Aspies DX'ed late in life...

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help me out with something;

do you feel that since you were diagnosed late in life, you might feel maybe a little bit more NT than people who were caught earlier in life?

I'm trying to find an answer to why with a man with Asperger's who was DX'ed in his mid thirties, why am I so open with people? Why do I kid around so much and goof off a lot?

If you were to meet me, you'd hardly know I have AS other than the fact that I don't make a lot of eye contact and I'd be reluctant to meet you for fear of making an ass of myself or just would rather just be by myself or something.

Are there degrees to AS or something like a Kinsey scale?

I'm not questioning my diagnosis or anything. I know I have it. When my wife meets up with her friends or coworkers at the store whom I've never net before and they're talking and I've yet to be introduced, I won't introduce myself and I'll just kinda wander away.

Could also be too that the veil of anonymity that the internet provides when I get all up in people's bizzizle here. You know how I can be a snot sometimes? Good thing you're not my next-door neighbor most days, huh? Actually, that might be kinda cool!

I was diagnosed at 37 and I'm 40 now. I've never fit in with NT's. My diagnosis was a huge revelation that explained my entire life. There ARE degrees of AS, but a professional would have to tell you where you fit on the scale.

My own AS is not mild. It is definitely moderate and might be severe. I'm still waiting for my full "adaptive functioning" report to come back. It was just done on Tuesday. That's the best method to find out where you are as far as "degree of AS" is to get a test like that done.

My AS has impaired my IQ by over 60 points, as far as from what I know and what I can translate into daily living. Understanding my AS has gone a long way towards helping me accept and have compassion for the way I am.

Then again, I've often been described as charming and sweet. People tend to like me now, later in life. They didn't at all when I grew up with no friends. I can "pass" for NT until you get to know me through an extended conversation and then you realize I am not like the others. I end up not making friends with them usually.

It doesn't have to be obvious to other people for it to be a severe impairment. However, I also find my AS to be a great gift. It's easier for me to think for myself, rather than follow the crowd, and it's also easier to be creative and conscientious with details.

I agree, even though I was dx'ed 10-15 years earlier than you.
But I do feel more NT because all my life I have been trying to correct my oddness.
I have learned what is appropriate and what is not when socialising with other people.
When I was young I would interrupt, constantly say inappropriate things and even make animal noises.
Now I wait my turn, know what I should and shouldn't say and all the noises I make are quite human.
I still have a few problems with socialising though.

I was diagnosed at 19.

Nobody can say what would have been. As it is, I'm pretty obviously autistic; I can't keep a job very long; and I have some relatively significant impairment from autism.

However, I was deliberately left undiagnosed. It would have been obvious to a professional when I was young, except that my mother wouldn't take me to see one. Had I been born in the late 1990s or after, it would have been too obvious for a pediatrician to miss; as it was, I was labeled either intelligent or bratty or both. In the early 1980s there wasn't too much awareness of autism in people who learned to talk on time.

So if I'd been born today, and gone to even a year of public school, I would've gotten a diagnosis pretty much automatically.

Whether going undiagnosed helped or hurt is anybody's guess. I got a chance to grow up unhampered by having my actions called "symptoms" and my existence pathologized; but I also grew up being called lazy and immature, which might be about as bad.

I might have been mistreated either way. I certainly would've been born with the same vulnerability towards depression, though whether it would've expressed itself if I had known I wasn't actually worthless, lazy, and immature is anybody's guess.

With a diagnosis I might have been put in a group home or a "home for trouble teens"; my parents were considering it, as it was, and a diagnosis might have been the extra that let them excuse something like that to themselves.

I might also have lost the joy of the things that autism makes so wonderful to me--some sensory experiences, my special interests, the way I learn--if they'd been called symptoms and I'd been told they were bad.

I've spent a few years breaking out of the idea that I'm worthless and can't do anything and that anything I fail at is my fault. I might've spent the same few years breaking out of the effects of institutionalization or a childhood spent as a "victim of autism".

I don't know how things could have been different. My mom immediately identified me as autistic when the definition was first expanded to include those without speech delays; she's an OT and has worked with autistic children before; but because she doesn't believe Asperger's is real, or doesn't believe it's a disability (she switches between the two) she never told me.

