How do you rate your life skills??

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Just wondering..

How do you find your life skills and if you live independently ?

Life skills as in . Self care and when/if things get difficult.. how do you manage to cope and get by?

I am curious to know as asking others around me who aren't on the spectrum would be like what a stupid question and I tend to not ask these kinda things as I feel like I'm judged by others on top of already knowing that I'm different to others..

I live independently. I also have dependant

My life skills are generally ok. I can't clean though. I find it tedious and boring so get a cleaner to sort that issue out. I manage to feed people daily, clean two people often, although if we don't go out daily we tend to stay in our pjs. I manage to pay bills and manage some how financially. It does take me longer to do some things, I won't lie, but I think we all develop tricks as we get older to make us able to cope better. My dad makes lists and works through it. I can't do that as I procastinate too much then hate myself if I don't get it done. Instead I have a set times when I do things and I do what I can in that time to get things done. I go to university so its more making sure I'm practising stuff rather than doing more interesting stuff that I want to do.

I'm mostly independent. My executive functioning isn't too great, but I've leaned how to get things done accepting that it just takes me extra time to do anything. It takes an enormous effort to organised myself I do well if allowed to do things in my own time, but get stressed if I'm rushed. I function well in a professional job, but only because I'm able to take my time. I work thee days a week, but spread it over four days, so I avoid the pressure to work quickly. Any more than thee days and I get too stressed and will burnout. I can hold a decent conversation, but am fatigued by the mental effort of social interactions. I don't have any friends outside of work, but that doesn't bother too much as I prefer to spend my own time on hobbies and interests.

Quite a bit below average. Definitely a case of intelligence much > than adaptive functioning. I live independently,but have a moderate level of support. I live a rather basic lifestyle with that support, which is a significant step up from life in Essex.

I have always felt like I have poor life skills. I don’t know what to do is a common theme for me. I never knew how to get buses and how to go about things. I put this down to not reading fiction as a child.

I did not know about my autism when I moved out on my own at age 19. I found I was poorly prepared. I did not know how to balance a check book, to plan meals for a week, to shop for food or anything else. I did not know about basic home care such as pilot lights, fuses or electric boxes, furnace filters, basic plumbing, or even how to change a light bulb and replace it with one that was safe to use in the lamp or fixture. I wish somebody would have taught me those things.

I did not know about self care, making doctor or dentist appointments for checkups or annual exams. I was lucky somebody gave me a few ideas about birth control!

I did know how to clean and do laundry. I bought a car and did not know I should have the oil changed, check tire pressure, or any of car ownership basic stuff. I wish somebody would have told me.
I am not very organized and need to rely on a calendar for paying bills, keeping appointments, reminders to do certain chores, etc. Above and beyond that I did not know how to watch out for people who would use and abuse me, take advantage of me and my trusting and anxious to please nature. I did not understand about alcohol and drug use, or how getting involved in those things can affect your life in unhealthy ways. I am lucky I was not dead in the gutter before age 30.

My life skills now I am almost 70 are adequate, and I have learned ways to make sure the important stuff gets accomplished, but I give my partner the credit for being the organized one and the one who has trained me to schedules, timely appointments, using the calendar, how to shop, how to live with sanity in a mostly insane world.
He is my major accommodation and my support. I might need a helper or an aide if he did not take such good care of me.
I am surely one of the luckiest old ladies i know of.

Passable for someone my age, I suppose. I've been living alone since 2015 and can handle the daily and weekly basics no problem, plus I work. I don't make much money but I write down everything I spend and live by no means wastefully, so I get by. What I need help with is filling some formal paperwork (some I can handle, others not) and anything that includes heavy lifting since my physical disability tends to get in the way.

Poor life skills, I’m still heavily reliant on my parents (and still live with them). Could keep myself alive and if I have the motivation, reasonably clean, but that’s about it. Can cook (with detailed instructions), have been doing my own laundry for over a decade, can keep my environment clean as well (but not get it clean once things are bad, I get overwhelmed and just don’t even know where to begin), but am also dependent on setting alarms on my phone to remind me to do things.

I live alone. My life skills aren't great, but they could be worse. I've managed to pay my bills on time, consistently, for a few years now. Which is great because I hate having no power and water, and late fees suck. I keep my house clean enough. I'm pretty good about basic hygiene. I could do better about eating and getting groceries. I'm terrible at dealing with things that suddenly come up and aren't regular parts of my routine.

Like a few years back I had some plumbing issues. I got stressed, blanked them out, let them go. As a result, I now have drywall issues in my entry way ceiling (it's directly under the upstairs shower where the plumbing issue happened). It took me a long time to get the pipes fixed, it was really overwhelming to me, and I still haven't fixed the drywall. Sometimes bits of ceiling still fall and end up on my floor. I'd be ashamed of my living conditions if I could feel ashamed. But hey, my living room is clean. My executive functioning is crap. It's like the ceiling ceases to exist until a chunk of it drops, then I think, I should really fix that, then I proceed to forget about it until another bit falls a month or two later. Meh.

