Nostalgia, wanting to go back in time, yearning for a 'golden era'

my life was so much better when i was younger good tv shows, not having to worry about geting a job, the sort of protection that school offered and i would love to go back to my year 8 i had a great time then allthough i would not mind going back more

sighs i gues life just keeps moving fowared how i whish i could go back

The Major

I don't want to go back to an earleir point in my life even though I am not happy with aspects of my current situation. I want things to be better than they ever have been.

I do prefer aspects of it though. I think the adult world is hard. The expectations and dealings with people are hard. I always wanted my independence and I have really tried to achieve this but I realise I am only able to go so far. Telling people you are not struggling or that something doesn't bother you may work to a certain extent with the other people but it has anegative effect on me.

I long for safety and security from the world. A place I can go where I can be myself. The world seems so difficult and demanding. Navigating it seems so complex.

I always thought I could achieve what I wanted by myself but I am facing up to the facts that I really can't and actually find it hard to cope with the ever increasing demands from life.

I feel ss an adult I am left to my own actions and consequence. Unless I negatively impact on others I am left alone to struggle.

I am lucky to have a very supportive partner though but I hate to acknowledge that I am more rely on her increasingly.

.....Ok I am rambling on and going a bit off topic......

I'm not sure I'd go so far as to describe my childhood as a 'Golden Age' - there was still the same anxieties and other problems hanging around that are debilitating now, they just weren't so relentlessly overwhelming that they consumed my entire every day existence.

I feel as though all I am really doing these days is attempting to control myself and contain my symptoms through a 'balancing-act' of a variety of medications, all just so that I can 'fit-in' with 'normal' society, for no apparent reason.

I feel like they mostly basically just treat me like a freak anyway, and a burden, so sometimes I wonder what the point is in trying so hard just to 'tread water' and keep my head up... but it isn't as though I'm being given any alternative.

It does seem sad I don't really have a 'special interest'. I guess I struggle to muster the enthusiasm to find much interest in anything.

I do think it's worth noting though that in terms of 'conforming' - given that people are apparently neurologically different to us - it wouldn't necessarily be 'conforming' in terms of a conscious decision as the term might imply, simply behaving as feels natural to them - they can't help the way that their brains are wired any more than we can it seems.

They'd still be like that even if everybody else around them was different, probably...

I'm not sure what people mean about being emotionally juvenile - if you go to the shop and they're out of stock of the exact thing you wanted, do you throw a tantrum and start screaming, for example?

I sometimes feel like the normal 'model' of 'grown-up' emotional behaviour is to be very messy and basically blurt everything out - complex 'adult' situations such as divorces and parenting issues are genuinelly blurry, complicated and full of grey areas... that people need to lay everything out and deal with deep ambivalence and layered emotion... and so it is seen as 'childish' to be very sparse, cut-down and straight-forward - even though such behaviour is actually 'better' it can definitely be argued.

If you keep your life 'simple' - as, actually, being excluded from society facilitates - this would seem to be a natural result: no complications from emotional messiness of relationships.

Indeed, there seems to be a general idea around that childhood is wonderful and being 'child-like' is something to aspire to.

I know I have had extremely horrible situations in counselling in the past, for example, with counsellors insisting that I must be very angry at people in my life due to traumatic incidents and other emotional mishaps from the past, whereas I genuinely didn't feel that way.

They seemed to be black-mailing me into blurting all sorts of horrible nastiness about these people and incidents, assuming that this would be the best and only way to process such feelings, and not verbalising them in this form was unhealthy.

It felt horrible, like having my arm twisted into being abusive, it was sickening, and given the counselling relationship - of my seeking advice and assistance from somebody, broadly put, in a 'superior' position, it was confusing, counter-productive and deeply unhelpful to say the least.

They very physical sense of queasiness induced by such situations was the amongst the kind of experiences which made me wonder if I might be autistic.

Hope said:

I am sad that my life is no longer 'free' in the real sense; free from fear.

 I am intellectually an 80 year old, but emotionally still a 10 year old. I just cannot grow up, and neither do I want to.

I resent adult seriousness, change, and responsibility. I want to feel secure, with readily available meaning bequeathed by others.

I lack structure, meaning, and I feel lost. 

Using those four sentances I can sum up my life right now. I hate conformity and I'm sorrounded by conformist's. I hate the fact there is very little in terms of new utopias to discover.

