Moving on from your past/ letting go of the pain

Hi Sue,  reading your journey sounds similar to mine..  I think just hearing others experiences helps me not to feel so alone. 

My daughter using "spoons" to tell me where her batteries are. I say to my daughter "try not to pick up the rocks".......carry the treasure with you (your beautiful moments). Sue

Life is hard, but I am resilient. 

Life has its beautiful moments too.

I've been struggling a lot over the past year, due to various circumstances, and I don't have the spoons to go into details.  I have been hurt in the past and I'm still battling through.  But I have my successes, too.  

What a wonderful tribute! I have some Autistic traits and my "career"  is in leadership development. Amazing how you will push yourself forward when you are passionate about what you do. After a long stint of facilitating, I need my downtime. Sue. 

That would be ideal. Luckily, I was never asked to do much teaching, just postgrad students and undergrads doing their practical projects, and that was mostly one to one. I'm still in touch with some of my former protégés. One made me a 'T' shirt, saying, "Fount of Benevolent Knowledge" on it.

Isn't it frustrating that people don't let you do what you are good at ........ and leave the rest to others. 

Yes, in retrospect I could see how working on a very focused project, problem solving on a daily basis, in a smallish research group, played to autistic strengths. The things that didn't, such as presenting work in seminars and at conferences and being involved in strategy meetings, I just scrabbled through as best I could.

This is really helpful and emphasises the need to have your own standards of what is a "good life". It reassures me that the flavour of the conversations I have with my daughter are going in the right direction. She has already stopped comparing herself to her peers. Thank you, Sue 

Martin, this is a very impressive repertoire of achievements. You are probably aware that the sciences and research are potentially areas where people with Autism flourish. Thank you for sharing, Sue

I don't really have an answer, I'm just muddling through, two years after diagnosis (I was thirty-seven when diagnosed). I've been distracted for some of that time by getting married, which has probably helped me feel that my life is going into a new phase. As Martin says, I feel glad that I can forgive myself for some mistakes, but on the downside, I feel sad that I am probably never going to achieve many of the things I would like to achieve or would see as the parameters of a "good life." I try not to judge this by other people's criteria, but even by my own criteria, it is hard to see myself as a success. Perhaps the thing to do would be not to judge myself at all, but there are too many personal and societal factors to allow me to do that, and I am too afraid I would waste my life without some targets.

I actually feel resentful of the celebrity stories as there is a survivorship bias there. The media only publicises the stories of the few who do well, not the many who don't. I find these stories put implicit pressure on me to do things I am unlikely to ever manage and to feel like a failure if I don't do them.

I was diagnosed about 7 months after I took early retirement. I went through my childhood, adolescence and entire working life having no idea I was autistic. I was hugely relieved at my diagnosis, as it meant that I had a reason for so many of the problems and limitations I have had. I could also forgive myself for past 'failures'. I was not a rather poorly functioning, in some areas, allistic person, but a remarkably successful autistic person, operating in a society that was badly designed for my needs. I worked for most of my career in biomedical research, I have a molecular biology PhD and I helped, in a small way, in overcoming drug resistance and drug design in a disease that kills over half a million people (mostly children) each year..

There’s no going back, but we were right and we were not ‘defective’ or ‘weird’, it is a good reason to start moving forward.

Maybe our diagnosis, with the new channels for our interest, can give us a means of paying it forward. 
‘Beacon of hope’ feels like such a strong phrase, if it seems right I’ll do my best to catch others, I’ll try my best to make the ground I can make.

I think wounds are par-for-the-course where life is concerned, tragedy is life and overcoming tragedy is good, and there is work to be done and hard truths to be accommodated.  
For those of us with a long-suffered path to diagnosis, there is work still to be done, we have not suffered-in-vain if we manifest our truth.

We now have the knowledge to head-off the suffering of I others, our path was tragic, but it would be evil not to help the rest. We have the power to support the community, we have the power to help people make their mistakes quicker, I feel that we should push-on wisdom from our pain and not suffering.

I don’t feel the need to recite a story for this one, so instead I’ll prophesy:    
As time goes on more of us will be aware, as more of us have awareness more of us will be accepted, as more of us are accepted more of us will prosper. 

The sooner we push the sooner we will prosper, but we will prosper as a community because the ball is now rolling, the moonshot report is a good indication of that.