Autism diagnosis: 'I want 40 years of my life back'

[LiberalArkie]

For most of his life, Barney Angliss struggled to fit in. At the age of 49, he finally had a diagnosis that helped him understand why.

As a child, he remembers his family not allowing him to go to a new school. "They thought I would be bullied to death".

Although he was good with words he had few friends and - by his own admission - he lacked empathy and social skills.

By the time he had a home, a family and a job as a teacher, "catastrophic thoughts" were building up.

Snip

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-50380411

[hunter]

1. That sounds a lot like me.

Figuring out the "rules" of social behavior was terrifying and took a lot of energy. I didn't realize how many social behaviors come naturally to most people. I just assumed everyone was studying social behaviors harder than I was and that I was failing miserably.

I got hammered by bullies starting in middle school. I quit high school. I suffered an extraordinary amount of shit for that, mostly from adults who were nostalgic about their own high school years. They weren't "Happy Days" for me.

After a torturous nine year path through college, starting as an engineering major, and finishing a biology major, I decided to be a teacher. That was the hardest job I've ever had and I've had some bad ones.

I'm happiest working alone in a lab. It was a joke in college that I lived in the computer labs, but that was essentially true. I had a university P.O. box, a locker in the gym, and I lived wherever. When I wasn't in the lab, working, or sleeping, I was running.

I met my first girlfriend in the computer lab. She said, "You need to eat." And I did.

That relationship was a flaming catastrophe that ended badly when I jumped out of her moving car in Berkeley while we were arguing.

I met my wife teaching. It hasn't been smooth sailing all the way, mostly because of me, but here we are, still together, our children successful adults.

[LiberalArkie]

2. I visited a counseling center in another town and they said to try a doctor in another town

I did, she did not take medicare but decided to ask me some questions. The first was "do you bang into doors a lot"? I said yep. and as he asked me some more. She said since I had made it most of my life figuring things out by myself that she doubted that she could do much except help with anti-anxiety drugs. I told her that I had been on Lexapro for 15 years and she said that is what she would have started me on.

She told me that some universities are starting a research project on aspie seniors. They never thought much about it before, generally forget about us once we get out of school. Kind of like a moma bird pushing a nestling out of the nest.


Try reddit/aspergers.. A great bunch of folks going through the same. The group ages from about 8 to 80

[hunter]

3. I could get sucked into reddit just as I was usenet and GEnie.

Antidepressants and antipsychotics have been helpful to me, allowing me to step aside from myself and ask "Who is that guy?"

Otherwise I was always living in the storm. I still live in the storm, but I know it's a storm.

I think my university wanted me gone. I burned through senior thesis advisers like kindling. I hurt a lot of feelings.

I had to have a dean sign off personally on my graduation and he told me flat out, "Hunter, I think you should go to graduate school. BUT NOT HERE."

He knew me well. The first time I was "asked" to take time off from school was for fighting with one of his teaching assistants. I was allowed to finish my other classes, but not his. I got an "F."

My parents didn't even ask about it. They were worn out dealing with my younger sibling's crap and their parent's crap. (One of my grandfathers was an occasionally brilliant autistic spectrum engineer, and one of my grandmas was just crazy. My surviving grandparents were not doing well as retired people who'd lost their spouses.)

My parents had helped me leave high school gracefully enough and then I was pretty much on my own. In their defense, from their perspective, my education since middle school had been one inexplicable shit storm after another.

Unlike the guy in the BBC story I won't say I want any years of my life "back." All those painful experiences and misadventures have made me the person I am. I don't know if I'd like myself as the guy who, in some alternate universe, hadn't experienced any of those storms.

[pnwmom]

4. Would you mind explaining to me the significance of

banging into doors a lot? I had thought Asperger's had to do more with social skills, rather than physical stuff.

[LiberalArkie]

5. Social skills, I have none. But a lot of us can't plot a line and walk through a door way without

banging a shoulder on the door frame. A lot of use monolog a lot. It is a general thing, don't ask an aspie how they are doing? I will tell you, you will start to walk away believing that will end it, nope we will follow.

I have often thought of myself as being Data on Star Trek. If that helps.

Accidentally finding the r/aspergers group more or less explained my whole life. Being 72 it was not known. My parents were told to lock him up in the state asylum or just handle it. In fact I was kicked out of 6th grade cub scouts.. My mom said it was my asthma.. I do have bad asthma, but now I know it was more than that. Mental problems were not things discussed back then.

[The_jackalope]

6. I'm not on the spectrum, but I had a similar experience with my ADD

Finally figuring out at age 68 what had been going on since I was a kid. The mixture of elation from finally having an explanation, and despair that nobody had recognized it earlier is a weird blend of emotions.

I'm intellectually high-functioning, so I was able to mask some of it - at least enough to have a few careers and a few more marriages. Now in retirement it doesn't matter so much any more, but I always have this regretful question in the back of my mind, "What if somebody had realized there was something wrong?"

Adults with undiagnosed "childhood" psychological problems have my deepest compassion.