Would like to hear from Asperger adults 40+ Special Insights

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Wow, it's wonderful to read these posts. I am 56 years old and only diagnosed a couple of months ago. I do have crippling Social Anxiety Disorder and am a recovering Anorexic. My diagnosis allowed all the pieces to fall into place and I could finally stop agonizing over why I am the way I am. I was physically and emotionally traumatized at home and at school, but I knew I was different before I started kindergarten so I can't blame my disorders on that. I think the abuse made my existing Asperger's symptoms worse, but it was not the cause. My diagnosis has helped me to understand myself better, but I still have as much anxiety and eating disordered tendencies as before my diagnosis. I am very thankful to be part of a group of wonderful people such as yourselves. I look forward to getting to know you better.

Welcome MoCoffee: I'm really happy that so many "old Aspies" are checking in. We do have a lot in common! Most of us had to muddle along, mystified by a world that simply made no sense. What affected me most growing up was how angry the people around me became when I did things that seemed perfectly normal. I still can't understand why everyone must think and act the same, but there it is!

Anxiety! What a debilitating emotion. I have been paralyzed by it for long periods of my life. I wish I had a dollar for every time someone said, Get over it; there's nothing to be afraid of; just go to the party, you'll have fun; everyone likes being social, what's wrong with you? You're selfish; you just don't like people... smile!

At this age it's wonderful to do what makes sense for who I am. I love my dogs; they are perfect companions.

I'm new here, and depending on how you look at things, I was either sort of diagnosed when I was six, or recently which was more than 40 years after that.

For those of you familiar with Stargate SG1, I'm going to do my best to give you the Jack O'Neill answer instead of full on Sam Carter... Sadly my default has always been full on Sam Carter, which no big shock is part of why one of my nicknames is Carter.

So, here goes.

At the end of second grade (around may of 1970) they (my folks and the powers that be) decided I was ret*d and completely incapable of reading or writing. The plan was to put me into the remedial education track starting in third grade unless things magically improved over the summer. The violence that had started when I was five because of another condition which I've been officially diagnosed this past year escalated because the word "ret*d" was being tossed around.

My father threw a book at me and said if you can't maser these, your life is over an you might as well die now.

My mother held me close, and finally, finally took time to answer my questions and listen to me. I undertook the project of learning how to read like a force of nature, and then, having mastered the alphabet, pattern recognition, and language, took to books like women dying of thirst in the dessert takes to a fresh water lake.

By the time September of that year rolled around, I'd digested the dictionary, Encyclopedia Britanica, the US Army corp of engineers bibles on AC and DC electronics and theory, and flight training manuals for a pilots license. My violent father was a NASA engineer...

So they tested me again. That didn't go well. Because in basically five months I went from being "ret*d" to having a "senior college level" reading, comprehension and vocabulary and the ability to read fast that Evlyn Woods. Oh what a mess that then was.

I of course was equally oblivious to the fuss at being able to do something that not being able to do it had caused. Wrong Planet indeed Dr. McCoy.

So I adapted best I could, fought the ongoing battle to fit and understand, was constantly bullied and abused by my father especially as I attempted to relate to him in light of having gone from ret*d to genius in five months, and my nearly obsessive literalness. Prevarication wasn't - really isn't to this day - one of my skills.

I don't need to tell the rest of you about my journey of learning to relate to others and this strange world I lived in where people said one thing and meant another and so on... The growing depression, stress and anxiety, well I was left to fend for myself mostly.

A life, career and marriage, as well as constantly being pushed to do more, faster, and not having answers to what I thought were simple questions combined with never being good enough, or "normal enough" lead eventually to a full on nervous breakdown or two, the divorce from hell, stalking, violence, and even a death or two. 2008 I moved here, a shutin, terrified of the world, suffering from PTSD, depression that was threatening to destroy me, suicidal ideation, fear of everything and everyone and so much more. Recovery has been interesting to say the least, and after swearing time and again NEVER to fall in love again, the amazing happened and I have.

My girlfriend is amazing, brilliant, smart, funny and beautiful inside and out. She's also incredibly patient with me, and even finds me adorable. Including when I have an attack of the shiny as I sometimes call it, or an "ohhh, puppies" moment. She's the one who first suggested I might be an Aspie. Especially after seeing me with her daughter. She and I have a great deal in common, get along like we're from the same planet, and suffer from attacks of the shiny. Having long suspected her daughter is an aspie, she suggested i might be one as well. She was the first, but not the last and things have snowballed into me finding myself here.

