Published on 12, July, 2020
The older I get the more I notice a difference between me and my peers regarding my social skills, and the more they notice a difference in me too.
I feel like as everyone is getting older and maturing i'm just frozen in time. Forever trapped as a younger person stuck in the body of an adult, no matter what I do. `No matter how hard I mask.
I felt the first big jump when I was transitioning into my teenage years. I just wanted to mess about, play classical playground games, do what we used to do. But girls my age just wanted to sit around talking about boys. Everything was changing and it was nerve wracking.
I'm now turning 23 and I'm noticing the big jump again, except this time it's worse, harder. I don't know what to do to emulate my peers at all. They can just tell that I'm different.
I don't want to get pushed out, I want friends. A romantic relationship. I've been craving more structure relationship wise because of this, a relationship with rules. I've returned to religion, not because I'm necessarily a believer but because religious people tend to have well defined social rules that I can learn, follow, and as long as I stick to those rules I'm less likely to be socially ostracised.
I'm in a lot of distress. I don't know what to do. Everything is changing so fast, faster than I can keep up with.
There might be a lot of reasons for this, but I have noticed that for myself it's a result from an increase in demands and expectations, both from my external world and sometimes from myself. I think two things play a big part in why our problems get worse with age.
When we are kids, it is not expected of us to know how to handle every task and situation that we face. We get away with being our strange selfs more than when we're adults. The traits don't cause as much trouble because our context is very different. Also, we tend to reflect less on our behavior when we are kids, so we aren't as aware of any differences as we are now.
With an increase of demands comes an increase of stress and anxiety, and that may lead to a regression of sorts where we loose our strategies and energy to cope.
These are just my theories. I have no evidence to back them up. I just think it fits for me at least, and maybe some of you too?
oh yes, it's called autistic burnout
memories go away too, or I would rather say because random memories dissapear it might happen we forget some of our strategies to cope, so it looks like to me like a brain damage
as a kid you can get it if you remove one of build in blockers we have, e.g. reluctance to lie