Hello new member here.

Anonymous said:

Thanks Mike.

If only I had done A instead of B. Oh yes I've had that my whole life. One wrong turn after another.

I'll be around here quite a bit as this seems to be a helpful place and I might be able to offer a bit of help to others.

Paul

Paul - so interesting you should have said that!

I enjoy writing fiction.  Always have.  A few years back, I published a novel (in a very small, not-rich-making way!) about a man living with BPD, which is what I was suspected of having then.  Now I've had my diagnosis, I realise that the novel is actually all about living with ASD.

Recently, I've started rewriting a novel I wrote a couple of years back.  It's about a man who dies in an accident, but whose spirit lives on - both to see the effects of his death in the future, and the results of decisions he might have taken, but didn't, in the past.  For me, it was answering a need to know 'what might have been.'  I've turned down so many opportunities in my life.  So... this is my way of, if not answering the question, at least exploring it in the context of what actually did happen to me.

We can never know if they were wrong turns.  Things may have turned out badly for us with the decisions we actually made... but there are no real guarantees with any life choice.  Like people who miss flights, only to discover later that the missed flights had crashed.  John Lydon, for instance, had been due to be flying to the US on the Pan-Am flight that crashed over Lockerbie in 1988.  He missed it because his partner left it too late to pack.

So, maybe I wrote it as a form of reassurance.  I think it's the kind of reassurance a lot of people need - autistic or otherwise.  It's the same reassurance I got with my diagnosis.  Now I know why I didn't do such and such...

Anonymous said:

Thanks Mike.

If only I had done A instead of B. Oh yes I've had that my whole life. One wrong turn after another.

I'll be around here quite a bit as this seems to be a helpful place and I might be able to offer a bit of help to others.

Paul

Paul - so interesting you should have said that!

I enjoy writing fiction.  Always have.  A few years back, I published a novel (in a very small, not-rich-making way!) about a man living with BPD, which is what I was suspected of having then.  Now I've had my diagnosis, I realise that the novel is actually all about living with ASD.

Recently, I've started rewriting a novel I wrote a couple of years back.  It's about a man who dies in an accident, but whose spirit lives on - both to see the effects of his death in the future, and the results of decisions he might have taken, but didn't, in the past.  For me, it was answering a need to know 'what might have been.'  I've turned down so many opportunities in my life.  So... this is my way of, if not answering the question, at least exploring it in the context of what actually did happen to me.

We can never know if they were wrong turns.  Things may have turned out badly for us with the decisions we actually made... but there are no real guarantees with any life choice.  Like people who miss flights, only to discover later that the missed flights had crashed.  John Lydon, for instance, had been due to be flying to the US on the Pan-Am flight that crashed over Lockerbie in 1988.  He missed it because his partner left it too late to pack.

So, maybe I wrote it as a form of reassurance.  I think it's the kind of reassurance a lot of people need - autistic or otherwise.  It's the same reassurance I got with my diagnosis.  Now I know why I didn't do such and such...