Is there any point in getting a middle-age diagnosis

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I'm 44, strongly suspect I fall into aspie/autism spectrum somewhere. I'm not getting better as I age, rather, I'm getting more practiced at certain things, like looking into the eyes of clients while I talk to them, but I think I'm also getting more emotionally fragile -- it's as if the things I'm doing to get by are just making me edgier. Honestly, I feel like I'm on the brink of totally falling apart, but I've felt that way forever too and it hasn't happened yet. I'm just fed up with feeling like that.

If I get a diagnosis -- are there any realistic treatments that will help me cope? If "yes" what are they?

Secondly, I can't help but wonder if I even fit in this category at all (maybe I'm just grasping at anything for an explanation) and if I don't, it would obviously make testing a real waste. Naturally I've taken some online tests, but honestly, I feel skeptical of online tests because so often the questions are not at all clear (like: "do you find it easy to play imagination games with children" or something similar -- well, I don't like kids or being around them under any circumstance (I'm intentionally childfree, so no, I'm not ignoring anyone), and thus, I have no experience at all with this question and my answer can't be valid in any direction).

Anyway, here's a list of things I've noticed about myself that have not changed during the course of my entire life which I think are indicative, but maybe not -- I'm no expert. If these are unrelated however, or there are contradictory characteristics, I'm thinking testing would be a waste and I'd appreciate feedback from people who have a better understanding of the condition than I do:

• I really dislike being touched or having my personal space invaded unless I invite it. My wife hates this, and it is a frequent source of conflict. For example she like to touch me with her foot or arm while sleeping. To me it is physically painful after a few moments, at which point I might say "your side", and then push the offending appendage away.
• I don't like bright light and hate light toward the blue end of the spectrum. If I'm forced to walk in the bright sun, I'll often reverse blink, i.e., keep my eyes closed but briefly blink them open every four or five steps to avoid obstacles.
• Very sensitive to and easily bothered by sound, especially high and low frequencies. High frequencies are painful and low frequencies are so distracting as to be anxiety provoking.
• Eye contact is extremely uncomfortable. I much prefer to close my eyes when talking to people, or look somewhere else.
• I hate sand or anything sandy feeling or sandy sounding. I love going to the beach, providing it is a rocky or gravel beach. A huge expanse of sand though -- I wouldn't ever go there. Luckily, the Pacific NW provides plenty of rocky/gravely beaches under clouded skies.
• Handwriting that never improved past 5th grade level.
• Clumsy in a whole body fashion (walking into stuff), but capable of great levels of fine motor skills in certain activities (handwriting not being one).
• I'm very sensitive to negative emotions, perhaps even seeing them when they aren't there. In any emotional situation, my first instinct to so go somewhere else immediately and hide.
• I fear and avoid interpersonal discussions wherein my feelings will likely be hurt or my wishes thwarted and especially try to avoid conflict. However, this allows issues to build up and eventually, I sort of lose it, meaning either I'm going to be yelling, or hiding out totally.
• Powerful empathy, extends even to things. One of my early memories is folding towels and making sure I'd touch each towel an equal amount so that none would feel cheated. Maybe it's a just a kid thing, but it is very easy for me to feel sad for others, which is why I tend to think of crying by another person in an interpersonal conversation as emotional manipulation. Once the tears start, I can't do anything but try to make them stop.
• Engage in projects very deeply, even obsessively, but then abandon them at a certain level of understanding, and find something new. Once I've learned something to a certain degree, I lose interest. But when starting, I'll focus vast amounts of time and money on it. When I'm done, I don't regret spending the time or money even though I've moved on because the experience felt worth it.
• Lousy financial planning. I've spent embarrassingly large sums on various projects, yet I live simply (in an apartment for example). Other people buy houses and invest for retirement. I don't even care -- I just want to do what I want to do.
• Highly focused. I can monotask on something to the point of forgetting to eat, not sleeping, etc. Multitasking makes me feel anxious and frenetic.
• Every friendship I have had has been context based. If I stop participating in a particular context, I tend to make no contact with the people I befriended within that context. This doesn't mean I don't like those people in any way -- just that I have no reason to contact them. I always categorize my friends by the context, e.g., boat-friend, work-friend, pottery-friend, etc. etc.
• Very comfortable when alone. I love being alone. I'm never bored and can always find something interesting to do. At the same time, I crave the charge from being in a group focused on an activity, or even with a group of people interested in an activity, but just being social. However, I loathe aimless gatherings with random people. I'd rather clean sewers.
• Completely and utterly disorganized. I'm a lawyer and I've built deep systems (physical, delagative, and digital (including writing my own custom computer programs in addition to using prepackaged stuff)) to prevent missing any deadlines, appointments, etc. at work. In my personal life however, I'm a total wreck. I've spent at least 2 of my 44 years just looking for my keys and wallet. I'm also a pig.
• I fall into routines that are comfortable (for example, I once at the same menu item at the same restaurant for two years straight -- I only stopped when the owner sold out. Even though the menu has not changed, I went back only once after the sale and then never returned -- it just wasn't the same environment without the original owner, though the taste and the menu item were identical).
• Ironically, I value new experiences immensely and actively seek new projects when ones I've come to understand to a certain degree start to feel old.
• I daydream an excessive amount. Usually I build up a complicated story in which I'm doing or learning something, and then go there. I'll work the same story for years and then suddenly, move on and build a new one.
• I worry obsessively about certain things. For example, when I'm in a project trying to figure out how to do something, I think of all the ways things can go wrong in various strategies for accomplishing a particular facet of the project.
• I avoid checking my personal mail because it seems only bad things come in the mail. I just have all my bills autodebit so I can basically check my mailbox once per week and then dump it all in the shred box. I open less than 10% of my mail. I hate email but it is tied to work so I can't avoid it, though I will procrastinate by doing other work.
• More often than not, I watch movies or TV shows I've already seen and know that I like. I don't feel like wasting time on something I might not like. Same is true with books.
• When I feel overwhelmed, I like to read the comfortable parts of familiar books -- like the first chapters of the LOTR before Frodo etc. head out for Bree, or the time spent in Rivendale.
• Audiobooks are like crack cocaine/LSD/heroin. But I can only listen while my hands are doing something or I'm driving, else I fall straight to sleep.

