Adults With Autism Quotes

My room is the safest place my body has. My mind doesn’t really have a safe place.

Presuming that a nonspeaking child has nothing to say is like presuming that an adult without a car has nowhere to go.

There is a perception that because individuals with autism have challenges in the area of communication and social skills, they are not interested in having friends. This is not so. Adults with autism may be socially isolated, but it is not always indicative of a preference for solitude.

I look at the sky and the dust that separates us from the stars that will be my home. I breathe in the night air, the rotten night air, and I miss, I miss, I miss.

The word “autism” still conveys a fixed and dreadful meaning to most people—they visualize a child mute, rocking, screaming, inaccessible, cut off from human contact. And we almost always speak of autistic children, never of autistic adults, as if such children never grew up, or were somehow mysteriously spirited off the planet, out of society.

Aware adults with autism and their parents are often angry about autism. They may ask why nature or God created such horrible conditions as autism, manic depression, and schizophrenia. However, if the genes that caused these conditions were eliminated there might be a terrible price to pay. It is possible that persons with bits of these traits are more creative, or possibly even geniuses. If science eliminated these genes, maybe the whole world would be taken over by accountants.

As a functional Aspergian adult, one thing troubles me deeply about those kids who end up behind the second door. Many descriptions of autism and Asperger’s describe people like me as “not wanting contact with others” or “preferring to play alone.” I can’t speak for other kids, but I’d like to be very clear about my own feelings: I did not ever want to be alone. And all those child psychologists who said “John prefers to play by himself” were dead wrong. I played by myself because I was a failure at playing with others. I was alone as a result of my own limitations, and being alone was one of the bitterest disappointments of my young life.

Autistic thinking is always detailed and specific. Teachers and parents need to help both children and adults with autism take all the little details they have in their head and put them into categories to form concepts and promote generalization.

My alphabet hates itself. Like ... imagine someone says, ‘Think outside the box.’ My hyperactive mind creates a sphere and laughs at the box and researches for hours on end how much better spheres are. Then my Autism freaks out that I broke the rules without realising there were any, and wonders why we are supposed to think inside cardboard boxes in the first place. Surely being inside cardboard boxes isn’t comfortable.

Bizarrely, my biggest fear was that the tests would prove I didn’t have Asperger’s or that the psychologist would think I wasn’t autistic enough to merit a diagnosis. Then I’d be back to having no explanation for all the atypical things about me.

I was, however, a handful. I was overly smart, easily bored, very curious and constantly in motion. Consequently, I got a lot of guidance from adults on how to behave properly. This reined in my more problematic behaviors, but it also made me feel like I was forever in danger of doing something “wrong,” especially when I “wasn’t trying hard enough.

Interestingly, adults are only shamed for having an obsessive interest if that interest is a bit too “strange,” and doesn’t come with the opportunity to rack up a lot of achievements or make a lot of money. People who routinely complete eighty-hour workweeks aren’t penalized for being obsessive or hyperfixated; they’re celebrated for their diligence. If an adult fills their evenings after work learning to code or creating jewelry that they sell on Etsy, they’re seen as enterprising. But if someone instead devotes their free time to something that gives them pleasure but doesn’t financially benefit anyone, it’s seen as frivolous or embarrassing, even selfish. In this instance, it’s clear that the punishing rules imposed on Autistic children reflect a much broader societal issue: pleasure and nonproductive, playful time are not valued, and when someone is passionate about the “wrong” things, that passion is discouraged because it presents a distraction from work and other “respectable” responsibilities.

It is important to note that the stress we feel as parents is not generated by our adult child with autism, but rather from the failings of the systems in place that are supposedly there to help us. There are caring people in the systems, yet often the lack of options and foresight and inability to plan ahead or provide options for our loved ones are accepted as normal by the systems in place.

One of the major ways abled society dehumanizes the disabled is by calling our maturity into question. “Adults” are supposed to be independent, though of course no person actually is. We all rely on the hard work and social-emotional support of dozens of people every single day. You’re only seen as less adult, and supposedly less of a person,[3] if you need help in ways that disrupt the illusions of self-sufficiency.

Nothing escapes my alphabet powers. It’s exhausting.

Adults tend to be more understanding and accepting of differences than teenagers. The important thing is to find a group that your adult child is personally interested in being a part of, and then acting on the assumption that he has the right to be there and that he will fit right in.

Finally, at age seventy, Goodman was able to get the diagnosis and access to services he needed. Joining a support group for adults run by the Asperger’s Association of New England, he says, was “like coming ashore after a life of bobbing up and down in a sea that seemed to stretch to infinity in all directions.

felt like I was somehow mothering my younger self—revisiting each moment, looking at it in a new light and telling that younger version of me that it wasn’t my fault, that I’d done the best I could, that to expect more from me in the absence of support would have been unreasonable.

We need to be doing a better job preparing our teens and young adults for employment during their high school and college years. But just as importantly, we need to be educating workplaces, job coaches, corporations, and business leaders about the benefits of hiring a person on the spectrum.

