Asperger's diagnosis affecting my self esteem

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Being diagnosed with Asperger's has hurt my self esteem and has made other things affect my self esteem more. Like I just got out of college and haven't found a job yet. Since I know a lot of people with Asperger's are un(der)-employed , I am starting to worry that I may never find a job, or if I do - I won't be able to keep it. I am also worried that I will never even kiss a girl. Basically, AS has me worried that I will become a 40 year old virgin that still lives with his parents.

Its like before I was diagnosed, I always felt like anything was possible. But since I was diagnosed with Asperger's - I am always questioning if I can even do normal things.

Can anyone relate?

Everyone is struggling to find work at the moment. Also I've been working on and off since I left school. I was diagnosed late but your certainly not doomed. Life is what you make it. Aspergers means you may need support at some point in your life or to do things differently as aspies can think differently.

When I was diagnosed I rejected it and thought no way; but I couldn't really say I don't have it because what was written in my diagnosis report was true. It depends upon your personal circumstances but I think pretty much all of us could work and live independently if we get the support we need. Some people don't need any support, some need more but it's all okay.

(Only my personal opinion, may not match others).

I've become a lot more aspie, a lot more dysfunctional, since my dx 8 months ago.

My sense of identity has taken a beating as I struggle to process the new information, and view my history in a new light. It feels like a natural part of the process for me and I assume I will settle down one day...

it did at first and then i realized i can do all the things i want to, even if i have to approach it from a different angle than others might have to. i feel empowered now because i've started to focus on my strengths and not weaknesses.

"Aspies" do get married and have successful careers. "Disabled" does not mean 'unable".

Yes I can relate to this. My diagnosis led me to a lot of negative "identity crisis" feelings. In a way I was glad I had been diagnosed late (I was in my mid-50s) so I didn't have the daunting information telling me that I probably couldn't do things that were very important to me. To cap it all, my wife left me a few days after the diagnosis.

But it's a double-edged sword. Undiagnosed, I made a lot of mistakes out of ignorance. And after diagnosis I eventually began to come to terms with the knowledge and use it to my advantage. After decades of bad relationships I seem to have finally mastered what it's all about, I found the courage to divorce my wife, and I've now found a very good relationship. I was never completely friendless, and that hasn't got any worse since the DX. I usually had a job, and mostly found the world of work very stressful and depressing, but thanks to the diagnosis I was able to get enough adjustments to alleviate most of the stress. I quit after a few more years, but only because I was finally able to afford to do so.

I managed to live it down and turn it to my advantage, and I see no reason why you won't be able to do the same. Things should become clearer and much more hopeful as you get used to seeing yourself in the new light.

sometimes i wish i would have not gotten a dx at all, but as i got older the differences between me and my peers became more pronounced.

The trick is.....to realize you are a person, not an "Asperger."

yes absolutely. i remember watching or reading something related to autism and it was like "Im not autisic, i have autism"

Indeed....I believe we are people, and not some mysterious other species.

I am of the belief, truly, that every person "has something." The key is to adapt your "something" to the "something" which is our world.

Yes, I can relate to this very well, and, at times, I realize that, if I have been reading on WP, for too many days in a row, my mind starts to put too much emphasis on how my Aspie traits are affecting me. Even though WP is a very positive resource and place for me to hang out, the more time spent here (not in the games forum, of course), the more I notice/am aware of my issues that stem from AS. Especially when I am at the office that I work out of. Most of my issues are exacerbated by various elements of my work environment. Although, I guess that's a whole other topic, in and of itself. kraftiekortie's advice is most wise. I, personally, have to find a way to get back to that mindset...

You felt like anything was possible before. So what do you think would have happened when you had tried these things and failed again and again and again regardless of the diagnosis. I had the opposite reaction to you because I got the diagnosis after this point in my life after failing. The point of a diagnosis is to identify difficulties once these are identified they can be worked on or adapted to. The diagnosis is meant to let you know what you need to do to achieve the things you want to make them possible to make them easier. Rather than failing relationships for years and never understanding why it offers an explanation a new area to work on to make it possible. Rather than struggling with work for years it similarly offers an explanation, an area to work on, a specific job type to look for and behaviors to adapt.

