Lost generation woman

Hello, and welcome.

I'm 59 now and was diagnosed 3 years ago, after a lifetime of bullying, challenges, mental health issues, misdiagnoses and misunderstandings - the usual stuff.  I have no friends, and never really have had.  I live alone now and prefer it that way.  I failed at school - or rather, school failed me.  I caught up a bit and went to uni at 28.  In spite of my degree, though, I still feel uneducated.  I've missed out on so much.  I've always been years behind other people - including emotionally.  Like you, I still feel like a teen.  I sometimes imagine my lack of education, the books I haven't read, the things I don't know as a mountain in front of me.  Each year that passes, that mountain gets higher and steeper, and it blots out more light.  All I have is a short rope to tackle it.  The more I try to climb, the more I find myself back in the foothills.  I sometimes wonder if it's too late now to even continue trying.  In my brief and all too infrequent periods of positivity, I tell myself It's never too late.  Keep it up.  Deep inside, I know that's true.  But I have things working against me.  I find it difficult to read now - difficult to focus on it.  I find it hard to study and retain knowledge.  All I've ever wanted to be, since a small child, is a writer.  It's the thing that's been with me throughout life - the bug in my head.  I've had a few things published - including a novel 5 years ago, which soon vanished - but haven't achieved what I've always striven for.  I look at that novel now, though, and realise I've still got a long way to go and a lot to learn yet.  At 59!  If anything happens, it will be a very late flowering indeed! 

Yes... I can't help feeling that huge amounts of my life have been lost.  Wasted.  I'm one of those lost - but I'm trying hard to find my way through.

Haha!  It's always amused me why people choose to express their individuality by copying everyone else!  People are strange, as Jim Morrison sang

What does ‘uneducated’ feel like? I’ve never heard of that feeling before. 

And what is a writer? I thought it was a person who writes. I’m a writer. I always have been. Or at least I thought I was. I don’t write story’s or anything and sometimes I just write random words, just for the sake of writing. But mostly, I write as a way to help me process this world but I don’t read what I’ve written and it just gets thrown away when I pick up the energy to have a clear out. So I’m a writer, and always have been. I’m just wondering, what your definition of a writer is? I thought it was somebody who writes but you must have a different definition because I know you write. 

And isn’t it great that we never grow up :-) I think it’s got to be one of the greatest benefits of being autistic. I love being a teenage boy even though I appear to be a 51 year old woman and I love that I’ve got my own little gang now, at my autism group, and we’re beginning to do all the things I never did or at least not fully, as a younger person, whatever that means, because I’ve always been young. My friend (female) sits with all the woman acting all grown up and talking about grown up things but me and the boys sit and play scrabble and have amazing, easy and often random, not matching, conversations with a bit of teasing sometimes. 

It sounds like you’re still grieving, which is understandable, and from what I’ve learned, grieving takes it’s own time. I’m glad you can still bring a smile though, even if that’s hard to do sometimes. 

What does ‘uneducated’ feel like? I’ve never heard of that feeling before. 

And what is a writer? I thought it was a person who writes. I’m a writer. I always have been. Or at least I thought I was. I don’t write story’s or anything and sometimes I just write random words, just for the sake of writing. But mostly, I write as a way to help me process this world but I don’t read what I’ve written and it just gets thrown away when I pick up the energy to have a clear out. So I’m a writer, and always have been. I’m just wondering, what your definition of a writer is? I thought it was somebody who writes but you must have a different definition because I know you write. 

And isn’t it great that we never grow up :-) I think it’s got to be one of the greatest benefits of being autistic. I love being a teenage boy even though I appear to be a 51 year old woman and I love that I’ve got my own little gang now, at my autism group, and we’re beginning to do all the things I never did or at least not fully, as a younger person, whatever that means, because I’ve always been young. My friend (female) sits with all the woman acting all grown up and talking about grown up things but me and the boys sit and play scrabble and have amazing, easy and often random, not matching, conversations with a bit of teasing sometimes. 

It sounds like you’re still grieving, which is understandable, and from what I’ve learned, grieving takes it’s own time. I’m glad you can still bring a smile though, even if that’s hard to do sometimes. 