I don't know how things could have changed if I had known, and if she had believed it was real. I do know it's better to know than not; it's just that in the real world, a diagnosis can be a problem because of the way people treat you, and it isn't always offset by you knowing more about yourself. Besides, like with me, if they're going to treat you badly, they'll just decide to do it because you're a brat rather than because you're a ret*d.

What a really interesting story. I think I had read parts of it before but I never read such a succinct description of your experience.

In some respects it sounds like we have very similar experiences.

As far as I know nobody really tried to diagnose me with anything until I was around 12 - today it would probably be different but the early 1990s were different enough that nobody was asking questions if you were a good academic performer and didn't harm other kids. (At least, I don't think anyone was asking questions.) Eventually as I got older I was abused enough by the other kids for being "different" that I got too anxious to go to school, and when I started missing school, I began having contact with psychologists etc. for the first time.

I know one attempted me at, I guess, 14 at the latest but for one reason or another she was tentative enough to ask my mother for additional input which scuttled the idea. Someone else did diagnose me - I don't know when, I saw him for years - but didn't say anything because he thought knowing would be useless or even bad for me. So I didn't find out until I was 20 that I had been diagnosed at least twice before but nobody told me about it.

My parents went to great lengths to make sure I was never diagnosed "on paper" with anything or classified as disabled or needing special education or anything like that, and they succeeded. If they hadn't I know things would have been very different but I don't know how, or whether they would be better or worse or just different.

You sound like me digger, it took me 3 years to accept that I wasn't just 'unusual'. I do meet the criteria, but a lot of the time, I seem so normal...

no -to the OP - I cannot say that is my experience whatsoever. And if I felt that "normal" i would not be spending most of my time alone painting and/or on WP. As my rather normal younger sister said on hearing i was finaly diagnosed., "oh well, mill, we've all always known there was something eccentric and not quite the same about you."

today was my "social" day - an NA meeting where each person takes turns in talking so there is little "to and fro" of social conversation, followed by the get together of a few people at an outdoor cafe in the main street of my country town. As is often the case, i left early because i could not hook into a single-tracked discussion with one person. too much cross-talk and overwhelm, so i ate my food with chilli sauce and came home early. (after 30 minutes.) i get annoyed and very upset internally because i cannot keep up with all the social chit chat.

I've always known there was something distinctly different about me, and i have always felt an incredible gulf between myself and other people.

there has never been anything vaguely normal about my life or how I interact.
BUt what is good is that i live in a region of australia renowned for its eccentrics and a big alternative arts community.


one other thing:
If we throw everything under thecategory of the BIG A - the question regarding degrees of autism becomes fairly clear.
i am tending towards that as the only meaningful way to explain it all.

It's not a question of inferiority/superiority on the basis of 'normal' functioning or seeming normality, it's what life has dealt out to you that makes its own distinctions. I do get tired of the 'faux' victims here.

I never had any kind of dx until 40. I was obliged to support and house myself until that age, and it was exhausting and really, beyond my abilities. But not having the cocoon of an early dx, I had to force myself, no-one else was going to help me.

Outwardly most people would see that I seem to get on fine, and would even be considered "successful", as a software developer.

However, coming from the "Don't Cry Out Loud" school of social interaction, I don't talk to people about what goes on "behind the curtain". It has been my experience that most people really don't care and don't want to know. So they have no idea that a day at the office involves a steady stream of assorted sensory assaults, and that most hours of most days are spent either on the brink of overload or in anxious anticipation of eventual overload. I don't try to give meaning to the long pauses and blank stares that greet all too many of their questions, or to explain why interruptions are so infuriating - after recovering from the disorientation caused by the interfering stimulus in the first place. I don't attempt to describe why it takes a minimum of three hours in solitude to mentally decompress enough to even attempt any form of rest, or why on many nights the brain just can't sleep when the body wants to, resulting in yet another night of skin-crawling-from-inside restlessness.

