Mentally Feel Younger

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I'm 43 but I feel like I'm 21 years old. I can't grow up in the NT sense if my life depends on it. I need help looking for work and I also need a job coach when I'm starting out a job. I also have gender dysphoria and being a woman doesn't matter to me, it never has been and it never will be. I'd rather identify and express myself as male. I also have a somewhat GI way of expressing myself in ways of gender expression.

I'm 55 years old but i feel like a big kid.

I may be physically 43 years of age but mentally I feel like I'm about 11 or 12 years old. My maturity feels stunted or stuck at that age and completely unmoving from that period.

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*** High Functioning Autism - Asperger's Syndrome ***

ADHD, OCD, and PTSD.

Keep calm and stim away.

It's the little things... Sitting with my feet up on the chair at work, Looking at numbers in my bank account and dismissing it because numbers are scary (which probably explains my bad luck with finances), eating cookies and microwave chips (fries for you US folk) for dinner (lunch for you US and southern folk), only buying magazines for the pictures and not really having the patience to read articles, preferring to sit an colour in rather than do house work, prioritising tasty snacks and fun activities over things useful to the house like washing up liquid, cleaning products, bedding and towels etc...

These are the kind of things that make me not feel like an adult

I'm like that too and I'm 40. My husband helps me a lot.

I´ just turned 65 and i feel like I´m 36-39.
Maybe I´m becoming a harsh old hag, but i HATE it, when people comment on my age and express due expectations.

BUGGERS! Kreutz und Donnerwetter! Splitte mine Bramsejl!
We are exactly as old as our level of functioning would indicate. BASTA! PERIOD!

The birth year is merely a number!

I agree with the other contributions.

I was doing quite advanced academic stuff in teenage years but on family holidays still built sandcastles and motorways on the beach until I was sixteen.

I still make the same omissions as Jon mentions in my household shopping and I am now nearly 55. A year or more before getting round to limescsle remover for the WC, then compounding matters by making a bit if a stimm out of the assaults on the limescale with the chemicals and bog brush.

And yes, I DID look up the chemistry of limescale and limescale removers after finally buying the remover.

A lot of us do, I think. I can imagine that it isn't rare though it won't be something all ASD people feel.

Absolutely so!

I'm also feeling much younger like just becoming an adult. I can't even realize that I'm 50 now. Most people guess me about 10 years younger.

If by maturity you mean proper, rigid, not enjoying life in the moment, suppressing feeling, and doing what others expect of you, I am happy to not be very mature.

I am still in my Pleasing 4 stage of childhood development. Its a gift. If you think an Aspie masking as an NT is a stretch. Then think how a 4 or 5 year old masking as a 70 year old is a challenge. But it is definitely doable.

I've always had my mental age and intellectual age as incongruous. I think because society doesn't really confront getting help from others beyond this misconceived notion of a Renaissance Man who can do a little of everything. It's only in academic settings where they tell us to abandon that notion and remember that we're always learning. Sometimes instructors can't explain things because they don't think they're that simple. I feel that we shouldn't be embarrassed or treat it as a bad thing because as a whole it means that we have higher emotional intelligence, adults in comparison are jaded and desensitized. Adults are always sad because they never find joy in the mundane whereas children tend to be fascinated by the simplest things.

That reasoning doesn't immediately take away the icky feelings but it'll be easier to accept eventually. I'm not bashing neuro-typicals, there are plenty of those young at heart. I'm bashing the notion that we have to have "adult interests" and walk around "adult-like" with our "adult" manner of speech.