Slightly simplistic title to keep it short.
The key point: I’m still me, but with more experiences attached"
When I reached 18, 20, 30, I never really felt like an adult like everyone else. I remember feeling strange when described as a man. I just felt like me. Objectively I was, I had a house, car, job, money, credit agreements, adult physical attributes, etc.
I asked ChatGPT, it's interesting
Question: Is it common with ASD to feel like you are not grown up?
Answe: Yes — that feeling is very common among autistic adults, and it’s important to say this carefully, because it’s often misunderstood (and often misdescribed by professionals).
What many people with ASD experience is not immaturity. It’s a mismatch between different kinds of development.
Here are the main pieces.
1. Asynchronous development (the core issue)
- In ASD, development is often uneven:
- Cognitive reasoning: often advanced or highly developed
- Moral reasoning / values: often strong and principled
- Sensory and emotional regulation: often younger or more fragile
- Social role acquisition: delayed, non-linear, or consciously resisted
So you may:
- think like an adult (or older than your age),
- but feel younger, more exposed, or less “armoured” in the world.
That creates the internal sense of:
“I’m competent, but I don’t feel like a proper adult.”
2. “Adult” is a social performance, not a state
Much of what society calls “being grown up” is actually:
- comfort with ambiguity
- tolerance of inconsistency
- emotional bluffing
- role-playing confidence
Autistic people are often less willing or less able to fake these.
So you may see adults around you and think:
“They seem solid. I don’t feel like that.”
But what you’re often seeing is masking, not maturity.
Many autistic adults say:
- “I still feel 16 inside.”
- “Everyone else seems to have a manual I never got.”
- “I’m waiting to feel like an adult, and it never arrives.”
That’s extremely common.
3. Time perception and self-continuity
...
So instead of:
“I’ve grown into adulthood”
It feels more like:
“I’m still me, but with more experiences attached.”
That doesn’t feel like growing up — it feels like accumulating data.
4. Trauma and repeated invalidation amplify it
Years of:
- being misunderstood
- having your perceptions questioned
- being told you’re “too much” or “wrong”
- walking on eggshells (as you described)
can freeze parts of emotional development.
Not because you failed to grow —
but because growth requires safety and consistency.
5. A reframing that often helps
Many autistic adults eventually realise:
I am not underdeveloped — I am differently developed.
You may never feel like the cultural image of a “grown-up”. But you may be:
- more principled
- more precise
- more internally consistent
- more perceptually grounded
That is a different kind of adulthood, not a lesser one.
Bottom line
Yes — feeling “not grown up” is very common in ASD.
It usually reflects:
- asynchronous development
- low tolerance for social pretence
- disrupted identity narratives
- nervous system overload
- and late understanding of self
Not a lack of maturity.
And importantly: many people report that this feeling softens, not by trying to “be more adult”, but by:
- understanding their own operating system
- reducing masking
- building trust slowly and deliberately
- allowing a different definition of adulthood to exist0
