Published on 12, July, 2020
I'm a married UK male in my early 60s, who has lived abroad for many years. Diagnosed Asperger's just two years ago. Although I figured it out for myself, two years before my diagnosis in the UK. I have a very limited number of friends, not so surprisingly. :-) It's a lonely existence. My partner does not wish to discuss the matter. You might say it is a taboo subject, locally.
I have previously had a couple of online mentors, and it was certainly helpful and interesting to both sides. One was a much younger European person living fairly locally. That was actually done by social networking chat, but our contact details were anonymous. It worked out fine, but all good things come to an end. I felt we had both said just about everything we could say, and to have taken it any further might have broken the anonymity and been a security risk to us both. The other mentor was a former medical researcher in his 90s, and I contacted him by email to cooperate with him over his contributions to a certain (rather esoteric) forum. The online cooperation was obviously quite beneficial to us both, But he eventually learned that I had been diagnosed; and he then admitted that his former colleagues had often opined that he might well be autistic himself, given his rather obsessive style. But he had never been inclined to take their opinions seriously, or take any action over it. Well, that communication lasted for some years, but it stopped a couple of months ago, and I eventually found his obituary. Again, that is life!
The thing is, when I have been in the UK lately, some relatives have been quite thoughtful on the matter, but I mostly get the impression that no one is really interested. And here it is the same. Even local medical professionals would prefer to ignore the issue completely. I would thus say that being a neuro-diverse expat senior here is politically incorrect.
Perhaps though it would just be so much easier to be a bit more active on this forum in future. And thus make more than one online friend at a time.
I strongly doubt that this forum is really a good opportunity to strike up an online friendship. Although I can see all the difficulties in distant mentorship, my previous experience of it was really quite productive. My last communication of this sort was with a former scientist, and our communication ranged quite far-and-wide. Certainly there were obsessions on both sides, but we had quite a few in common too. I found some of his opinions on current lifestyle quite reactionary, but later noted that many of those opinions were actually quite coherent in a scientific sense.
But send me a PM if you have an comments on this thread with which you prefer to be more direct. Be as brief as you like. I prefer a fairly high degree of anonymity, as the country I am living in does not suffer misfits gladly. Also I have people in the UK who either still know nothing about my condition (and who probably never will), or who mostly would rather not talk about it at all. I also have people here who refuse to discuss the matter at all.