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Growing Up and Age

H_Pcats

For context, I am 17 nearly 18 years old and I am really scared of becoming an adult. I don't know if it is because of my autism or the fact most of my teenage years were spent with covid. 

As a child, I seemed mentally ahead of my years and seemed to grow up really quickly. But since becoming a teenager I started to seem younger than my peers, especially so recently. I still feel about 15 yet my 18th Birthday is in a few weeks. Everyone else seems to be growing up and keen to leave home and school and start driving and being independent. Yet I don't feel anywhere ready for that. I still want to be a kid and be in school and everything seems to have gone too fast. I am in desperate need of advice and if anyone else felt/feels the same and how they coped with it.

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  • I think that autists differ from neurotypical people in our understanding of the passage of time because autists' thinking is a combination of the literal, the metaphorical, and the symbolic. Obviously some autistic people have, like me, difficulties regarding numeracy and that fact argues against what I previously wrote...but I nevertheless feel that struggles with comprehending time, age and so on are not what they initially seem and are much more layered than even my half-baked theory. I basically mean that we don't actually misunderstand the idea of time passing...instead, we (psychologically) refuse to accept that it passes at all; and we have many reasons besides our assumed immaturity for this refusal of ours.

  • in reply to Steven
    Steven said:
    autists' thinking is a combination of the literal, the metaphorical, and the symbolic.

    I cannot believe I wrote that as if it were fact, and not merely a very personal and skewed opinion. What a stupid, ignorant, and irresponsible thing to do.

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