Skill level?

If I could remember 10% of what I have learned over the years I would be happy.  I got into Mensa when I was a teenager and I pick things up easily but my trouble is staying focused.  I am so easily distracted that I have trouble keeping at learning something. 

I have a very interesting book by Temple Grandin called The Autistic Brain which looks at ASD from a scientific perspective and dives in to how our brains are different, however I have to read it in small chunks or my mind wanders and I need to do something else. 

This probably explains why I am just a programmer and not a CEO or some tech company.

Yes I was like that as well, exactly like that. For some reason I haven't been since I got ill but hopefully it will come back.

Yeah I do that too, but I keep refreshing the knowledge every few weeks to strengthen the memory of it, so that hopefully it'll stay in the reserves of my mind somewhere. We all have this mind erasure mechanism, and if something is not useful to us after a month, it'll get erased from our minds and forgotten about. It's a natural process. 

In college, the other students were making fun of me for taking down notes, and they'd point to their brain and say "I don't need to take down notes, it's all up here!" Like they had some kind of godly eidetic memory and were rubbing in how much they were smarter than me. And that discouraged a few other students from taking down notes too, but I didn't care. I knew how the brain erases information, and even if they think their brain won't, I know my brain will, so that's what the notes are for, they're for me. Well, a month later, they all forgot because their memory process naturally wiped itself clean, and all of them were asking me and begging me for my notes. Oddly enough, they also seemed to have forgotten that they made fun of me on that day, and they didn't apologize, so I did not want to share my notes with them. 

I'd say that I'd rather obsessively learn a new interesting thing, than to hang out and socialize with a group of people talking a lot about nothing. Well, like the small talk stuff, and most of that is not interesting to me. But even without school, I still obsessively learn things, but NT think it's weird if it's not for school, so I took an online course, just to say "I'm taking an online course" so it'll be less weird if they see me studying something. 

I can definitely relate to that. If I have an interest in anything, I get really obsessed and absentminded about anything else around me. But since getting married things changed, I hardly had that level of attention and focus as constantly fighting with my partner and having to learn to think about feelings all the time, I can no longer embrace that kind of immersion until things get improved or we get on the same level of understanding.

I once did programming in the 90s but can’t remember it now. As well I did music theory and a dissertation on the collaboration of Schoenberg and Kandinski which I got a distinction for. But now I don’t even know where middle C is on a staff. I stared a Biomedical Science degree before changing to computing then graphics but don’t remember much about Anatomy but maybe retained a science intuition or maybe as Plinky says an abstract of the subject.  Another situation was I trained for three years to be a counsellor at a college. However it was very hard to do it at a professional level.  But I do retain some abstract of the training to help others in a kind of peer support way even if it is only just empathic reflective mirroring.  

I am on a waiting list for an assessment and I only just came across spiky skills in autistic people and it would definitely explain some of my own history.  Spiky skills can mean having education or skills but finding it hard to apply them. 

I wonder are you concerned about how you are. If so then it is ok to accept oneself. As well it’s ok if you have to pace yourself or switch between activities. 

Forgive me if I am not understanding your post but I hope what I write is relevant. 

in the 80s I did a Humanities degree. We read books and wrote essays although it took me three times longer than others to write essays. When I left college I started voluntary work at Citizens Advice I soon went to pieces because we had to seek and co-ordinate obtaining and returning stored information on shelves. Instead I ended doing voluntary work for Age Concern which involved making oldies tea, scones and beans on toast which I could do. 

I suppose what I am saying is if people want to learn stuff then learn it even if it is just to get meaning or enjoyment out of life. 

As well with computing I had to give up the idea of full time work because of mental illness. However I have helped old people to learn how to use computers but only a couple of hours a week so still came in use.

As well there have been times where I have been too ill to do anything. Also once I would believe if I can educate myself in a subject then I can apply it but now I believe education and work can be different things.

I hope you no longer wish to self harm. Self harm can come from how we value ourselves and we all have value as human beings in different ways.

I can relate to this so much. I don’t consider myself to have a big ego but there’s not much I can’t do. And I can then generally excel at it and be better at it than most others I know. With one big caveat: so long as I’m shown it first or know where to find the answer. Without that, I’m hopeless. I can’t do anything! Like with DIY I’m hopeless, when it’s a skill I’m stereotypically just expected to have.

Your comment about becoming an expert and then forgetting it all reminds me of my childhood swotting for exams. I’d do well but then it would all be forgotten by the next year, unless I was still doing the subject. It’s like I just learnt the way to revise for things I wasn’t interested in, rather than learning the subject long-term.

Now, I work in the pensions industry. There’s so much historical stuff I don’t know (I was only born in the 80s, and that’s young for the industry!). It means I hate getting called on the phone and being surprised by a question I don’t know the answer to. But I’ll know it (and everything about it) within a couple of hours. So email is a godsend. Gives me the time to give the impression I knew it all, all along!

Just to clarify, I’m not diagnosed, so I’m not in exactly the same boat (just sharing my experience). I’m on the NHS waiting list. And I’m considering going private to end the doubt. I keep coming across posts which sound like me, like this one, though!