.
I still feel guilty I didn't drop a card through one neighbour's door, but I really don't like her. Hypocrisy is a sin.

I've got a headache and sore neck and shoulders. A good night's sleep should fix it.
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It's funny you mention foods touching each other. My kids have always given me a hard time about my habit of keeping everything separate on my plate and then only eating one thing at a time until I am done. They want me to mix up different foods on my plate and God forbid, eat them together in the same spoonful or fork full! No!!!!
 
I’m lucky I don’t have the food touching thing or the not liking hugging thing… but it’s still stressful for me because… well, the first Christmas my wife spent with my family, she saw all my nieces and nephew opening tons of presents and the entire drive home talking about that, nobody saying thank you and just wanting to open the next one.

Guess what it looked like at our house this year and every year since we started having kids?

Drives me fucking insane. A month from now they won’t even be using half the stuff they got.

Thank goodness it’s over for another year!
 
mpeters said:
I’m lucky I don’t have the food touching thing or the not liking hugging thing… but it’s still stressful for me because… well, the first Christmas my wife spent with my family, she saw all my nieces and nephew opening tons of presents and the entire drive home talking about that, nobody saying thank you and just wanting to open the next one.

Guess what it looked like at our house this year and every year since we started having kids?

Drives me fucking insane. A month from now they won’t even be using half the stuff they got.

Thank goodness it’s over for another year!
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I wasn't surprised my cousins make sure their kids do say TY, but I think we've grandparents who were strict about it... plus the cousins are all teachers so are natural with kids anyway. I get a slightly stressed over TYs and my bf thinks it's funny that I always check with him.

Hugs are OK if they fit what I've come to know to be normal practise. I've an uncle who suddenly decided to start hugging 'hello' 'goodbye' 'TY' and I find it creepy... mostly because he's creepy! :LOL:
I think it's much the same with food touching, @Escierto - it could a habit you picked up as a kid but it may be something you have in common with auties. We're all human beans.
 
This made me smile the first time. I thought it was worth posting again :)

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Having learned for the first time a year and a half ago at 60 that I’m on the spectrum, and getting that more confirmed since then, I’m finding it difficult to figure out what to do with that knowledge. I mean, it does explain so much about me and my personal history, but sometimes I find myself wondering if somehow I’m getting… well, I don’t want to say worse, so maybe I should say more on the spectrum as I get older.

I find myself compartmenting my life more and more… my wife and kids don’t understand me (I don’t know that they ever did) and most days I feel like they don’t even know me, and part of that may be my fault (although they couldn’t handle what I keep from them).

I’ve begun to seek out some of the sexual experiences I feel like I missed out on or am missing in my life, and I probably should feel guilty about it but I honestly don’t, because I need it.

I am getting less and less interested in emotional attachments and more and more interested in purely physical connections. Of course it’s possible that’s a delayed mid life crisis thing (after my first wife passed, I had a time when that’s all I was interested in, too).

Because I also have anxiety and depression, it’s challenging to determine exactly what factors into what… is it the ASD, the anxiety, the depression, or something else that’s the basis for a feeling or desire? I don’t know if anyone else feels this or not. I am being treated for the A&D with therapy and medication so I kind of feel like most of what’s going on is probably the ASD.

Here’s the weird thing: sometimes I think when I was single and living by myself, despite wanting to be in a relationship, I may have been my happiest then. I got to do the things I enjoyed, I wasn’t stressed out all the time (except sometimes at work, now it’s the opposite, work feels like my calm happy place).

Am I a mess or what? Lol
 
mpeters said:
Having learned for the first time a year and a half ago at 60 that I’m on the spectrum, and getting that more confirmed since then, I’m finding it difficult to figure out what to do with that knowledge. I mean, it does explain so much about me and my personal history, but sometimes I find myself wondering if somehow I’m getting… well, I don’t want to say worse, so maybe I should say more on the spectrum as I get older.