Yes it is so totally worth it.

http://www.iancommunity.org/cs/articles ... r_syndrome

You can crumble in the end from all the pretence and trying to live up to something you can never be, trust me.

Many of the things you have said I can understand totally as I am close in age and was diagnosed about 3 years ago-I do go to therapy but we are tryting to get through years of hurt that I have been through-I also avoid eye contact and a few of the other things you have said hit very close to home.

I share a lot of those to some degree. I rarely open my mail, either. When I see a credit card bill come in, instead of opening the envelope, I just go on the computer and pay it on-line. I have a year's worth of mail siting in paper bags in the back seat of my car. I forget which year it was, but they've been there for two or three years.

I daydream all the time, but it is usually about being somewhere and/or doing something. For example sitting in a small boat in the middle of the lake fishing. Or on a sailboat just going from one point to another.

As for movies, my preference is for movies that are in places I would like to go or environments in which I would enjoy being. To a degree, I watch a great many movies like they are a travel show rather than a story.

I generally only pay attention to a select few tv series. It is very difficult for me to find other tv series at all interesting. I've never even heard of the vast majority of tv series that have been on over the last forty years.

"Better late than never."

I was diagnosed 5 months ago aged 44. I has passed the point you describe now and had to quit my job and as a result lost my wife and home. I figured no matter what the answer was I had to know. Saw a Psych who suggested I should ask my GP to get me tested. He did, one of the guys who diagnosed me said ASD was "oozing out of me" although I present very NT and socially able (I can act it well).
I would say that the thing to bear in mind is that getting a diagnosis doesn't offer any "benefits" as such at our age. Nobody will come and give you pills and make it go away. What will happen, if you are exposed to any sort of decent post-diagnostic care, is that you will gain an understanding of where you need to make allowances for yourself so you can function without undue suffering. The truth may hurt though. I am having difficulty facing up to the fact that I am much more vulnerable than I thought I was. I want to work but I need (not optional any more - one breakdown too many) to take time out quite regularly and acknowledge the stuff I suck at. Organising myself, for example. I realised that all my life I have "employed" the services of women to take care of lots of stuff for me (caring what clothes I wore, buying them, cleaning, taking care of household budgets etc, etc, etc....) These women (after my mother) were wives or girlfriends - I did the money earning, they did almost everything else. I still do that now - I am fortunate enough to appear socially adept enough and I guess I am not too ugly so that I can "manage" some women (that I have/am dating) to do some of that stuff for me.
Bottom line is this. If you keep trying to shove a square peg in a round hole the peg will eventually break. If you are suffering - go find out what is hurting you. If you believe you can continue to cope (deep down), don't get a diagnosis because you won't need one.

I didn't know I had aspergers until I was 41. Before that. I'd never heard of the word "aspergers" let alone know I had it. It wasn't until I got lost in Seattle and ran into a psychiatrist at a Starbucks that finally told me what was really going on. now that I know what I have. It's been both good news and bad news. The bad news is that there is no cure for it. Its kinda depressing knowing that there is no pill you can take to make it go away. The good news is that it give me some resolve in life. It's nice to know that the horse is dead so I can stop beating it.

