Published on 12, July, 2020
Hello, I have just received an autism diagnosis. It explains a lot and it makes a lot of sense but I’m really struggling to come to terms with it and what it means for my life. I’m not sure how my autism can be a strength in my professional life for example as people keep saying it can be.
Does anyone have any advice on how to navigate adult life and university with autism.
One problem I have is that I experience quite black and white thinking and I’m therefore impulsive. I also feel that I say things without thinking that can accidentally come across differently to what I want to say.
If anyone also has any advice on how to be a good partner while also having autism I would really appreciate it.
Thank you all so much in advance for your help and I hope you all have a great weekend. Sending kind regards and positivity to anyone reading this.
As an older Irish gay man from an Irish Catholic background living 21 years in the U.K., with extended family in Rural Ireland, diagnosed later in life, after 30 years in supermarket retailing, I totally empathise - I was diagnosed online in 2021, having started the process in early 2019, even before a chance comment was made by a family member back home in Ireland, whose children were displaying traits of the condition after they had returned to Ireland from living in Australia as a student - what I found after diagnosis was a shockingly unacceptable and utterly disgraceful lack of adult support and even the most basic, post diagnostic assessment (which I believe and maintain must be a basic legal requirement) - while I get that the focus should be on children, whether public or private, where does this leave adults living with autism? Having been aware of the struggle for LGBT rights and HIV/AIDS awareness as a teenager in the 1980’s, I’ve signed up to some autism awareness campaigning groups, as the level of ignorance around autism, even within the LGBT community has been a real shocker
Thank you so much for your kind reply and the time you’ve spent writing it. You’ve got no idea how much I appreciate it. I was just wondering if you have any strategies or advice on how to navigate the world as an autistic person. Thank you so much for your time.
I’m not in any position to advise, as I have not even had a post-diagnostic assessment since my diagnosis in 2021, without which I cannot advance, because I don’t even know what my support needs are - what I do have are ignorant people, who Karen/Kevin like, constantly giving their tuppence worth, saying that I need a live in carer, that I need ultra strict discipline as being the only way to manage my condition and such people are utterly determined to enforce their ignorant opinions in any way possible, legal or otherwise “because they “care” and are only trying to help” and “that I am the only one that is wrong in this situation” and I “need to accept that I do not understand that I am the only one that is wrong”