I have always gravitated towards children and teaching. I am now a special needs teacher working with children with Autism and it is very fulfilling for me.

I would describe myself as pretty determined. I achieve goals with intent and purpose, once I’ve figured out what it is I want to do.

Do you have uneven sets of skills? (e.g., you can comfortably speak in front of a large group at work but are unable to speak to a small group of strangers at a party?

-autism is neither a deficit, disease nor disorder, but simply a different, and equally valid, way of being.

Indeed, courage is not the absence of fear but the ability to feel the fear without letting it stop you from doing what you want.

auditory processing issues: difficulty understanding spoken language, often experienced as a delay between hearing spoken words and being able to process those audio sounds into recognizable words .

He acknowledged that being an autistic adult doesn’t necessarily mean not attending your cousin’s baby shower; it can mean going to the baby shower and spending a good part of the afternoon hiding out in the kitchen (one of

She lives inside the book. She loves English literature to the point that her bedroom looks like it came out of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. She is in love with the words, the characters, the paper, the pens … even the smell of the pages. – Uncle of avid reader

Allen had an aide who hovered within inches of his face and physically prompted him so frequently that her very proximity became a dysregulating factor. As time passed, Allen became more and more agitated—mostly because of the aide’s behavior. Some adults who work with children have the misguided concept that to be effective, it’s best to be in the child’s face, even to give positive support. But for a child with autism who has social anxiety and sensory challenges, that can be scary and intimidating. It can also impede progress.

I never allowed my Autism/Asperger's to have the prerogative to neither tear nor slow me down. I earned a degree in chemistry, juggle for elementary schools, play piano for seniors on Sunday mornings, and been mentoring children/teens from K-12 at Royal Rangers almost every week for six years and counting.

There exists a social spectrum that at one end a person may be so social that they cannot stand to be alone all the way to the other end (the person cannot tolerate being with people). When an individual learns where they are on the spectrum they can then make environmental and social adjustments. This can help with exhaustion and tiredness.

I knock into things all the time, fall over sometimes, have bruises all over me, spill food or drink on my shirt, I miss my mouth … it’s frustrating and embarrassing at times when I lose my balance. Our daughter can fall out of a chair she’s sitting in, knock into objects and trip out the doorway, all whilst answering the doorbell! She has always had difficulty with coordination

I really identify with being a bookworm. I love reading, learning and books. I mean, I have 1000 books, all catalogued, already in my specially made library my dad made me. Books are my friends. I live in sweat pants and workout gear or t-shirt and jeans. I dress more for comfort than for fashion. I dress up if I have to go out but I can’t wait to come home and take off the makeup, heels and scratchy clothing.

I never could fit in with other kids, but I could impress teachers with my grasp of big words and my sophisticated-sounding opinions. Though my language was highly developed, my social and emotional life was not. I annoyed other kids by talking too much about subjects that didn’t interest them. I clung to adults who found me “impressive” and equated being well-behaved with being mature and worthy of their respect

Just as functioning isn't uniform, it isn't linear either. There is a commonly seen phenomenon in autistic children where they'll make big gains in elementary school then regress when they hit adolescence. Or a child will be labeled a late bloomer, seeming practically "normal" in their teen years, then seem to backslide dramatically when they go off to college or enter the adult world of work and independent living

The Asperger’s child at the gifted meeting is doing well in school, but the Asperger’s child at an autism meeting may be in a poor special ed program, bored, and getting into trouble because adults in his life hold lower expectations of his abilities. Unfortunately, in some cases, people are so hung up on the labels attached to students that they teach to these low expectations and aren’t even curious to learn if the child is actually more capable.

For as long as I can remember, I have been on a quest for self-understanding and self-improvement. I am driven to figure myself and other people out. I have analysed myself as far back as I can remember, reanalysed myself, been to many psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors and psychics. I love self-help books, courses, anything to improve myself. My special interest is self-improvement, quantum physics, medicine, anything to do with bettering oneself and self-help.

I do certain things over and over again. I fidget, twirl my hair, leg-bounce, rub or massage my feet together. I’m usually always doing something with my hands whether it is biting my nails or skin, picking at my skins, chewing my hair, fidgeting with something. I grind my teeth and bite the inside of my mouth. I also sway when I’m standing up. I was in trouble for constantly leg bouncing when I was at work because it distracted others. I just learnt its called self-regulation or self-soothing.

Your child, too, will one day be an adult. For them to live life with the same degree of independence as neurotypical offspring might be difficult, but one day your child-rearing, child-minding days will come to an end. Parents grow older until they can no longer look after their adult children. The period in which we are together as parents and child is finite. So please, while the child still is a child, and while you’re still around to do so, support them well. Laugh together and share your stories. You won’t be revisiting these years. Value them.

While many autistic people face great challenges as children, things become even harder once they reach adulthood. Suddenly, society expects you to be “an adult” and behave and function as such. It is such a shame that exactly at the point in their lives when they need it the most, the support they receive from organizations and resources often stops. Because I was diagnosed at 21, I never received any support as a child. After I received my diagnosis, my mother tried to find all kinds of resources, but she soon realized that I was too old for much of anything.

