Why can’t you just be like the other children? Late diagnosed or self diagnosed adults, Can we forgive parents?

Hi, a really good question was asked earlier in the week about our earliest childhood memories. Most seemed to be how we had been taken to different events and were unable to join in. A thread that I noticed was that as late diagnosed or self diagnosed we seem unable to forgive parents for how we were treated. The usual, “ don’t show me up” or “why are you so awkward”?, the one I can still hear is, “your a strange child” these  are just a few of the instances that a lot of us endured. This was whilst we didn’t know why we couldn’t  identify with other children either. I find I just can’t forgive my remaining parent, my mother. I fully understand that no one had any knowledge of autism but I just find it very hard to forgive the verbal and sometimes physical punishments that were handed out. I actually keep contact now to a minimum. I don’t know if I’m being “out of order”  or making too much of this, I am still processing a lot of my childhood, a lot of these memories still haunt me and just find it very hard to forgive and forget.  Your thoughts on this would be appreciated.

Parents
  • I’m not diagnosed yet. I’m realising how much ASD has cost me and caused issues throughout my life. I get upset and frustrated at times because I wish I had known and got help as a kid. I’m nearly 51 and because of various things I am unable to work anymore. 

  • This is the very reason why that in many ways, adult autism support is even more important and while child autism support is important, those of us who are diagnosed later in life need all the support we can get - I’ve really been struggling to find any sources of adult support, including from autism charities since my (online) diagnosis at 51 in 2021 - it would be so much better if the focus was brought a little bit more towards autistic adults and (slightly) less away from children 

Reply
  • This is the very reason why that in many ways, adult autism support is even more important and while child autism support is important, those of us who are diagnosed later in life need all the support we can get - I’ve really been struggling to find any sources of adult support, including from autism charities since my (online) diagnosis at 51 in 2021 - it would be so much better if the focus was brought a little bit more towards autistic adults and (slightly) less away from children 

Children
  • It's (not literally) killing me.

    They are crying out for people who can do my job, and I can't get work unless someone else does the application. Never have been able to. If it were a trainable or learnable item, I'd be able to do it.

    As it is I'm so fundamentally, irredeemably, "excluded" that there simply is nothing to play for as far as me and society or "normal life" is concerned.

    Having no income means (if you aren't too dumb) you learn how NOT to pay for anything, including fines, fees, taxes, licences, which in turn pushes you further away... 

    If you are me you end up wrestling with questions like;

    "If I assemble the device as instructed, although in all likelihood it will do nothing exciting at all, there is a none zero chance it will run away, causing a large excursion of energy, and a small loss of life, including my own, but a far greater chance that it will produce (as designed) a smaller measurable burst of essentially free electrical energy" which will of course lead directly to a new age of plentiful non-polluting energy... (IF our measurements of low neutron flux are accurate, otherwise any large scale/long term application will cause low level waste to be produced as a result of neutron impacts, and it still ain't non-polluting). 

    If you are my neighbours, you are blissfully unaware, of these decisions.

    I'd like to consult them of course, but the moment you mention "thermonuclear fusion" in the context of that shed in the back garden, you lose the Audience...

    It gets worse: I bought a little flatbed truck cheap (at least I could fire the thing up in the middle of nowhere, I thought, making the risk factor however low, socially acceptable) but I find that I can't insure it for less than a thousand quid, whereas my 4.0 litre Daimler last time I used it was £250... 

    We've applied for all sorts of help etc. and we need piddling amounts of money to do big things, (we have definitely fused deuterium gas into what appears to our (basic) testing to be helium already, at a total sunk cost of less than £200K 

    I've been holding the others back as much as possible, on safety grounds, and I'm not firing this up until I am certain I will survive the experience, so my neighbours are really as safe as I am, at least... 

    What do you do with all that spare time they give us?

    I stopped thinking of my life as "disadvantaged" when I realised how much actual free time to think and act (A.K.A. "agency") we get compared to the normies!