Lack of structure is really frustrating. I'm hitting the gym regular, but that only a few hours a week. I crave for an intellectual obsession I can sink my teeth into. I think the uni thing that would satisfy my need's would be to do a MA/MSc or PhD, but I'm in a mindset so negative this isn't remotely achievable (+ I wans't born with a silver spoon).

Again I can empathise with some point's, but unfortunately have no sollutions.

It is indeed the lack of direction  that is most frustrating, and the fact that there is not much to work towards, other than trying to combat my OCD. When I was younger, I at least had special interests that kept me occupied: child development and the actress Kate Winslet. I think the former enabled me to relive childhood: I collected the toys in parenting magazines and listened to nursery rhymes well into my teens.  Winslet was a mother figure and surrogate friend: I watched all of her films repeatedly and thought about her all the time. Every day I read her interviews and looked at her pictures, particularly the ones of her child.

I don't have any special interests right now, and I see this as a bad thing. I think that people on the spectrum often use their interests as a shield, protecting them from the world and from anxiety. Without strong interests, other, more negative obsessions have filled the gap along with the all pervasive anxiety.

I can't believe two people have used the same word I use all the time SAFE.

I don't feel safe. I am anxious all day every day. In my case everything except a few years when I was at Uni was grim. I am now back to where I was at 10 years old, feeling totally wretched, back to meltdowns and shutdowns, and this time without the hope that things will get better when I "grow up". There is just no way out of this endless round of anxiety and fear.

Recently I have been trying to reply to the parents who are constantly posting on here about their very young children, they feel overwhelmed, but they don't get how it will be for their child when they are older. Even when they are supportive now (my parents weren't which is why I don't have a golden age of childhood), the future for people with ASD as adults is constant anxiety.

There seems to be no support, treatment or even understanding of this constant fear. I feel like there is nothing for the future, and the constant emphasis by Autism professionals on small children means adults living with all this anxiety and fear are alone. I realise that severely autistic people have many more problems and need much more support, but honestly can't someone represent the reality for high functioning adults?

I also feel like a small child, but because I have degrees, can talk etc. I am expected to be like any other adult. But like you Hope I feel totally lost. It will only get worse as I age, because people are less forgiving of childlike behaviours the older the person is, and this aspect of ASDs is not referred to much in any literature.

It is nice to at-least find somebody who seems to understand and feel the same it appears.

Much of my unusual behaviour involves a mixture of trying to get back to the past sense of safety - through ordering my environment - reliving memories of a more secure time, and attempting to create a similar sense around me now: while feeling relentlessly violated by the intrusive behaviour of those around me.

I make lists of things I used to enjoy - such as computer-games, for example: attempting to comprehensively catalogue these according to categories such as owned, borrowed/played-at-a-friends-house, or 'was aware of' (such as having seen a review in a magazine)...

Then I'll move from this to use these points of memory as a spring-board trying to pin-down points of my childhood: what year I would've been at school, for example, what house I would've been living in at that time and so-on - when I would have played that game.

It's an attempt to impose the sort of structured environment that makes me feel comfortable, but it is a frustration derived from feeling out of control in the current moment I am sure.

I am depressed now, but I have been living with my parents, out of work for 5 years, and the stress having got to the point where it's so severe I can't leave the house without support - so that doesn't surprise me.

I do find it quite insulting however - given that it is now scientific demonstrable that our neurology is different - that we're supposed to simply accept notions that we're 'childish' or behaving 'inappropriately', forced to conform to uncomfortable behaviour in-spite of the fact that it is gruelling for us.

There is such an implicit arrogance - like the world was perfect, full of people with flawless communication skills who made the ideal society, before autistics came along and ruined everything with their abnormal habits.

This is not the case, in my opinion, and it's somewhat ironic people who apparently feel it appropriate to congratulate themselves on their social skills seem to be struggling so much to accomodate a vulnerable minority group amongst them.

God yes Hope.

It all went wrong in the teens when people started going out together, and casual social groups became the dominant structure among my peers, instead of school.

I struggled to stay involved, and did ok sometimes but really all that did was make my crippling anxiety even worse, and I had a deep sense of deprivation, like there was always something going on that I was missing out on - which I think that there was, basically.

It is hard not to feel absorbed by thoughts of a time when life was simply fundamentally qualatively better and to have it overshadow whatever positives might be going on currently.

I try not to be pessimistic but it's just so hard not to resent those around me I find - but I hate so much to be bitter.

And yes, the relentlessly anxiety drives me out of my mind.