Autism and ageing

Is my autism getting worse with age or am I just struggling more and more to function and mask ?

Parents
  • I think the world is becoming less and less autism-friendly. So it's harder for us to deal with. E.g. when I was growing up you had to walk a mile to a phone box to make a call, I think I was nearly 10 before we got a phone in the house. Now a phone is a computer, TV, diary, camera.... permanently in your pocket, permanently contactable. Shops used to have little choice in the 70s and 80s, now there's about 10 types of apple, when we used to only have 'red' or 'green'. Too much choice is exhausting. The constant noise of people, traffic, car stereos, TV, aeroplanes, alarms, beeps, pings when the kettle boils, the microwave/washing machine/dishwasher is done.

Reply
  • I think the world is becoming less and less autism-friendly. So it's harder for us to deal with. E.g. when I was growing up you had to walk a mile to a phone box to make a call, I think I was nearly 10 before we got a phone in the house. Now a phone is a computer, TV, diary, camera.... permanently in your pocket, permanently contactable. Shops used to have little choice in the 70s and 80s, now there's about 10 types of apple, when we used to only have 'red' or 'green'. Too much choice is exhausting. The constant noise of people, traffic, car stereos, TV, aeroplanes, alarms, beeps, pings when the kettle boils, the microwave/washing machine/dishwasher is done.

Children
  • The world is way to noisy and continues to get only louder with every passing moment,  it would seem

    Sadly, I find even silence deafening 

  • Actually a choice of apples is something I miss, we get around 4 or 5 here and none are my favourites. I used to live under the Heathrow flight path and we could hear concorde and its boom even when we couldn't see it, I've swapped that now for the sound of fighter jets training pilots and helicopters. I agree that the world has got more noisy, even my washing machine sings a little song when it finished. I wonder if car stereo's are as loud inside the car as they outside? One things I remember from childhood that dies seem to have got quieter or at least differently noisy are tills in shops. I remember when the assistant had to add everything up in her head and press keys like the ones on an old manual typewriter to ring up the correct amount. Woolworths at xmas was a barrage of noise, tills with buttons that worked like a adding machine were so much quieter.