I believe that there are others on the spectrum and I would be interested in hearing your (and anyone else’s) thoughts.
I’m 64 and back in August I was formally diagnosed as being level 1 on the autism spectrum, level 1 being the highest functioning. This followed years of therapy for a variety of things including anger issues, low self-esteem, and depression plus a host of other behaviours. At one point, about a year ago, my wife was talking to me about my excessive stupid jokes and puns and said something along the lines of “it’s almost like you’re autistic or something”. So that led, eventually, to a diagnosis at a private mental health clinic.
This diagnosis has been like a mental and emotional health Rosetta stone for me as I can look back on my entire remembered life and decode every stupid thing I’ve ever said or done (even including some immature and/or obnoxious postings here).
The good thing is that I’m high functioning enough that with some effort I can “step outside of myself” and mitigate potential damage. The bad thing is that I have effectively wasted my life from an emotional POV; I can look back at my behaviour with other people and wonder how many were confused, pissed off, hurt or whatever. Professionally and materially, however, I’ve done reasonably well despite it, for which I’m extremely grateful. If the spectrum could be mapped to a nice tidy numerical scale, like a measuring cup, I do wonder how many notches up that scale it would have taken to make me antisocial enough that I might have been unemployable in a white collar environment.
I have always felt that I’m “on the outside looking in” and I do wonder how I’ll manage things over my remaining 20 years or so.
Anyway, there it is. And I apologize for any stupid things that I’ve posted here.
velomont you’re a good person, I gotta tell you. I coach people on the spectrum in job skills. Sometimes they have obnoxious behaviors yet I appreciate them.
If making stupid jokes and puns is a sign of autism, I must be quite far along on the spectrum…
I don’t think I’m autistic, but my husband and I both have some traits, and we created a Level 2 kid.
But what you’re talking about reminds me of what I went through when I was diagnosed with ADHD at age 34. I was a high achiever all throughout my academic career, but despite my high intelligence, I have always felt a little stupid, a little behind everyone else, missing things that the average person would not miss, having trouble following people when they talked to me, and then just being an utter disaster domestically. Suddenly all the difficulties keeping things organized and the jobs that failed spectacularly because they couldn’t hold my interest, and the long periods of unemployment made sense. Suddenly a lot of the conflict between me and my mother during my childhood made sense. And how much I struggled to stay on top of my course load in college. All that time I spent feeling like I wasn’t good enough, I wasn’t reaching my potential. It suddenly made sense.
And there is a grieving process that comes with that. You wonder what could have been if you had only known sooner. All those years of feeling stupid or seeing wasted potential could have been spent working on self-acceptance and coping tools.
That’s why, when it was clear my son was autistic, we sought help as soon as possible, despite the skepticism of many people around us. I don’t ever want my kid looking back on his life and wondering why he was different. I want him to be around other people who are autistic, too. We realized through this process that my 86-year-old grandfather is Level 1 autistic, and I don’t think he really needs a new identity at this point, but it was certainly funny and heartwarming to see him relate to all my son’s little idiosyncrasies. He got him a t-shirt that says “Grandpa Gets Me.”
I hear a lot of self-judgment in your post, and I would encourage you not to blame yourself and to also consider the strengths this gives you. Who you are is inextricably linked with your neurodivergent brain. All the talents and abilities and unique way of looking at the world are just as much a part of that as the social struggles. That is not to minimize those struggles, but to contextualize them. And I love that you are going through and reviewing your life and thinking about ways you can do better. That is a mark of true character.
People at worked have complained to my then boss. A lot my dumb jokes were of the “pulling someone’s leg” variety, to the extent that I’ve heard on a few occasions things like “I can never tell if Velomont’s serious”, or “I never know what to believe”. So that doesn’t help credibility, and I’ve paid for it professionally.
Or when we had a visitor, I had constructed a pun which was so (in my mind) clever and sophisticated, that our guest responded with “but that’s not even a joke!”
A challenging conundrum about this is that the processing unit that is doing the assessing is inherently flawed so that I can second and third and fourth guess if I’m not careful.
Pre-diagnosis, I had told people that I couldn’t trust my own emotions. Now I know why.
