Published on 12, July, 2020
Hello
I'm 40 and I'm really in some trouble. I've always found social interactions difficult, and my personal life certainly doesn't look like most other people's. I don't know if I'm autistic, it's been suggested, but I've had some bad experiences and am a bit wary of the medical profession so I've considerable reluctance to finding out. Trouble is I'm also in some trouble and in my 40 years still haven't worked out how to deal with it. I've done some reading and it seems like maybe people on the autistic spectrum might experience similar things so here I am hoping you might have some ideas.
Work wise I've been quite lucky on the whole, I work in a job I enjoy, but I'm running into the same problems over and over and finding them ridiculously distressing over and over.
It's all about morals and truth. It is my thing. I absolutely cannot stand people lying. Theoretically I realise that people lie, for all sorts of reasons, but I've never managed to integrate the fact of people lying into my expectations, so every time I am shocked and confused. And then angry and upset. There is a pathological liar that I am senior to, and they lie when they've done something wrong, when they haven't done something they should, but also volunteer totally unnecessary lies seemingly to make themselves look more important. I can't cope with this at all. They have become progressively less valuable in my eyes over time and I have retreated to the position that I simply don't play them any attention, deliberately ignore them when they are attention-seeking, and discount everything they say as it seems to me there is no worth to be applied to them. Trouble is people are telling me this is too extreme and I'm getting irrationally upset, and I see they are probably right but I can't seem to temper my reactions. And once I've reacted I'm so damn upset I stay visibly annoyed and upset for hours.
I also am stunned into confusion by hypocrisy, which I clearly have no grounds to get on my high horse about, but it, and inconsistency, just bambozzles me. And then people are messy and inconsiderate and that enrages me.
The upshot being that I'm getting continuously upset by the people I work with. And I'm struggling to understand them, then getting angry with them and it is not a good situation at all. I have no poker face at all so when I'm upset they know about it. And I'm senior to some of them and that doesn't make for a great combination.
These things are quite specific so I haven't been able to find out whether these are things that autistic people also find difficult, but I've had these problems since I first had to interact with people when i was a toddler, so I was hoping someone might recognise my problems and have an idea how I might start to cope with them. If there is some sort of training or a plan or a type of therapy or anything at all that I can do so that I can cope with these people being people.
I was diagnosed with autism last year and just wanted to say how I feel an obsession with truth is an autistic thing. I have a very strong need to do what is right, which caused me many problems in work when I blew the whistle on unsafe practices in my hospital. The rational me knew it would destroy my career but I had to do it! But at least I gain some peace from having done the right thing.