Can anyone answer a question about middle age aspies?
I'm 34 and a half. I don't even have my first Grey hair but I feel fearful about the years I'm approaching. It feels I'm a far cry from 40, 39, 38, 37, or even 36. But sometimes it feels like some people online talk about mid life crisis at 35: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/ ... llennials/ Of course I'm not sure how this works for different people with aspergers. I feel like saying why can't people aspergers feel forever young in their minds and say they won't let age get them down. It sometimes feels like as a woman with autism, I can't tell if my mind is my actually age, or if I'm a teenager or even younger. It is funny how they say as soon as a woman gets pregnant at 35 and over they call this mid life motherhood. Yet they still say people are still young at 35, 40 up to sometimes 50.
lostonearth35
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Joined: 5 Jan 2010
Age: 50
Gender: Female
Posts: 11,877
Location: Lost on Earth, waddya think?
I'm 44, although I might not be officially middle-aged yet for a Canadian woman until I'm maybe 45.
So what is your question? Is it that middle-aged aspies are still young or are they still old? Personally I feel younger mentally (not necessarily in a bad way) but I feel older physically (which is bad).
I think many people don't feel " their age" because they have misconceptions about how people their age should feel.
I'm 38, however I don't feel much different mentally than when I was 34 or 30. I feel similar to how I was when I was in my late 20s...28, 29, with the exception of the fact that my social skills have improved, I'm a little wiser and am a little less generous with my patience.
I am 63 now, and still haven't really grown up yet. It's like I never matured. A lot of people have a "mid-life crisis" but that never happened with me. Maybe my brain still thinks I am young. I thought turning 30 would be hard. The movie "Soylent Green" had an effect on me. But 40, 50 & 60 meant nothing to me. I do know my actual age and have no issues with it. I just hope I die before I have to be cared for to survive!
I feel like I had my "mid-life crisis" when I was in my late-teens and early twenties. Becoming an adult (in other people's eyes, at least) crushed me, as I was totally unprepared for it. The crisis resulted in very severe mental health problems and alcoholism. Pulling myself out of those things was not easy, and took me well over a decade, and there are still occasional lapses.
Approaching middle-age, in my mid-forties, I had almost the opposite of a crisis. I discovered my autism, was officially diagnosed, and began understanding myself much better than ever before. Using that knowledge to improve my life has been difficult and frustrating at times, and there's been the occasional crisis, but overall, it has so far led to a steady, gradual, improvement in my well-being. The people around me might not see it that way when they compare me to themselves, some even see my greater expression of autistic behaviours as signs that I'm "getting worse". So long as I feel greater satisfaction and no-one feels that I'm hurting them, I just ignore this; it's not their place to judge what does or does not make me feel better. Thankfully, the people who I care about most accept this.
Conversations where people idealise and reminisce about their wonderful youth mystify me. I wouldn't turn the clock back for all the tea in China, even if I could do it knowing what I know now; I have no wish to relive the kind of social pressures which society places on people at that age. I've just started playing with Lego again after a break of nearly 30 years, and I'm loving it; it helps me to relax so much. Am I being childish? I don't know and I don't care; it is no more pointless or vacuous than many of the things that the "adults" around me seem to enjoy. Have I missed "milestones". Yes, I certainly have, but I realise now that I only wanted most of them in order to "fit in", not because I had any genuine desire for them or because they would feed my soul.
Physically, I'm deteriorating a bit as everybody does, but this is more than compensated for by getting closer to living the kind of life that I actually want to live. Mentally, I don't feel as if I'm any particular age at all, I just am who and what I am.
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