Absolutely, we absolutely and unequivocally know absolutely nothing, there’s no doubt about that. And how fabulous, that you, a man who loves to learn, has so many things yet to explore!

It’s not that you ‘can’t’ learn, but that you learn in a different way to the majority of people. That’s different to saying you struggle to learn. 

I’m still learning how I learn and that in itself is a delightful dose of education. For example, I started going to a little art group, via a referral by my work coach, and through attending the group, I made a surprising discovery. 

My ‘goal’ for the past year and a half, or however long it’s been, has been to create a daily routine so I can at least begin to start getting up every day, again. However, I also wanted to try and build some flexibility into my routine. I had no idea how I was going to achieve that seemingly impossible task though, but at this point, it wasn’t too important because I hadn’t even established a daily getting up/going to bed time yet. I had only just transitioned to having no distinction  between night and day to at least now having a distinction. 

However, through participating in the art projects (and I’ve only been a few times so far), I noticed that my thinking was becoming less rigid and more expansive. I found this truly amazing and realised it was a subliminal effect I got from doing the art. 

Following my realisation, I asked my art teacher, who had told me that she had moved from graphic design, to now teaching this more freestyle kind of art, how the experience had impacted on her life. 

She had never considered that question before but it was interesting to note, that without her realising it, her life had also become more expansive and she had moved away from some old rigid and hurtful thought patterns etc. 

So I realised, and I have since observed, that I learn in a very different way to most people and on further observations and reflections, it’s almost like I learn at a more energetic level which isn’t easy to put into words. But it showed me that it isn’t a matter that we can’t learn but that we simply need to find a way that works for us. 

I currently have a very short attention span so I flip between YouTube, audiobooks, actual books and simply sitting and being, in silence, and slowly but surely I’m finding my groove and my learning style and my little attention span is slowly growing. So I’m super excited to begin exploring the endless amounts of interesting things to learn and I’m utterly delighted to know that if I lived a thousand years, there would still be more to learn. Learning is probably my deepest passion, so I know, that no matter how long I live for, I will always, absolutely always, be able to indulge in my passion for learning. 

Ahhh, so it’s not that you want to be a writer, it’s that you would like to get paid for your writing to such a degree that you can spend all of your time writing. That’s quite another thing. So what is your plan and who is helping you with your plan? - because you know we can’t do it by ourselves, right? 

realising there's a vast body of knowledge of which I know nothing or very little

For me, that is the definition of "educated". The more you learn, the more you realise there is so much that you don't know and can never know, but it doesn't stop you from trying.

Ignorant or uneducated people, on the other hand, think they know everything, or that there is very little left to learn. For them, the latter is true, for they lack the capacity to learn anything more.

What does ‘uneducated’ feel like? I’ve never heard of that feeling before. 

For me, it means realising there's a vast body of knowledge of which I know nothing or very little: the arts and sciences, politics, law, philosophy, foreign languages and culture, etc.  I haven't traveled much, either.  I pick stuff up piecemeal and entirely at random.  That, to me, doesn't constitute being 'educated'.  I don't necessarily mean formal education, either.  Qualifications don't interest me, and my lack of them doesn't bother me.  But I do definitely feel that I have an element of LD, which is why I've always struggled with learning new things.  Having said all that, of course - and dropping in what seems like a learned allusion! - I think it was Socrates who said something like the truly wise man is one who knows he knows nothing.  Or maybe it was Plato.

I don't mean it in terms of 'completely uneducated', but 'lacking in education'.  Notwithstanding my comment on formal education, I truly envy people who had a great time at school and received a good enough grounding to set them up early.  I didn't even start reading seriously (at all, to be honest) until I was 26.  I feel like a computer with a huge amount of RAM and a vast-capacity hard drive - but in low-power mode and with malfunctioning input devices.

And what is a writer?

I think you know what I mean.  Anyone can be a cyclist.  They just need to jump on a bike.  Anyone can grab a knife out of the kitchen drawer and perform surgery on themselves.  That doesn't make them a surgeon.  I mean earning a living from it.  Being able to spend my entire life doing the thing I most love and which means the most to me (and yes, I know that you're already doing that - but again, you know what I mean).