Hi all, new here

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Hi all. I've lurked sporadically. 62. Retired. My dad and two uncles were definitely Aspie, though we didn't have that term for it back then. Lucky me: I didn't feel isolated. They had careers and families while being just as "different" as I was. Now they're gone, and although US society knows about Aspies these days, there are still a lot of stereotypes etc., and there seems to be limited understanding that if we are born this way we stay this way. There's more support for schoolchildren now, but I don't see much for adults (at least where I am, and I'm in a blue state).

That lack of local support/meetups brings me "out" now. I've spent most of my life and pretty much all of my careers providing support/problemsolving/info/insight for people around me, but I was definitely in what I call the Competence Trap: when I needed anything (Anything. At all. Really.) those same people were flabbergasted. This included life partners, sadly. Eventually, even with a lot of escapist literature and excellent cats, I burned out and retired. (Lucky again, that I could retire. I know that, deeply.)

I'm in the process of recovering (with the cats) from the burnout and exhaustion. Looking for my tribe. Hoping to both give and receive. Also hoping my avatar will persist - I've loaded it multiple times and it keeps disappearing, gaah. Will stop here for now. Since I have to garden, stain porches, bake, launder, and such, I may not check in daily but I intend to try.

Welcome to the site, - I'm in my 60's myself btw and diagnosed late.

Thank you! I've been to Chester; it's beautiful.

I was only diagnosed in 2010 myself, but I had strong suspicions before.

My browsers are misbehaving terribly - Firefox won't let me log in here at all, and IE11 is freezing up on me/forcing me to bail out of this site. Going to have to dig around in the security settings and see if I can fix it/them. Over and out for the moment --

Welcome to Wrong Planet!

Warm welcome to another golden oldie from an even older one

Thanks for the warm welcomes! I'm glad not to be the only 60-something here - and hurray, my browsers are even behaving (for the moment ).

Welcome, Esme!

and also apologies for the delayed response... I've belonged to other forum communities, but that was over a decade ago; back then I was online daily; these days not so much. Part of that is this "retirement" thing, and a larger part is the aforementioned burnout.

Note to self: if I want community (and I do), I need to show up often enough that I help to make one...

I think J K Rowling would love your username. I do too.

. Thank you! I didn't discover Discworld until my late 40s, but I quickly realized that Esme was who I wanted to be when I grew up. If I ever did. And now here I am, not exactly grown up, but old enough to claim kinship.