If thats Aspergers, thats me.
Save a couple at the end of the list ALL those symptoms plus some are me.

My GF, a psych nurse, has suggested on a number of occasions that I am. After looking into it more I'm inclined to agree. I'm not sure what an "official" diagnosis would achieve for me.

I'd be interested in how you go with your exploration.

I think it sounds like you have it. At least, you have a lot of things that point strongly to it and I think that getting a professional opinion would be good for you if only to give you the peace of mind of knowing for sure.

I can really relate to some of the things you mention, and oddly enough, this is the first time I've seen someone else mention them.

I also find it difficult to look at light on the blue end of the spectrum, the indigo (dark blue) LSD especially. I got very annoyed that Christmas lights this year were all about blue LSDs! That's not a comforting sight.. I can't really "see" the lights, they're like something from another dimension that's not really coming through, it makes me feel sort of nauseous to look at them...

Powerful empathy extending even to objects. YES. I had that very, very strongly as a kid to the point where I felt bad for throwing away garbage, like candy wrappers, so I would hide them under my bed for months and months until my mom discovered them. I would cry if someone made a comment like "your food will be sad if you don't eat it", or something along those lines. I felt sad about toys I didn't play with as much, or clothes I didn't wear as much. (Come to think of it, I think I started my clothing system on the pretext of wanting to wear all my clothing equally). I felt sad for throwing away any random objects. The problem is that, aesthetically, I'm the opposite of a hoarder, so I eventually got over it and went all minimalist. I still get the odd pang of empathy for an object though. I used to wonder why I felt more strongly about objects than people.. for instance, I'd be tearfully sad if I had to throw away a pair of chipped mugs, but not care if I heard that an acquaintance had died. It's like it's easier to project emotion onto objects. However, I do get strong bursts of empathy for people at random times too.. especially when I understand that they were sad.

Friendships being context-based, yes. Enjoying being alone, not being bored, yes. Craving being around people if everyone is there for a common activity, yes. Disorganized and coping by creating complex systems - absolutely.

I also daydream extensively about the same thing for a long time before eventually moving to a new story.

I never open my mail until it builds up too much and then I open it all at once.

I totally get not wanting to waste your time on new shows or movies that might be bad when you already know there are really good ones that you can't go wrong with.

I also used to read and re-read familiar favorite parts of books when feeling overwhelmed! I like the first scene of LOTR before Frodo leaves too (but in the movie). For me, I read just the first quarter of To Kill a Mockingbird innumerable times, and certain parts of the Harry Potter series. When I was aged 13-14 I used to read Obasan by Joy Kogawa over and over.

I can relate to all this and more.

I'm 41 and only figured out I had Aspergers two years ago. I thought about getting an official diagnosis but then thought what's the use? Spend money for them to tell me what I already know and then I'll have a "pre-existing" condition to give cause for rejection from insurance companies. I might feel different if people weren't so ignorant about it, even that Baron-Cohen guy who's supposed to be an expert, has got us wrong and harmed people's impression of those with Aspergers.

I think it depends on the reasons for getting an official diagnosis.

I just found out over the weekend that I likely have it. I'm 33, have a daughter, a wife, just lost a house, have a failing job and a entrepeneurship that just isn't going forward. I identify with a lot of your statements, a lot of which I had never considered before.

I've made it 33 years, and about two years ago, things started falling apart...and the more stressed I become, the more I am seeing AS behaviors as opposed to NT. Worse is that I'm starting to see that most of my NT trends are just trained behaviors. I've wondered for years why my dreams never have faces, and just now I figure out it's because I don't look at faces, or if I do, I look right through faces when I talk to people.

I'm not in a hurry to get a diagnosis, I'm hoping that just recognizing that I likely have it is enough to help put the pieces back together again. I've only been in therapy for a year, and expect to be in it much longer.

What I can't get over is how devastating the requirement for patience is, and this round of intense highly focused interest research is the worst...because it's everything there is to know about the disorder that I have...but I'm not finding the answer I need, and that's how to make myself ok. It's killing me to discover that that answer isn't written down somewhere, that there isn't a step by step instruction manual for me to hold on to while I push forward, providing comfort if I were to need to read it.

Good Luck!

Thanks to everyone for the responses. I have decided to get evaluated, not because I think the evaluation will be useful in and of itself, but the ancillary effects may be worthwhile. Specifically, my wife recently said to me with respect to not liking being touched, that if it was rooted in some condition that she would not feel like I hate her, because apparently, that is how she interprets it when I say "my side" or I sleep on the couch.

I suppose though, if it is shown I do not have this condition, that could just make everything worse because that leaves only the "I hate her" explanation in her mind, though for me, nothing will have changed. I still hate being touched without specifically inviting it and that has nothing to do with the other person.