When did you start feeling like adults?

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Still waiting. You're asking a bunch of aspies! One man at group meeting said he still felt 12 and he was not alone.

Same here just change the age to16.

I am 46 and I still don't feel like an adult. Sometimes I even think that something has gone horribly wrong and that I'm stuck in my teens for the rest of my life.

What is even worse: a lot of people seem to be convinced that I am much younger than I actually am and I don't necessarily take that as a compliment. I do look a bit younger than my age on a particular good day but they probably think I am younger because I come across as a naive and slightly dumb girl instead of a 46 year old woman! The fact that I'm tiny doesn't help either ofcourse. Another negative side effect of all of this is that I am not taken seriously most of the time. Very worrying!

Last edited by pokerface on 21 Jan 2013, 4:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Part of that may be your voice and appearance. If you have a girlish voice, people may not take you as seriously as someone with a more "adult" sounding voice. I've run across that with people many times. If someone doesn't sound their age, they are not taken as seriously. Just my $.02.

You are right but I don't think I have a girlish voice. As a matter of fact, my voice is probably the only thing that is not girlish about me.

I don't think I ever felt anything slightly hinting on grown up until I was in the Army for several years when I was maybe 34 years old. By that time I maybe felt something like an 18 year old starting to live on their own. I have always been way behind the power curve on the issue of independence. Independence and self sufficiency have always been a huge struggle for me. It's not that I don't want it, things always happened very badly, with repeated pitfalls and failures, my vast ineptness and fearfulness and others' lack of help or even hinderence, the difficulty of finding an appropriate niche to fit into, and progress going terribly slow.

I still have most of the same interests as I did as a child, and I pretty much fail at pretending to be neurotypical.

Eh, I'm kinda like a big kid in a way......... says my brother Danny. XD

During my childhood I was constantly told that I seemed older than I was. I related better to adults than to children my age, and actually had a state-issued ID card so that I could get youth discounts, as most people simply did not believe I was as young as my biological age. I was essentially kicked out of kindergarten for being to advanced, and being unable to relate to the kids my age.

I'm now in my mid thirties, and have had people guess that I was in my late forties, so I guess the pattern continues.

Strangely, I don't feel as though I've aged psychologically. I don't feel like an 'adult' any more or less now than I did ten or even twenty years ago. I worry about different things, and take a longer view of some things but I don't self-identify as an adult. It's very awkward.

I'm told by some that I 'grew up' in the space of about fifteen minutes when my son was born with a massive heart defect. They seem to base that assessment on how calmly and rationally I responded to the news, and how well I handled the subsequent hospitalizations and surgeries, but from my perspective it was simply the appropriate way to behave. I think they were expecting me to break down, wail, moan, and gnash my teeth, which would have served no purpose (except, I realize now as I type this, that of allowing them to 'comfort me'. In retrospect some of them seemed rather upset that I was planning on driving myself the two hours to the hospital they were flying my son to.)

That was almost nine years ago and I don't feel any more or less grown up now than I did before. I'm beginning to wonder if I'll ever feel 'grown up', and to think that the answer is no. It's almost as if I was born a thirty-year-old, and will die a thirty-year-old, regardless of how long I live.

At 47, the more this body ages... the more I feel my consciousness is ageless. For me, being "grown up" is not the goal.

When I was 14, I felt like I was 30. However, I only feel like an adult when it comes to budgeting and listening to people's problems. I feel like a small child in almost every other aspect.

I doubt I'll ever feel like I'm an 'adult' until I'm financially independent, and maybe not even then.

So much of my perspective is so child-like it's hard for me to see myself as an adult, even though I'm 34.