One of my husband’s traits is he has a tendency to take jokes too far. I don’t think he can pick up on other people’s signals of annoyance or disinterest. He’s always genuinely apologetic when someone corrects him, so I know he doesn’t mean any harm by it.
He also cannot pick up on my own disinterest when he’s beating a subject to death. He is the King of infodumping and he has one all-consuming passion: the X-Men. 21 years ago when I first met him one of his first sentences was about the X-Men. To this day he still listens to X-Men podcasts every morning and rearranges his action figures (he put santa hats on all of them yesterday.)
I think his traits are subclinical because it hasn’t stopped him making and keeping friends, but he just has all these little traits that you commonly see in autistic people.
Meanwhile, most of my traits were present in childhood, but I’ll admit to being socially awkward. Probably subclinically socially awkward, but I don’t always know how to say what I want to say, so usually I just say it, and it seems a little blunt/harsh to me. I don’t know if that’s how other people perceive it or not. I also don’t understand why some people care about what they care about. This was most marked in adolescence, when many girls my age were into fashion and flirting, but to this day I always feel like I’m pretending through a lot of social situations. But again - this has never prevented me from making or keeping friends. It’s just made me feel a little odd.
This is fantastic of you to do this. My current therapist has told me that some say that neurodiversity is sort of a “superpower”. That may be true if one is high functioning enough, and diagnosed early enough, that they can use its strengths and mitigate the negatives. But at 64, I prefer to think of it as a vile, toxic curse 
Good luck and glad to hear that you’re able to make use of your newfound knowledge. Being able to better understand yourself and why you might be acting outside what people expect is a valuable gift and tool. Don’t spend too much time dwelling on the past aside from knowing “Oh, okay, that’s why I did that but now I know”. Use it as soemthing to help you navigate the future.
Stuff About Me
About ten years ago, my son was diagnosed as being on the spectrum. In the course of that, I learned a lot about signs and symptoms that put a lot of my own past into a new light. Smart but socially awkward kid, would spend time rocking in place, fair bit of detachment, various sensitivities, etc. Back then, it was just being “a weird-ass kid” versus reason for a clinical diagnosis. “Autism” meant being nonverbal and somewhat uncontrollable. My mother told me about watching me rock in my crib as a baby and crying because she thought I was autistic but then I started talking early and reading/memorizing books as a toddler so felt that everything must be all right. Ha, showed her! (In seriousness, we talked a year ago and I told her (a) that I’m likely on the spectrum and (b) she did a great job with what must have been a pretty mystifying kid).
I haven’t been formally diagnosed because I don’t see much value in it. After 50 years, no one is going to teach me anything new about how to get by and I’m happily married with kids and a home and a good job so I’ve obviously managed to navigate it well enough. Knowing it is enough to put some past things in a new light and perhaps key me into some of why I am like I am but that’s enough for me. Just sort of a “Ah, that makes more sense now” for some of the things I do or why certain things tend to upset me far more than they should.
I don’t really talk about it because I dislike the idea of the self-diagnosing Facebook Test person with the conveniently quirky and relatively benign trait and don’t want to add to that. Also, I assume most people outside of an explicit context (like this thread) don’t really give a shit. And there’s people in far more need of support and compassion than I am so let people use their “care about autism” moments on them instead.
Certainly understand, though for me I needed answers. There are some complicating factors in that my parents weren’t the best and there is some mental illness in my family; I have a 1st cousin who is bipolar, and a sister who may have some sort of mental illness, but she estranged herself from the family, and I can’t blame her tbh.
Oh, absolutely. Only speaking for myself. And I come from a mother who once told us that she thought she had a stroke but didn’t bother going to the doctor because “What’s he going to do, charge me a thousand bucks to tell me I had a stroke? I already knew that”. So I might not have the best pragmatic view on medicine to emulate 
One big one for me, and on a couple of occasions it has precipitated chains of events which have come close to ending my marriage, is that I need periods of undisturbed, uninterrupted time without interaction. Sometimes this may be just me alone in the kitchen, washing dishes while listening to my favourite music. If my wife comes in to talk to me about something, I have to be really careful to be the right kind of responsive. Basically I have to be on my guard to a certain extent, most of the time, so that I can be ready to be an actor if necessary.