So while not officially diagnosed at this point, I believe that's a mere technical formality. Especially given the online tests I've explored and the results I've received. So now while working on finding out what this all means, I'm also grieving now for the life I might have had, but not that much, because while far from perfect, the life I have now is not one I'd easily part with. I don't know what if any impact knowing will have on my life moving forward, or if I'll be able to find resources that I can afford to get an official diagnosis.

I think the biggest reason I'm here is to understand myself more, heal, grow and be more aware. From what I've read so far here, I can relate well to what many of you have described having walked my own journey. So it's nice to feel less like a freak for a change, and for me to have the gift of reflecting on my journey with the clarity of greater understanding. So much of the weirdness in my life can be, and is more readily understood in the context of Aspergers. I've as gonewild said, long since learned to live the way that makes sense for who I am. And I also agree that dogs are always wonderful and perfect companions.

Unless of course they are someone else's dogs in a truck, 100 miles from home, and you say "ohhh, puppies" and wander over to the truck to talk to the dogs while everyone else in you party is waiting for you. True story that.

Welcome Carter: There is much in your post that is familiar and I want to comment, but I'm watching Denver vs. KC right now and I'm too distracted.

I'm so pleased that this is turning out to be a terrific thread!

Hello Gonewild, I so get the being distracted part. Which is why I don't often listen to music while I'm focused on the computer. Which is why when I try to, I often have to shut the music off and have the silence or risk having my head short out and burn down on me. So no worries, I so get it.

I'm glad you're pleased, and I'm glad you started it. Now I should go back and start at the beginning to catch up I think. An interesting side note, August 12th is when first started looking into this and took the Aspie Test at RDOS the first time.

Oh my, I so get this, especially the lack of boundaries between arts and sciences. Which is in part why one of my nicknames as I said is Carter, another is Sunshine. I've studied both arts and sciences, and spent years working as a consultant instead of as and employee. I could get in, get the job done, and get out. I survived school by being invisible, having grown and learned more skills for dealing with all sorts of things in life, I'm way less invisible, but like - need - must have - the ability to disappear into the wild, or a closet full of books.

I'm really digging this thread too.

I also think I should mention that part of why Adult Aspies are invisible is because when we were children, they didn't even have a diagnosis for us yet. So that means we're all trying to figure this all out, and by this point in life, we've all found our way here. Both to diagnosis of one sort or another, and a body of skills and adaptations that have allowed us to survive and thrive in our own way this long.

I'm 49 and just joined a waiting list to be diagnosed with Asperger's. We have to take into account that when we were young the syndrome wasn't known, although some of our generation who are affected were diagnosed with "borderline autism", such as Daryl Hannah.

In my case, all major signs for autism (apart from the lingual development) were there in my childhood, and I really should have got a diagnosis. However, in hindsight I doubt that with a diagnosis I would have put that much effort into fitting in and developing coping mechanisms as I have, so there are two sides to it.

I basically spent 25 years of my life desperately trying to fit into society and another 25 accepting that I was different. I work in childcare because I relate to children a lot better than to adults, and I also help an autistic child with his homework. For many years I've said that I have autistic traits myself, but recently I realised that it's more than just that - and I have to say that this realisation came as a great relief since all my problems (well, most of them) now have an explanation.

I was first diagnosed as bipolar 27 years ago after searching for a diagnosis for 15 years! No doctor, or psych thought there was anything wrong with me despite epic manic-depressive episodes every 6 months. I was too high-functioning to be "ill." Instead I was treated like I had been as a child and was told to shape up! Other people are really suffering... Wow. That was hard. Once diagnosed, that was it - any problem I had was attributed to bipolar. Lithium worked (still does) for me, and brought the bipolar symptoms under control, but there was all this other stuff leftover, which various psychs. and therapists still attributed to BP.

One day, I began describing my father to my therapist, whom I suspected was Aspergers, not even thinking that it applied to me, but alarm bells began going off. My T. revealed that he had often thought that bipolar was inadequate to explain my severe social anxiety, total confusion about social behavior, etc. He had not suggested it earlier, he said, because he had accepted the old idea that female Aspergers are extremely rare, plus, wouldn't someone have diagnosed Aspergers when I was a child? Well, no - I'm an older adult and that just didn't happen back then.

I began looking into it and found research that focused on female Aspies, who it turns out, have different behavior than males. There I was! We are continuing to learn about Aspergers together: not many therapists would be that open. He encourages my ideas and study of Aspergers because he's seen the results. I'm so much more confident in my intuitive, pre-social skin!

