Losing abilities?

Post Reply New Topic

I read that it's possible for aspies to lose abilities. This is said to be particularly prevalent during adolescence. An example of this? I developed mild Prosopagnosia when I was ten. The onset was very sudden and there was never any hint of it when I was younger. I was much more charismatic up to about twelve. I had a better work ethic and more energy up to about fifteen.

Though prevelent in adolecence I read this can happen at any age. It was said that it affects abilities that allow aspies to pass for normal but I think it could also effect more unusual abilities. A rare example would be eidetic memory.

So has this happened to anyone here?

I was much more self-confident in my mid-late teens than I am now. I also had less social anxiety, and seemed to be on a better path for achieving "life" accomplishments like learning to drive, finishing high school, landing a good job, etc. I was getting to these things at a slower pace than my friends, but at least I was on the path to getting to them. When I was 18-19 however, this all came to a crashing halt, and now I'm trying to pick up the pieces again.

I remember I used to speak much more clearly up until I was 12, and I had more energy to do things. I also didn't really start feeling "brain fog" until then.

Was it burnout? I got burnout when I was 15.

I was more extroverted and neurotypical as a youth, if precocious in some things (especially speaking, and memory for things heard). It wasn't until my adolescent years that Aspie traits started to show heavily.

Environment? Epigenetics? I wonder so often, but cause-effect answers are complex, elusive, and mostly impossible to "test," empirically.

I had a somewhat public meltdown (thought it was a mental breakdown at the time) that I found to be absolutely humiliating when I was 13, which led to a burnout type period. Things just weren't the same after that. I was naturally expected to have more personal responsibility and expectations in general were much higher. I wasn't able to keep up with the NT act.

Last edited by calstar2 on 17 Sep 2014, 3:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

the past few years i seem to be, for lack of a better term, "becoming more autistic" - more stimming, more time spent "inside". don't know how much might be burnout (last couple jobs i had were very stressful), or how much from having much less contact with people, so don't have to pass so much, or maybe just aging or something....

Depending on the environment your autistic traits may become more/less obvious. The teenage years are particularly hard as you become more self-conscious and develop a sense of responsibility. And maybe that's when your autistic traits start interfering with your life very noticeably. Could that be the reason why the "loss of ability" seems to happen around that stage of your life?

I started to develop pretty bad OCD when I was 17. I think the pressure I was under (having to do something about my future) caused it.

I'm Aspie-ish. I can't say I am, but I am developing more narrow interests.

Define "burnout".

Intriguing theory.

I also developed OCD around the same age.

yep, i was a lot more extroverted when i was younger too. i was more confident, yet i still stimmed publicly and had my outbursts. i was an annoying kind of boisterous. yet it attracted some people, not at all malicious.

i started to become a bit more reserved as i went on to 8th grade, mainly because i was realizing just how annoying i was becoming, both by having it told to my face and wondering to myself why people avoided me.
probably a mentality of "better to say nothing at all than to say something stupid", which i did a lot as i had pretty bad impulse control, which i'm working on. i might also be going through burnout, being undecided between trying to mingle and learning to enjoy social interaction and just being to myself.

on the other hand i speak more than i used to, i remember really hating my voice and using a 'silly' voice to compensate. don't feel much like this anymore but i still think if others heard me the way i hear myself it would be ideal. my voice is a little too deep for someone like me.

Yep, that sums it up nicely. I was confident most of the time as a child. I was really weird but I didn't know I was weird. I had no inhibitions at all. True that as a teen there are often more social pressures (not very many social pressures for me because my usual response to social problems I didn't understand was just to withdraw from them) but responsibility was a killer for me. Deciding what to do with my future overwhelmed me to the point where I seriously had a plan to be unemployed for my whole life. I thought, school is too hard and uni must be much harder and work must be much harder. That plan lasted a few years after finishing school until I got a part time job. Maybe my work load seemed greater than it actually was due to a combination of confusion, poor organization and some bad meds.

Now I want to get a serious job but I still can't decide. The difference is now I stress about all the work I'm not doing instead instead of all the work I'm doing. I can never relax but being stressed all the time hasn't increased my productivity like it was supposed to. I stopped playing video games so I could get more done yet that didn't lead to me getting more done because I'm juggling a few different things and I'm bad at prioritizing. I get so caught up in one task I neglect other tasks. Every time I'm not doing something I feel guilty yet that doesn't seem to help.

But as a child? Everyone around me thought I was weird but as far as I was concerned, I only had one problem in life. Combating boredom. School wasn't hard, just boring, life at home wasn't hard, just boring.

As for social skills, they started improving a bit in my late teens after I excepted that I was weird and decided to embrace it. I decided I'd rather be weird and have people remember me than be plain and have people forget me. I gained a bit more confidence in my mid 20s when I started to realize that lack of confidence was the result of a self fulfilling prophesy (e.g. I am shy because I am shy).


Burnout is when you work or study too hard to the point where you're overwhelmed and then you effectively stop or drastically slow down because you're unwilling or unable to continue.

I've experienced burnout like what you've described before, but the problems I started experiencing at 12 had more to do with the rigors of puberty, adapting to middle school life, dealing with the instabilities of my parents' marriage, and adapting to adolescence. I was feeling burnt out in the sense that I was overburdened, but it's not because I was working particularly hard at it either. I had a pretty decent childhood going up to that point, then BAM, I'm expected to grow up all of a sudden.

I see. It seems like we had the opposite problems. I ignored puberty, wasn't bothered too much by middle school, and my parents were long divorced.

I just felt overworked. Some of the work was confusing and that made it seem harder. Some teens get confused by social issues. I just ignored those and hung out in my misfit cliche. I was academically confused. and exhausted.