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

Hope

I have touched on this topic before, but it is a recurring 'obsession' of mine. My life WAS better in the past, objectively better. When I tell people this, they always contradict me, trying to tell me that my life has barely started (I am 25), that my life is good now - I have support, my own flat, and even a part-time job. But no, my life pales into insignificance when compared to my life before the age of about 15. The pre-lapsarian era, before my fall into a black hole of fear/uncertainty/constant anxiety and crippling OCD. I am not depressed; I actually get pleasure from life, but I am sad that my life is no longer 'free' in the real sense; free from fear. I have always been anxious, always had problems, but they used to be manageable, and they  were often other people's concern. 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. And I am anxious ALL the time. No-one has succeeded in removing my constant general anxiety, despite the fact they have helped my OCD and specific phobias.

Parents

  • 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.

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  • 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.

Children
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