I find myself compartmenting my life more and more… my wife and kids don’t understand me (I don’t know that they ever did) and most days I feel like they don’t even know me, and part of that may be my fault (although they couldn’t handle what I keep from them).

I’ve begun to seek out some of the sexual experiences I feel like I missed out on or am missing in my life, and I probably should feel guilty about it but I honestly don’t, because I need it.

I am getting less and less interested in emotional attachments and more and more interested in purely physical connections. Of course it’s possible that’s a delayed mid life crisis thing (after my first wife passed, I had a time when that’s all I was interested in, too).

Because I also have anxiety and depression, it’s challenging to determine exactly what factors into what… is it the ASD, the anxiety, the depression, or something else that’s the basis for a feeling or desire? I don’t know if anyone else feels this or not. I am being treated for the A&D with therapy and medication so I kind of feel like most of what’s going on is probably the ASD.

Here’s the weird thing: sometimes I think when I was single and living by myself, despite wanting to be in a relationship, I may have been my happiest then. I got to do the things I enjoyed, I wasn’t stressed out all the time (except sometimes at work, now it’s the opposite, work feels like my calm happy place).

Am I a mess or what? Lol
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Firstly, I'm just another Autie, not a therapist so these are simply my opinions.

My gran used to say 'People get more like themselves' and nod enigmatically. What she meant was that as people get older they kinda become a condensed version of themselves, perhaps a bit less flexible and less interested in pleasing other people. So if you think you're becoming more autistic, then you might be simply becoming stereotypically ( dare I say it?! ) older in your outlook! That's a commonly shared change and I hear guys at work talking about the change in attitude in themselves.

Remember you are not a fixed item and you will change mentally with age as much as physically. You're autistic but also a human and there's lots of overlap.

You mentioned relationships and sometimes they can be a two edged sword: we welcome the intimacy but we need space too! I've treated past SO's badly because I didn't know I was autistic and so I was sometimes cold and grumpy. With my current SO we use a kind of safe word for when we notice I need to take a walk by myself, or sit with my headphones for a while.
I bet you loved covid lock-down too?! I did - the lack of fellow human-induced stress was bliss! Same thing there - we can enjoy a certain amount of company, but we need to acknowledge that we need time to decompress too.

As for the sex thing - I can't think of an answer there. Maybe that's how dudes generally think about sex in the NT world too? Maybe you can vocalise what NTs keep quiet about?
 
stickygirl said:
Alexithymia can leave you suddenly fighting back tears because you don't understand your own emotions.
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Way back to the beginning here but thanks for giving me a word for this.

I highly suspect I'm autistic and a few different times I've become so overwhelmed after sex with my husband that I cry right after orgasm. Fortunately I'm safe with him, but it's embarrassing. I didn't realize that could be linked with autism. Makes sense.
 
titsoutnow said:
Way back to the beginning here but thanks for giving me a word for this.

I highly suspect I'm autistic and a few different times I've become so overwhelmed after sex with my husband that I cry right after orgasm. Fortunately I'm safe with him, but it's embarrassing. I didn't realize that could be linked with autism. Makes sense.
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I suspect being overwhelmed emotionally by orgasm is not an uncommon experience, because it can be so intense. I don't know enough about the condition, so have a google and see what you can find. :)
Autism can touch us in innumerable ways and to varying degrees: we're humans too. Unless your autism already causes you a problem don't conjure one by stressing over a diagnosis. Being kind to yourself is good advice for everyone.
 
My son is on the spectrum. He's 30-years-old and has never been on a date. I hate the thought of him going through his life alone. Of the only two women his age who he's close to, one is a lesbian (or at least says she is) and the other an orthodox Jew with serious OCD. He has a twin sister but they are not close. He managed to complete four semesters of college over four or five years but that's as far as he's likely to go.

He is obese and isn't very conscientious about his grooming or clothes. He's told his therapist that he wants to date but I don't know how to help him. He talks about getting married and having children but we aren't sure if he's ever going to be financially independent.