The diagnosis of Asperger's in no way means you can't have a successful relationship nor a successful career nor that you cannot care for yourself and be independent(unless the diagnosis specifically identifies that you cannot be either through severe autism or a co-morbid like intellectual disability neither of which are aspergers). It simply identifies your areas of difficult making it easier to achieve these objectives when you actually try to achieve them which you are now. So I would suggest using the diagnosis, using your areas of difficulty, to identify why things are failing so you can fix them. For example I failed every job interview I had because of social skills. I only work today because my brothers aided me in this endeavour. If I ever have to get a different job I will focus on social skills to try and pass the interview. I will not try to communicate except in ways I know I can for example I use notes at work because I struggle with verbal communication. So I adapt, I fix a problem in a way that allows me to achieve the objective so if you can't effectively communicate verbally then communicate through a different medium. Like this, text, and find a job that doesn't require anything beyond your capabilities or what you think you can enhance them to.

What does disable mean then because I was told that I have a disability and that I am not disabled because I can still do anything but I would just have to work harder to do it. Disabled means not able to no matter how hard you try.

ToughDiamond - I am curious. What aspect of work did you find stressful/depressing? And what adjustments alleviated that stress?

You have hit on the problem with the catch-all word "disabled". "Disabled" could mean it will hell of a lot harder for you to do it then the "average" person besides unable. A person that is described as disabled might be totally immobile or can walk with the assistance of a cane. With Autism especially people on the part of the spectrum that usually post here fall most often into it is really difficult/inhibiting rather then unable category

Stressful aspects: unclear instructions, background noise, interruptions, having to do things their way, management-led changes to my working routine, having to work and deal with people I normally had little to do with, meetings, crowding. When conditions happened by chance to be right for me, I frequently out-performed my peers, but when they were wrong, I wouldn't know what to do, and certain supervisors were clearly annoyed and bemused by my difficulties, and tended to put it down to a lazy or hostile attitude to the work they were giving me. I routinely went home for lunch in order to decompress in solitude, but they occasionally put pressure on me to ignore or shorten my lunch break at the drop of a hat.

Adjustments: I identified the particular area of work (and by implication, the supervisors) that was giving me by far the most trouble, and they largely exempted me from it, and gave me specific tasks for what remained of that work rather than an overall responsibility. They stopped trying to screw around with my lunch break. During diagnosis, I'd explained the stressful things about my job much as I've explained them above, and the diagnostician had pretty much copied and pasted them into the report, which I gave my employer. Little was specifically said about it when I met with the management to discuss adjustments, if I remember right (the meeting was rather a blur), and nothing was ever written down.

Results: The exemption was a great help. But because nothing had ever been enshrined in writing, I continued to feel uneasy - I felt they might one day start to renege on the adjustments. For the work that wasn't part of the exemption, I noticed little improvement. Mostly things were tolerable, and I performed well, but the stressful aspects would still happen occasionally at random. I felt somewhat safer from getting into trouble because the diagnosis was on their files, but after so many years of anxiety, it was rather like PTSD.

Depressive aspects: Unlike the anxiety, I don't believe the "depression" I felt was ever really clinical. It was more a sense of sorrow and ennuie that my experience of the world of work was so bloody uncomfortable and - well, stupid. I'd achieve job satisfaction for a while, then some bigwig would go and change something and I'd be back to square one. I was discontented because I knew I hadn't achieved the vocational level my intelligence and education deserved. I had to rub shoulders with people who were higher up in the food chain than I was, yet they didn't seem half so bright. And there seemed to be nothing I could do about it. There were also cliques of schmoozing colleagues to add to the misery. If that's how NTs want to behave, fine, but let them do it somewhere else, not in my sight! At work, I sometimes couldn't get away from them, so it was sometimes like being stuck at a horrible, non-inclusive, raucous mainstream party - ignored, invaded, and envious of their closeness.

There were no direct adjustments for those things. I hadn't complained about them. I sometimes avoided it by leaving the scene, hoping that my diagnosis would afford me some immunity from disciplinary action. I don't know that anybody even noticed when I took extended lunch breaks. But my workload was often heavy and I couldn't bring myself to drop the ball on an assignment, so there was a limit to how much I felt able to duck out of.

I felt like a lost potential, as if I was being seen as a weakling to be kept away from the high-powered work. Towards the end I asked the management to look into making specific adjustments, so that I could be better included, but they didn't want to know, and I didn't have the proactive assertiveness to push them any further. That's when I finally took the decision to quit, having dreamed of it for decades.

I'm not saying that the world of work does nothing but suck. There was a lot of good there, but the bad outweighed it many times over for me. I needed to be independent, I needed the right to control my own environment, because my employers weren't dependable and I couldn't trust them to consistently give me the environment I needed.