Do your abilities shift around or stay the same?

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Ten years ago I raced motorcycles. Now I can barely drive a car. Go figure.

Stress will cause some skills to drop out, but they return after things get back to normal. I've yet to have to re-learn a skill; that suggests to me that most likely I'm not losing the skill itself, just the "fuel" to use it.

Yeah I found out the hard way that riding a bicycle isn't "just like riding a bike" for me.

...ouch.

the issue with this question is that it assumes that abilities are task specific. in asd's the profile is not task specific but resulting from different wiring and different motivations. therefore, abilities shift according to whether or not there is enough energy to use a method that works.

no, it is not amnesia. I know who I was born as, I know my name but all my family is dead and my brother never returns my calls. I just space out the people I do know, forget to call them and maintain relationships. One day I will find their phone number in one of my writings and give them a call and find that 5, 10 years have gone by and they are married and busy raising children, or have raised them and have grandchildren (and lately, great-grandchildren) and their families but I am just me, sorta waking out of some dream wondering why I never grew up, why I never had kids, why I had no family. Stability is not something I learned in my life.

. I usually gain jobs and lose jobs and track of people and sorta drift away.I used to be an excellent cook, cooked in restaurants and hotels and even had part of a vegitarian restaruant for a while, but now, I barely cook an egg. I was a specialty laundress for a family in a town house in New York City, and I still enjoy doing laundry. I used to be able to sew and design clothing, but I can't even thread a needle these days. I can never trust what I am going to do, or make myself do. It is like I have to be 'in the mood' to make myself DO something I used to do very well, and if I try to force it. . . it just doesn't work, is all.

I move a lot, from Oregon to New York, from New York to Sioux City, IA, from Minneapolis to San Diego. Seattle and San Francisco and back to New York again.
I know how to set up an apartment and how to pack a U-Haul and drive it away. I have a series of cat (singular) that I replace from time to time. You used to be able to say to gaps in employment history "oh, I was married at that time and my husband supported me" and decades later you can just say you were living with some guy.

I have gone by Lilly Erlene Hicks, Tara Keogh, Dianne Tabitha Shafter, Robinelle Gosline, on and on. Of course, this was back when you could bring in your Social Security card 'next week' ( that never came) when you got a job. I didn't pay taxes before I went to college and I didn't start college until I was 37 years old.
I did get a degree in my birth name, though. I am getting pretty old (my body will be 60 this year!) and I got a job that I am grinding it out daily, but I have no idea how long that will last.
Stuff doesn't seem to stick to me, actually. When I die, I doubt if anyone will know although I am not selfish enough to think that no one will care. They just won't know, is all.

So, no, it is not an 'April Fools' although I am not saying I am not a fool, it is just how I have learned to survive in the world, is all. And yes, pumibel, it is scary when I think about it. I have had some razor thin close calls in my life. Since I have been DXed I have more of a handle on it, though. That is why I wondered if it was just knowing about my autism that helps.

Merle

It doesn't have to be task specific. But it's task specific things where I notice the shifting. It's not like I can pull back in my brain and find the exact reasons I can do one lost of things and not others. I just notice when I try to do something and can't, or when I have to learn an ability from scratch that I had mastered before. So it really does look like there's things I can do and things I can't and things I have to relearn, and what is on which list is changing constantly. If that's not your experience then it isn't, but it IS the experience of me and many people I know. I'm not getting into the why, I'm getting into the what.

I just know I can't do it any more. I know internally I 'don't feel like it' meaning I don't know how to force myself to do it again. I notice it also happens in microcosm as well.

Case in point. Sewing. I was a great seamstress when I was in my teens. I would sketch my own designs for dresses for school and make my own patterns out of newspaper taped together, then select the fabrics and complimentary colors and sew my self into the late nights and have the strangest wardrobe of any of the girls in Jr High and High School.

In my twenties I got out a sewing machine and carefully read simple sewing books and tried to follow printed patterns and frankly I couldn't figure them out. I left the project because I just couldn't make it come together. Then in my 40's I was browsing in a thrift store and found a huge emerald green velvet bed spread and a fuchsia satin water bed sheet and took it home, borrowed a friends sewing machine and thread and with no pattern, made the nicest Galway style hooded cape I have ever seen since. When I was making it, I had only the shape in mind, but I would take a nap and work on it and it would just create itself under my hand. When I got frustrated (the satin sheet would slide all over the back of the velvet I was lining) I would sorta doze for a while and rouse myself with some fabulous new idea (the ruffling around the face, the balloon hem, hanging a thin woolen blanket between the velvet and lining for warmth and water resistance and the best thing, making the gathering at the base of the hood/top of the cape when it can stretch out and become a nifty sleeping bag. I wore it when I took the ferry to Victoria on Vancouver Island and even though I wore it with jeans and a tee, I had people bowing to me as I sashayed by . .

But just the other day I was trying to make some rudimentary curtains, just hems at both ends, straight seams. . . I just couldn't make myself do it. So I don't know what it is, anbuend, but it happens to me.

Merle

is it stress? i sometimes shut down, yet it is different with me because almost everything gets affected. I have to go through long periods of time trying to function, so that when i can afford to be unproductive, i decompensate.

it could also be possible that the situations, rather than the people, are changing over time.

Being tired or in a bad mood has bad effects on my abilities and I can't seem to do even simple things right. Stress effects my abilities too. Depending on the circumstances and the type and level of stress, it can have good or bad effects on my abilities. And sometimes I simply lack motivation or interest, which makes it harder to do something well.

Those factors can temporarily change my abilities, but my abilities never shift out of the blue.

shift...a great deal.

My theory for myself anyway is it's almost like I have a limited amount of "can do things" so it keeps being moved around but not in any way I have control of. It doesn't take stress (good or bad) to bring it on. It's just... things are there, and then they're not but something else is there, etc.

When I was on neuroleptics, even teeny doses for nausea, this was hell. Because I guess over time I have developed a warning system where I can tell an ability is not there pretty quickly when I go to use it. Phenergan eliminated the warning system. So I would go to pick up a stack of papers and not get the signal telling me it was impossible and go into a screaming headbanging meltdown after pouring too much energy down into a skill that isn't there. And this was happening every five minutes. Fortunately I had an allergic reaction and am now on better nausea meds. Because I never want to go through that total lack of feedback again.

I have gotten to where I just do what I can and don't push myself to do what I can't. And it's settled into a rhythm. Like a juggler. Or something. But it's very hard to explain to someone that I can't do something I just did in front of them ten minutes ago.

Jim Sinclair had a quote about one part of this experience, and I seem to remember from a Donna Williams book that xe had this experience (so did Donna) too. She described it as a shutdown (but more a partial one than a total one) or a "system shift". Jim said:

http://pubpages.unh.edu/~jds/Autism.htm

One really weird thing that has happened to me sometimes is that I will learn something for the first time and be totally interested and excited that I learned it. And then... I find some old files on my hard drive and learn from my writing that I learned it three years before and then three years before and who knows how many other times.

A really good friend who has known me since we were twelve, tells me that she envisions my brain as this place with all these enormous and detailed repositories of information all over the place, but with whatever accesses the information being some combination of blocked from some areas, only able to get parts of others, and never able to get very much at once.

Anyway, I just go with what I can do these days and don't waste energy on what I can't, but even at my least overloaded these things are always moving around. Have to go eat.