Most people just meeting me work out straight away that there's something different about me - they can't help but notice even though they can't place it. Over time, they begin to detect those little annoying tendency many autistic people display and notice that I seem to zone out and withdraw quite often, and seem to tire at random times. They still don't see the tremendous amount of energy being expended to mask what is really going on inside just to appear normal enough to be granted passage into the working world.

Over the years it gets progressively harder to keep putting on the show. I had already withdrawn from the employed world once, for 6-1/2 years, in my late 20s to early 30s, living reclusively and surviving in self-employment, and did so again last June. Finally, I had to seriously get to the bottom of just what is up with me. I like to think that I try to keep things in perspective, but it became patently obvious that other people just didn't seem to have these same issues to this degree. All the other little things - not recognising people's faces, hating being touched, being seriously irritated by certain sounds, to name just a few - clearly affected me much more than those around me. So I looked into it. AS seemed to fit. After a few months, I went for a professional assessment. It was important for me to know that "my compass pointed north and my yardstick was three feet long".

My diagnosis was two months ago, at 45. It's too early to tell where I'll go from here.

To answer the thread's original question - the majority of us older spectroids, other than those with unmistakable, observable impairments (as would be evident for most LFAs, for example), really had no viable choice but to "act normal" and try to get by. We may therefore give the illusion of being "more NT". However, this is simply the result of better developed adaptive behaviour through necessity. Had more of us had options to live "more authentically" without putting our very survival in jeopardy, I'm quite sure a good number of us would have done so, and consequently would have less developed adaptive mechanisims and would likely not appear so "NTish". Which way is better? Both, neither, haven't got a clue - ask me again in a few months' or a few years' time, if I'm still treading these grounds then.

Does 25 count? Retrospectively, I would have easily met the DSM-III for Early-Infantile Autism, but my ma is cool. She didn't see that there was anything wrong with not talking until I was 4 1/2--I walked really early, so she thought that certain skills would develop a little differently due to such. A walker rather than a talker was her "label" for me. Didn't interact with anyone except clinging to her and playing by myself; what's wrong with that? I'd line things/toys up in order of size and also shape; she thought that was quite smart (my sister didn't do this). I could easily put square blocks in square holes. Tantrums at change and illness, which were something that bothered her (they were quite severe), but this wasn't too frequent. Started talking, reversed pronouns, poor grammatical structure, etcetera; had speech therapy for a year, which worked wonders. Started preschool; didn't listen to teacher, seen as "bad child" due to doing my own thing; nothing special there. Started allowing peers to interact with me (i.e., I wouldn't ignore them). Started school; did ok in everything but English in the early years, couldn't read/write, which took awhile to correct. Had an IQ test, told that I had a "high IQ", and that they have no idea why I can't read/write. Can't really remember any of this prior. When I "woke up", which was around the time I could read/write, I improved greatly in regards to academic and social functioning; I think I even went to the "active but odd" level in grades 4, 5 and 6--which means that I just talked about what I liked to my friends spontaneously, rather than just sitting around and waiting for questions.

Social and academic functioning "regressed" around the age of 13 to 15; started becoming "aloof" again (like I was when 4), schoolwork dropped from good to bad. Started noticing sensory symptoms and anxiety at this time, but I didn't actually know what they were. Started noticing people beside myself, and they scared me. Stopped talking for the most part. Skipped classes often. Left in year 11.

I think the only difference being diagnosed early is that I'd have a high-school diploma, which doesn't equate to much nowadays.

My social ability has been mediated by my innate level of severity, rather than anything externally. I had a good period for several years ("good" equating to typical AS), with "bad" periods when young and older.

My mother taught me what's appropriate to say and what's not.

I wasn't diagnosed until I was 58 but I'm very far from being an NT. My autisim however permitted me to become a very good actor and mimic so I can pass for normal when I have to. Kind of like an alien who has the appearance of a human during the day and then reverts back into a creature at night. It actually seems perfectly normal to me.

Well, back in high school--which was before I was diagnosed--my then-best friend did help me learn some basic social skills, which gives me some ability to socialize with others, albeit a lot which won't ever entirely change. It's because of him I also learned how everybody truly views me, and I'm actually quite thankful for that, cause it helped me no longer care, and just do what I'm gonna do, regardless of what others think. The way I see it, I'm probably never gonna be appreciated as I would like to be, and it's just something I accept. I just stop caring what others think, and do my own thing. It actually helps me to be who I am, even more. Cause many of my ideas and the beliefs I live by are ultra-taboo by society's standards...and I think that it's so idiotic, that I just stop caring.

