Finding my home / tribe

Hi all, long story short I've been on the waiting list for ASD evaluation for 12 months and hoping for a positive result in Spring, did an awful lot of blogging and connecting with others via social media last year and feel so much in common with most others on the spectrum, but then realised that social media is a real source of stress for me and withdrew completely from all platforms in Autumn last year.

I miss the connections I made, but can't risk going back as I'm pretty sure I'll end up consumed by it and stressed again. Hopefully I can make some good friends here. I tried Wrong Planet but chose a non-anonymous username that I couldn't then get rid of, and think that remaining anonymous here might allow me to discuss more freely.

I'm middle-aged, and male.

The impact of ASD on me is (as far as I know):

• Sensory issues:
  • difficulty processing voices in the presence of noise & inability to screen out unwanted voices / conversations (which makes working in an open office a hellish challenge)
  • sensitivity to temperature changes and smells
  • sensitivity to some textures
  • (very) mild synaesthesia
  • poor interoception?
• Alexithymia
• Executive function issues
  • Hyperfocus = great work performance when "on task / in the zone"
  • Easily distracted from "the zone"
  • Hard to get into "the zone"
  • Constantly forgetting what I was going to do next (especially if doing something "quickly" first)
  • Working memory issues
    • Need to see source and destination together when copying data
    • Can't easily create visual imagery in my head, but I'm a genius with it on paper (if it's a diagram)
  • Long term memory issues
    • Memory like Swiss cheese where the gaps are topics not periods of time
  • Impulse control problems
• Anxiety
  • Rumination & guilt
  • Catastrophising
  • Feeling unable to relax around people
• Eye contact hurts
• Ask me "does my bum look big in this?" and I'll answer truthfully; you need to know, presumably.
• Combine the social problems secondary to this lot with the fact that my dad has undiagnosed ASD & didn't model successful male-male relationships for me = I find most other men intimidating & prefer to talk to women
• Tend to talk about myself a lot :-)

For the last 20 or so years leading up to autumn 2017 I had been unknowingly masking all of this using intellectual effort, but then the elastic snapped and I suffered what I'm describing as a mental burnout equivalent to breaking both arms and both legs. Now I'm carefully rebuilding myself in the light of all of this new knowledge, knowing that I need to try extra hard to monitor my stress level (see above re interoception and alexithymia) and also knowing that what I thought was a comfortable 5/10 was closer to 95/100 and there are zones below where the happy people live.

That's probably enough for now! I genuinely do care about other people too :-).