LFA as child to HFA as adult

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Getting out on your own can trigger it--suddenly being overloaded with everything you have to do. Actually I think that should be a big part of autism education; you should already know those things so the transition doesn't hit you so hard.

Sometimes people think of me as experiencing a severe regression in adulthood with moving out and stuff, but when you look at the course of my whole life, it's really just that my skills shift up and down a lot, and it depends on what everyone is focusing on at the time.

For instance, when I was ages 10-16, the things that got most attention were my academics, so I was looked at as really very high functioning, especially by lay people. After that, my functioning appears to drop somewhat, because the emphasis on independent living becomes more important.

But looking at my history, there were especially prominent periods when I was 3, 7, 13, and 18 where my speech, daily living skills, and such became much more difficult, such as when I was 13 or 7 and hardly participated in the school day and was often put into a separate room in isolateion.

From your post I don't personally see much regression so can you be more specific as to what has occured since you were maybe around 13 years old for instance.

Where people in my life have seen regression, seems to have more to do with what they were paying more attention to at the various times, their expectations and such. Because my skills and traits shift from day to day, hour to hour sometimes even.

But since they observed me being highly academically capable in elementary school, they assumed I was capable in daily living skills, and also my speech, I used more of it than I do now, though less of what I did use, was actually communicative (If they ask "do you want a glass of water?" and I say "No" when I mean "yes", for instance and look confused and upset when nobody gives me water - looks perfectly normal speech, but is not actually me communicating the thing I want to, was EXTREMELY common for me).

Nowadays, they see me being NOT half as capable in daily living skills as they assumed I would be, my speech drops down because I realize that I can communicate better by writing or some such than by forcing speech, and suddenly the difficulties that were always there are a lot harder to ignore or explain away - when I would get confused and upset about nobody giving me water, that couldn't POSSIBLY have been a language difficulty, even when I explained in writing later on, because I did well on spelling tests and occasionally lectured on my favorite topic! No, it had to be because I was "changing my mind", which is a very female thing to do.

My main thing that could be called a true "regression" I guess would be the area of arithmetic and spelling - I used ot be great with these, but not so good with the larger, more abstract concepts (something fairly common among young children). However, around age 16, that pattern started to change in a dramatic way, following a brief time when I could solve logarithm problems mentally in a fraction of a second, while the rest of the class would work on it for half an hour to an hour.

Shortly after I lost that ability (which lasted about a month), then my rote memory went into raid decline and I lost most of my mental arithmetic (though I can still do 2+2 and 1+1). I had started having trouble with my excellent spelling, despite consistent practise and reading and writing, around age 14, though I have nowhere near the trouble with that as I do with arithmetic, for which a calculator is absolutely mandatory. However, I am quite good with calculus and number theory and modern algebra (though have only dabbled a little in the latter two, but have done well wherever I have approched) so long as I don't have to do the calculations.

Wow, earthmonkey I can really relate to that, though I'm still terrible at math. At 14 I was really good. I was home schooled and I guess I did it to show my mum I wasn't completely worthless. But then I forgot all I learned, then relearned basic maths and forgot it again. I have a year 7 maths formula book which is helping me get better at maths.
My spelling has become worse too.
I also remember when I was under 12 that I was good at balancing and didn't have that many motor problems, though I was bad at sports. But lately I can't balance and my motor skills seem to be deteriorating.
And I don't know where my speech problems came from. I speak more than I did when I was a kid, so maybe I just never picked up on it.