For me, if I can make something a habit, do it daily, I can start doing that on automatic. I use to-do lists (all in one notebook) to help keep me on track and to help me get back on track when I mess up and lose my routine. I mess up a lot, but I keep trying. The notebooks help. I have another notebook for food/exercise, and another one for my bills/money crap. I forget things unless I write them down, so yeah. I'm a fan of notebooks. As for the other stuff, I dunno. I'm still trying to figure out how to be better about those sorts of things. I wonder sometimes how much of it is lack of give a damn on my end. I can be pretty apathetic as a person. I know I should care more, but my mind struggles to connect to things that aren't aggressively in my face.

Like others here, I need support in place for things that go beyond basics. Between the apathy and executive functioning issues, I can be a wreck of a person. I'm lucky my daughter checks in on me or I'd rarely make it to the grocery store since it's not a daily thing for me and I hate doing it. I don't go see doctors unless someone makes me. I struggle to know when I need one, and making appointments alone is overwhelming to me, much less trying to deal with actually going there. I kinda suck at adulting.

My life skills are okay, I think. It's just my ability to start tasks and cope with multiples that makes me really struggle. I can handle doing only a few tasks a day right now without becoming very overwhelmed, and some of them, like going to appointments or shopping, lessen what else I can do that day.

I can cook, clean, and take care of my hygiene just fine. I also can take care of our pets and am the one who mainly does that.

I can also make appointments for doctors and dentists, and handle them by myself. I don't really make appointments for the doctor unless someone makes me though. I can also make appointments for our pets and can handle giving the pets medicine, etc.

I'm not good at navigating outside and get very disoriented walking around by myself. I also can't drive yet and don't have any experience having a job.

I can budget okay and I can handle doing grocery shopping for my mom with minimal help (if we're at the store near us, because the layout never changes and it's not that busy).

I also can do some yard work, like mowing, weeding, etc.

I know how to do a lot of things, I just often can't handle doing enough tasks to keep up with everything. lol

I'm high-functioning, independent. I am basically capable of anything the average person is expected to be, but sometimes anxiety and overthinking get in the way. I don't need outside support.

I'd say my life skills are pretty good. I've invested a lot of effort into learning those skills over the years. Before going to uni, I could barely go shopping for anything on my own. I couldn't make a phone a call. It was just too baffling and overwhelming to me. Between then and now, I've actually even managed to get pretty stressful bureaucratic stuff done abroad in a foreign language on my own with no help or support, the kind of thing that anyone would find stressful and would often fail at. It took a lot of persistence and determination, and to me it was much more meaningful than the college graduation that I never got to. I'm probably more proud of it than of anything else.

One major insurmountable mountain though is occupational adequacy. I've been told I'm unemployable, and I tend to agree. I just don't do well with people and set routines (especially in the morning, it's always been a huge problem) and workplace BS. It literally makes me lose my sanity. I have zero ability to do teamwork, and my ability to work at all fluctuates a lot. Thanks to the bizarreness of currency exchange rates though, I can get by and also save regularly for [hopefully early] retirement even just doing an average of a couple hours of underpaid freelance work a day, with very little (always text-based) interaction with people.

A few years ago I moved out on my own so I could spend more time actually alone and undisturbed, but in the end I found it just wasn't worth it. I was worried all the time about money and searching for other gigs, which I really didn't want to, and it turns out that there's a lot of BS involved in being a paying tenant too (a lot of things that weren't my fault but that I had to take care of anyway, which then involved dealing with people who just wouldn't freaking do their job, major pain in the ass).

I'm currently living with my parents, probably indefinitely. They can be a little annoying sometimes, but they don't seem to mind that I'm here, they didn't even seem to want me to move out in the first place. I pay for my own food and bills, and I help them with tech stuff, with moving heavy stuff around and daily chores.

Thank you all for your experiences.

I find I relate to a lot of your experiences and glad to know that I am not entirely alone or strange with the way others are with support needs, scheduling etc.. here on WP.

It's somewhat of a relief

Welcome. If I scaled back my life I could live independently. Since I don't, I have a spouse to support me (and I support him).

I can do most anything I want if given lots and lots of time and space to do it. Life isn't like that, so after I crashed without parental support, I found a spouse to help compensate for my difficulties. For example, I make plans and he implements. On the other hand my ASD-like BFF lives by herself but does very little in life. So between the two of us the option appears to be "live independently, live small" or "live big, get lots of support". I was doing so much in college (degree, work, volunteer) that my BFF (degree only) was the one who enabled me to grocery shop and I had other friends to help me get stamps and fill out applications. As I said, I can do non-routine individual things myself with sufficient time, but then I couldn't do anything else - so it's not very practical. It's frustrating to know that what's "simple" for most other people is hard for me, but apparently what's "complex" for many other people is easy for me. I'm still unable to fully grasp and articulate the latter part.

My life skills are good I can cook my own meals and clean my house.
I started doing things when I was at home, my Mum taught me to be independent which has helped me now.

I can take care of my hygiene and go shopping and clean. That's most of it though. I dropped out of college every time I went. I never worked a paid job and don't see that happening for a long time. I can only cook a few things. I failed to make important phone calls in the past because of how scary it felt. I failed to show up to one of the only interviews I ever had from fear.

All of those things stopped bothering me a long time ago once I stopped caring about being "behind" in life and embraced it.