I'll tell people what I think, and I'll throw in the suggestion that I'm more than aware what they think, whether or not they'll admit it. Does that scare the crap out of them? Like I'm even gonna question it.....but y'know what? Let it. Oh no...they don't like me? Eh, they never did anyway, nor would they, so how would it change anything, honestly?

To quote Jack Nicholson, I believe in "A Few Good Men"..."you can't handle the truth!! !! !! !! !"

I was diagnosed when I was 43 and I am only realising the full weight of it now 3 years on. I don't think I feel NT or Aspie - it would be true to say I hav spent a life time feeling anxious and not rlating well to people. I wake up some mornings thinking there is really nothing that different about me. I am usually wrong but it is a very subtle line. I have AS so I really have no idea how people feel unless they tell me. So how would I know



I am very self-confident and have a very particular sense of humour. I am very open with people, partly because it is a 'literal' way of communicating. I think you should be careful not to collapse your personailty into your disorder. I don't think being open and goofing off are symptoms of AS so some people will, some people won't do that.




I make a lot of eye contact. Sometimes too muh especially if I am trying not to look at your tits if you are a woman. Again I don't recall eye contact being part of the diagnosis I can pass for NT most of the time but it takes a lot of effort.



If there are I would love to know where I am on the scale. I think I am almost normal but again what would I know I had no idea what made me different and that is what makes getting a diagnosis difficult.


Try licking the person she is talking to on the face, that usually works.



Put the kettle on, I'm coming round for a cup of tea and a biscuit.

To answer the original question, no, adapting doesn't make you more NT, but only changes behaviours and understanding.

Melissa17, what you describe is exactly what I went through as a very "successful" and excellent teacher. The effort of dealing with all that intensity was exhausting.

TheDoctor82, that's really lucky you had a friend teach you about socializing and what other people think. If only we all had this early, I think it would be helpful. I always wanted this and sort of tried to ask for it but of course I really didn't know what to ask for because I didn't have it. Kinda like an animal clawing at a window, trying to get to what's behind it.

I'm really interested to hear how others deal with this late realization, because I am finding my life is a bit like a knitting project where the needles and pattern have been lost. Have to unravel some and start up differently and wondering how to make this thing wearable as it's clear the original pattern was unworkable. Kind of a mess, and I don't like messes. I don't actually knit, either, and so I'm stuck with this bizarre project, so to speak!

Hi-

I as DXed very late, too.

My life was hell.

I go back and forth. If I had known, I would have been left to my "PRISON" as Autism Speak calls it, but it was my safe place.

I was disabled at 15 by this but they had down everything you can imagine and then some. Have you ever head of things as obscure as Infantile PD? Well, they had me as that and totally missed the AUT! Duh.

I was practically mute in socail siutations, enjoyed my self in my head, non sexual, non social.

Got into treatment inappropriate to AUT. TOld me the way out was to socialize, have sex, do drugs- a therapist was so happy when I told her I smoked pot. Even though it almost made me psychotic because of sense issues.


If I had proper care it would be: "Your daughter is ill . She has Autism. She will need care for life." Not "YOu daughter is a spoiled b***h and needs to be punished and beaten and forced to be normal.'

My parents told them to f off and were very good to me though they had no idea what was going on.


Now I am a mess of a weirdo. I look 27 though I am late thrities. I made weird faces in solcail settings and say weird things. I go overboard on my obsessions and can't be intimate and try to please people and act normal.

It's hell.

Yes, I wish I was DXed earlier. I wold have lost nothing because I would have known that my obsessions were good and I never had to be social. Just my take on things. Us Late DXers have such stories! Worth a book.


THe should study us instead of kids because we can verbalize what we went thorugh.

You could start by reading my book (first two chapters are free) http://logicofattraction.com for clues, or my blog http://blog.aspergineering.com

Best

Mark