Hello Frank! I'm glad I wasn't diagnosed as a child; I think the stigma back then would have been overwhelming, and likewise, I would have resisted all attempts at being reprogrammed - it's impossible anyway. I feel badly for Aspie kids today - a diagnosis does not mean appropriate treatment, since Aspergers (or the disorder formerly known as Aspergers) is seen as something to treat as a defect rather than as human potential to be cultivated.

Do you have any links you could post here? I know there's a difference between myself and the men Aspies who make up the majority of the group I'm in; there's only one other woman who comes regularly out of the eight that make up the group. But there's not much written down that I can find. And it seems to mostly focus on teens and under. Older women Aspies have differences from younger women Aspies because we had to find ways to cope without knowing what we were coping with.

I was going to post a link to a site I had found, aspergerwomenunited.org. But whoever had it let the domain lapse. There's just a placeholder there now.

There is this: List of Female Asperger's Traits

Hello OnPorpoise: I have a scan of a chart, but the image upload only takes a URL. This is a jpeg on my computer... anyone know how to upload a jpeg here?

It came from www.help4aspergers.com

I totally agree. I see it as a state, such as being left-handed or double-jointed. Treating it as a disability certainly is no help!

This is going to take me a while, as I am entering the text using an iPhone, and my sausage fingers are too wide for the onscreen keyboard. Ergo, I'm typing one letter at a time with a stylus. The exercise is particularly frustrating because I'm a very fast typist on an ordinary keyboard, but may not use the desktop PC right in front of me. You see, I'm losing my job of 8 years, and have been expressly informed that -- as my remaining duties consist of nothing but filing -- I should not really be using the computer at all.

I was informed by my psychiatrist just this summer (at age 42) that I was a strong candidate for AS. Clearly, from some of the posts I've read here today, there are certain quantitative assessments of the condition to which I have not been formally been subjected. Additionally, when mentioning my doctor's opinion on a different anonymous board, I was strongly advised to take the news with a heaping helping of salt. The modest amount of research I've done on AS, however, as well as a second concurring diagnosis from a local specialist, have persuaded me that I am, as the local parlance goes, on the Wrong Planet.

I strongly suspect that my disclosure of this condition to my employer is the principal reason that I am still sitting at my workstation at this moment instead of applying for unemployment. I think they're a) hoping that I'm job searching so that I might possibly make further action on their part unnecessary; and b) gathering as much proof as they can that my presence here has been redundant -- which would, I'm sure, serve as part of their defensive legal strategy should I try to lodge any complaint citing the Americans With Disabilities Act -- a step I have no plans to take. The pay scale is pathetic, I've zero chances for advancement, and I'm fed up with the way the way I've been treated here. Even if they changed their minds right now and asked me to carry on as before, I'd still be determined to leave.

But I'm really, REALLY scared.

The job search process is incredibly intimidating for me. I have a BA in history from a prestigious university, am highly computer literate, and have a history of career longevity. But certain symptoms that have only reared their ugly heads in the past few years (crippling lethargy and panic attacks) make the prospect of finding a suitable job seem insurmountable.

I've been aware of this site for some time now but haven't given it much of my time. In fact, this is the first thread I've read all the way through and my first post. I've taken a great deal of comfort from what some of you have had to say, and will be paying close attention to the site's resources and advice for job hunting.

My very best to each of you, and I'll be seeing you around.

I uploaded the URL and it puts the image up here. This is better than just linking to it.

[img][800:656]http://www.help4aspergers.com/pb/wp_a58d4f6a/images/img244154ad237783e339.JPG[/img]

Yes, much better. It's amazing that this is the only (?) chart I've seen that characterizes females. I find it a good match to my habits and behavior, except stimming. I've never been a stimmerer.

Hello. I mean to introduce myself formally later. But I'm 44, and unofficially diagnosed. My son (7) was at the Neurologist, and.she was getting a social history
From observing me and reading the letter I wrote, she has little doubt that I have it

Official diagnosis is optional, but she reccomends it for purposes of job accommodation.

Of course it "didn't exist" when I was growing up. It was all about "He's a bright kid, but he just isn't trying!" Followed by long, humiliating interrogations at home.

My dad also has it to the nth degree. After a prolonged visit, my first wife asked for a divorce. She had visions of.becoming my mom: caregiver, organizer and manager.

Very understandable in retrospect.