My kid is fucking extraordinary. The way his brain works just floors me. At three years old, he knows most grade-school math concepts and how to calculate the volume of a cube. His “special interest” is numbers, but he relates to them not just conceptually but aesthetically. He lines up his toys in various ways to create these big elaborate number projects with patterns and colors like he’s some kind of graphic artist. I always look forward to waking him up in the morning because I’m curious to see what his latest “creation” is.
For Christmas we got him a t-shirt that says “Math is my Superpower.”
He has real limitations because of his autism, but he also has real strengths, and the two just can’t be separated. And that’s true of me and my ADHD as well. I’m extremely good at comparative anything, relating one thing I learned in X field to something I learned in Y field. I write fiction that somehow just naturally integrates all these things I’m thinking about into a cohesive story. At the same time, my ADHD makes it really hard to finish anything I write! You gotta take the good with the bad. It’s all the same brain.
This is largely me as well. I’m 48, realized (without formal diagnosis) that I’m on the spectrum about 12 years ago when my then-2-year-old son was given the diagnosis (both of us Level 1/Aspergers).
The biggest realization/relief when I began to explore this was that I didn’t need to try so hard to “pass” anymore. I didn’t need to push myself to be social (I can still do the social niceties and force the smiles and small talk when necessary, but I don’t have to run myself ragged trying to fit in anymore), didn’t need to feel guilty when I need quiet time by myself, knew what was going on inside me when I felt my emotions building up in certain situations, realized that loud crowds cause overstimulation and shut me down, and I finally figured out why I would shake my hand in stressful situations (I remember when I was a young teenager, I told my dad I thought I had Parkinsons because I would repeatedly catch my hand shaking for no particular reason 
Nope, just my form of stimming.).
This informal diagnosis also explained my irrational meltdowns I had in my younger years when something wouldn’t exactly go how I wanted it, or when routines were broken. It also explained why I was having panic attacks regularly in my previous job, which had absolutely no routine whatsoever. This has allowed me to forge a new path in a career that is 100% routine, and regulate my emotions/control my reactions when things don’t go according to plan. I can also plan for the anxiety that inevitiablly comes with a change in routine (it’s also opened me up to getting on anti-depressants to help regulate things as well).
Same. And, while it hasn’t pushed our marriage to a brink, it is a source of tension. With the kids in the house and both of us working from home, I have few chances to actually be alone and undisturbed. This means I’m rarely at a “full charge” to be sociable and stuff. It’s like, if I needed an hour of true alone time to be comfortable interacting, I currently only get maybe 25% of that in an hour. So I not only never get charged but I tend to jealously guard those 25% hours because it’s all I get and, in turn, my wife gets disappointed that I don’t want to hang with her on the couch all night. If I could have gotten that full hour, I’d have calories to burn; instead I’m spending all night foraging for alone-time berries.
She actually figured this out before I did. My mother was making some comment about me being irritable and my wife was “Oh, I can tell you exactly why that is…”
Fingers crossed, my older son will be graduating in May and moving out sometime after which will free up a room in the house and help a lot.
I’ll be retiring in less than a year, and I’ve been telling my wife for the last few years that the first thing I want to do is about six months to a year of doing only what I want to do. And if that means I hang out at the same coffee shop every day for a year, then so be it. After that then I’ll slowly re-engage with others.
I’m not sure that she completely gets it.
I am in the same boat right now. I am largely a solitary creature. My husband has always been supportive of my need for alone time, but it’s rare that I’m the only one in the house at any given time. And 3 year olds don’t really understand “personal space.”
I’m sure I’m on the spectrum somewhere but I’ve spent so much time working with engineers that it’s hardly noticeable.
If he were to be diagnosed as on the spectrum, this would not be a surprise. In my case I can think of one friend I successfully alienated with a specific focus until he and his wife ghosted us. In retrospect, I really can’t blame him.
And as far as not picking up other peoples’ signals - holy crap that is a huge one for me. And it applies, in my case anyway, to not picking up how damaging my own signals are or aren’t. I used to think that my joking and sarcasm were like “nerf bullets” in their hurtfulness (in other words they were good natured fun). As it turned out I was kind of wrong.
Just curious, what is your thing? We call it a special interest here, but some call it a hyperfixation - what’s your passion?