Autism for beginners

basic info all in one place

Somewhere around eight years ago I began to suspect I was likely autistic. I had learned about autism when television began discussing it on daytime talk shows my mother was watching back in the late 1960s and the 1970s. I was born in 1951.

I thought I knew what autism was and that autism did not apply to me. (In those years only the worst struggles of autism were recognized).

By 1980 when autism was being added to the DSM I was fully adult, recently divorced and getting long overdue therapy to help myself after a lifetime of emotional pain and bad decisions. Getting therapy was the single best thing I ever did for myself.

Flash forward to 35 years later. I was married with 2 adult children, I had worked with autistic people, one of my best friends had a child with autism who was always in and out of the house with the rest of our kids, In my last job I had worked among autistic kids in a group residential/therapy home 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. I retired after over 50 years of struggles with keeping jobs, being bullied in every one of them. I still thought I understood autism.

Then in 2012 0r 2013 :
I was watching a TV documentary with my adult daughter one evening ( something I never do on my own but she finds this activity companionable). The program was about autistic kids in high school in Great Britain. I began weeping, shaking and sobbing and saying
“it was like that, I was like that” repeatedly.
Understand I almost never cry! It was soul shaking and totally unexpected.

Daughter consoled me and said “maybe you are autistic, too, maybe you should check it out”.
************

I began to think that idea over but it was probably a year or two later when I began to actively search out information about adult autism. There was little information online or available in books, almost everything was aimed at parents with autistic kids. There were all sorts of claims about autism causes, cures, therapy, etc. and lots of mystic, magical thinking too. So confusing to sort it all out! I am a voracious reader and spent hours each day trying to learn all I could for better understanding. Today I still have a strong, fixed interest in autism and continue to search for new information daily.

I did find a couple of blogs and a couple of books but it was so very frustrating trying to get basic information as it related to adults, particularly to older adults, and as I became more certain I must be autistic, I decided it would be useful to others to find the relief I was finding by my self discovery. I am an information seeker and information sharer by nature.

I began to write a blog about my autism journey, my struggles to find diagnosis, to find self understanding, to find information and to learn more about autism itself.

I wanted to present as much basic information as I could in one place so that others struggling to find information and maybe awkward with doing searches or reading scientific studies, etc could get explanations and be assured that they were getting reliable information without being led down the multiple paths to “woo- woo” over unscientific understanding, miracle cures, speculation without documentation, fake therapies and so much more.

About 6 years ago I began this blog.
If you have read this far, please forgive me and understand I know very little about setting up a website, even making a simple blog. I know page numbers or an index would be a great help!

To read these pages in context and in order of posting, you must go to the bottom and read backwards. ( its a pain, I know, but I don’t know how to fix it!) I am not tech savvy, don’t have much $$ to invest, I am not making a profit or trying for one, I don’t ask for donations , I am not seeking “likes” for money or self gratification.
I am simply offering a story about what I have been discovering in my old age ( I am 73 as I type this on my old fashioned desktop keyboard). I hope it serves to provide basic information in one place and to encourage those elders who are suddenly suspecting they might be autistic and want to learn more. Diagnosis has been life changing!



I hope you find what you need. If not, let me know and I’ll try to find info about it and write another blog. I am happy to email with readers. My sensory processing differences do not let me do texting, phone calls, messaging, or other “real time” conversations effectively.

What you see here can all be documented and is known and proven scientific info.
I can give references if you want more information or to know I am not “making it up”.

I could have used some explanations and information very early in my life, but until I began to suspect my ASD in my mid 60s I didn’t have the least suspicion that my neurology was the answer responsible for so many painful “whys”, for so many failures where others thrived, so many awkward moments, so many misunderstandings.

What a relief to finally learn everything was not, after all, “all my fault” but that my different neurology was working behind the scenes in almost every painful incident of the past. Best of all I learned that there are others out there who can offer insights, explanations, information and understanding because they too have lived lives with ASD. Diagnosis can be life changing even in the very last parts of life.