Anxiety about my future

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so I havnt had a very hard life apart from emotional abuse from my mom. My dads a dentist who brings in decent money , i attended one of, if not the most prestigious high school in America where everybody goes to USC, UCLA, Washington, Stanford and good universities like them. All my life ive been expected to be suciessfull because I was the son of a sucessful dentist and went to a prestigious school...now I'm dropped out of the University of Oregon temporarily and have a part time job and living at home, no girlfriend. Now im not completely doing nothing but im broke, i live with my parents and ive dropped out of college and I'm freaking out about my future. All my high school years i thought id go off to college and graduate in 4 years then get a job and get married and live happily ever after....totally not how my life is going right now. Will I graduate from college and find a good job? Will I find the right girl and get married? will i do something with my life? Right now I work a minimum wage job and I NEVER want to do this when im older. I guess this is just a part of growing up....its scary

I hope that your future works out for you.

SO what are you leaving out here? You have been diagnosed as an Aspie? Didn't you have problems in childhood like most of us? You are just having problems now? And how have your parents been dealing with you all of these years? I'm sorry but our problems don't come out of nowhere. Many of us, including me, have had the hardest time of it in grade school and junior high. Are you failing to give us background or saying your problems came out of nowhere?

I'm not really ragging on you here. It's just that it's hard to help in any meaningful way without a little more data. If you are an Aspie, then you need to know it's not going to go away, and perhaps it's time to sit down, preferably with your parents, who probably created your expectations in the first place, and work out a more realistic plan. You all need to understand that if you are one of us that NT dream of a perfect life probably is not going to happen. You need to assess your skills and deficiencies and work out a future that takes both into account.

I know the feeling. It was only into my 30's before I began to realize my life wasn't going to follow any conventional path.

It might be helpful for you to throw away all your expectations of how your life was supposed to go and instead, start writing out the job and the life you want to build for yourself and then learning what you have to to make it work. This is more or less how I have structured my career and my life in the past 10 or 15 years and I wish I had started doing it earlier. When I started thinking this way, I wanted to be a commercial photographer and I became one. I shot for magazines and books. The social aspects were stressful for me so I moved on to computer graphics. I learned the kind of computer work that I would enjoy doing and sort of created my own job. It's what I do now, but I'll probably move on eventually.

Obviously it's not as easy as it sounds, but the key point I'm trying to make is that if you set yourself clear, concrete goals that genuinely appeal to you, while you probably won't attain exactly the goal you envision, you'll get a lot closer to it than if you have no idea what you want to do with your life.

I will grant it was a lot harder and a lot less organized than I make it out to be in the above paragraphs, but what I'm suggesting is that you can benefit from actively constructing your career and life time goals and then, step by step, working to achieve those goals. Of course if you change your mind, you can always change directions mid-stream. You don't have to be locked into any one path. But if you at least find a path and start going down it, you will be further along than if you wait for a path to find you.

Live deliberately. Take an active approach to your own life. Take risks. Start doing it as soon as possible and you will find you have it in you to lead a good, fulfilling life.

Good luck,

Lars