It's heartbreaking.
 
Keep him focused on what he enjoys doing and if a relationship happens, it happens. That's the same as for anyone.
As for the other things you mention, they're very person specific. His ideating for marriage and children may be simply that - maybe he feels he ought to do that to fit in and prove himself? Keep being a great parent x
 
stickygirl said:
Meh - it's just an expression. I've grown up this way so I have to borrow other people's experiences and language which makes it difficult to to describe more eloquently.

One analogy that works quite well is comparing iPhone and Androids, but don't dig any deeper or else you end up talking apps and computer code and then people leap to - 'Ah, she's autistic so of course she must be a computer programmer...' and miss the point.

Without being aware of your autism can mean you are only, finally, diagnosed because of an acute situation as an adult. Most of the time you get by, but then all the pieces (traits) fall into place for a psychiatrist. There's also a gender bias, because traditional diagnostic methods were based on male traits - girls are often better at fitting in and fly under the radar.

Gender bias isn't uncommon in medicine - did you know the symptoms of a heart attack present differently between men and women? Heart disease is the most common cause of death in women.

I can only speak from my experience. If you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person. We're all different just like neurotypical folk, but have much in common. Hence the thread - to reach out and share.

Oh a couple of terms we hear and they rankle. We do not 'have autism' - we are autistic. A certain charitable group thinks since we 'have autism' we can be cured with bleach enemas and electrotherapy. Seriously we don't need to be mended, just understood.
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Lol, is being a programmer an autistic stereotype? My son is a freelance programmer. It was only a year ago, age 28, that he accepted his diagnosis. He's been programming and hacking since he was 12. He assumed everyone knew how to program. When I told him that only .5% people in the world can code, let alone master 5 programming languages it was like a light went off in his head. He's just as proficient in chemistry as he is coding.
His acceptance of being autistic made me really happy. Before if I mentioned it he would become defensive now we joke about it. It took him realizing and accepting that he is exceptional to embrace who he really is.
I love my boy, he stays up for days, wears a bathrobe as his daily attire, often forgets to put a shirt on if he's going out, gardens at night and looks like a crazed, disheveled Jesus.
 
Yeah, pretty much, though no stereotype is definitive but can only point to probability and bell curves. :)

I have a bestie whom I recognised as autistic before I even had my own diagnosis, and she was really prickly about the suggestion that she might be in the spectrum. Some years later, she seems more relaxed about the idea, but so far as I know hasn't been officially diagnosed. She's my go-to to solve database problems.

It's not unusual for us to take around 18mths to adjust to our diagnosis. I get the impression it takes that long to re-evaluate every life experience you've ever had in the light of that information.

Both my family and SOs have arrived at my computer, rubbing their eyes at stupid o'clock asking 'when I'm going to bed?' Just this week I was up at 5.30am and still working on dumb-shit stuff at 11.30pm... I never considered the time.
 
stickygirl said:
Keep him focused on what he enjoys doing and if a relationship happens, it happens. That's the same as for anyone.
As for the other things you mention, they're very person specific. His ideating for marriage and children may be simply that - maybe he feels he ought to do that to fit in and prove himself? Keep being a great parent x
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That's very insightful. Thank you.
 
Misdiagnosis plagues the medical world that still struggles to recognise autism, especially among women. Our very own Miss Diagnosis today is Caragh McMurtry, now retired from representing the UK in Olympic rowing but instead pushing back the boundaries to ensure autistic people and athletes are understood and valued.

She spent five years on radical medication for bipolar... five years of hell she'll never get back. I understand her drive for change to save others from the same problems. :rose:
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I found this useful channel on YT - Autism from the Inside . He's done a range of videos but his style may not suit everyone. When you're looking for a therapist or counsellor you have to be able to get on with them or else there's a hurdle of communication. I think this guy was diagnosed as an adult, so that resonates with me.
Do you have a go-to YT channel?
 
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