I have auditory processing challenges. I often don’t catch what is said and I’m always asking people to repeat themselves. People whispering in a lecture would drive me crazy and I’d have to get up and move somewhere else! She is highly sensitive. She dislikes fireworks, balloons popping, vacuums, and too many people talking. She would say the noise hurts her and makes her feel sick. She hears things more loudly, sees things more clearly and feels things much more than others do. She also can hear what everybody is saying in the house, so we really have to watch what we say! – Siblings of highly sensitive person

Psychology (and psychiatry), philosophy and education has always been my passion and has been ever since I was really young. I have always been intrigued by human behaviour and what makes people tick. Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? Why do people do what they do? From very young she has asked us the BIG questions and we didn’t know the answers. So she read and studied and read and studied. She does find it difficult at times because she wants the answers to life in very black-and-white ways. She loves the rules and when things don’t make sense, she can get frustrated. – Stepmother of curious psychology student

What is it about autism that makes two rational, educated adults torture themselves in this way? Playing the blame game is not healthy and helps no one. Autism does that. It grabs you and, if you’re not careful, it drags you down with it. Despite all the progress made, I’ve felt its pull lately. But we must not let it get the better of us. I propose a new version of the blame game. In this version we ask, ‘Where did he get those beautiful eyes from? That smile? That gorgeous hair and stunning face? Who’s responsible for his amazing reading ability and astonishing memory? Where did those dancing skills come from? And the musical ability?’ Trouble is, my wife would win that version too! Nonetheless, these are the questions we should be asking because, ultimately, they are his defining features, not autism.

The 2D:4D ratio is so variable, and the sex difference so small, that you can’t determine someone’s sex by knowing it. But it does tell you something about the extent of fetal testosterone exposure. So what does the extent of exposure (as assessed by the ratio) predict about adult behavior? Men with more “masculine” 2D:4D ratios tend toward higher levels of aggression and math scores; more assertive personalities; higher rates of ADHD and autism (diseases with strong male biases); and decreased risk of depression and anxiety (disorders with a female skew). The faces and handwriting of such men are judged to be more “masculine.” Furthermore, some reports show a decreased likelihood of being gay. Women having a more “feminine” ratio have less chance of autism and more of anorexia (a female-biased disease). They’re less likely to be left-handed (a male-skewed trait). Moreover, they exhibit less athletic ability and more attraction to highly masculine faces. And they’re more likely to be straight or, if lesbian, more likely to take stereotypical female sexual roles.72

Having Asperger’s is like having an enhancer plugged into an outlet in our brains. Asperger’s is an accelerator, amplifying the perceptions that we have on the world and the ambiance around us. Like going to the store and buying a device to plug in or install on something in order to make it run faster, Asperger’s will deepen everything’s significance, causing us to take things to a more intense level. Those of us with Asperger’s need to take our time on certain things, which causes us difficulty in accomplishing simple tasks. We learn to diligently persevere and be more prudent and careful. "Juggling the Issues: Living with Asperger’s Syndrome is an anthology explaining these topics through the eyes of someone with Asperger’s. This is more than a researcher giving an outline of what we face and what we can do. Instead, this is one of those books told by a person who has Asperger’s and has dealt with certain difficulties in order to experience achievements over the past twenty years. I have personally overcome and am still overcoming a lot of the trials that come with having Asperger’s.

They also devised an ingeniously low-tech solution to a complex problem. Even highly verbal autistic adults occasionally struggle with processing and producing speech, particularly in the chaotic and generally overwhelming atmosphere of a conference. By providing attendees with name-tag holders and pieces of paper that were red on one side and yellow on the other, they enabled Autistics to communicate their needs and desires without having to articulate them in the pressure of the moment. The red side facing out signified, "Nobody should try to interact with me," while the yellow side meant, "Only people I already know should interact with me, not strangers." (Green badges were added later to signify, "I want to interact but am having trouble initiating, so please initiate an interaction with me.") These color-coded "interaction signal badges" turned out to be so useful that they have since been widely adopted at autistic-run events all over the world, and name-tag labels similar to Autreat ("autistic retreat") green badges have recently been employed at conferences for Perl programmers to indicate that the wearer is open to spontaneous social approaches.

MY PROCESS I got bullied quite a bit as a kid, so I learned how to take a punch and how to put up a good fight. God used that. I am not afraid of spiritual “violence” or of facing spiritual fights. My Dad was drafted during Vietnam and I grew up an Army brat, moving around frequently. God used that. I am very spiritually mobile, adaptable, and flexible. My parents used to hand me a Bible and make me go look up what I did wrong. God used that, as well. I knew the Word before I knew the Lord, so studying Scripture is not intimidating to me. I was admitted into a learning enrichment program in junior high. They taught me critical thinking skills, logic, and Greek Mythology. God used that, too. In seventh grade I was in school band and choir. God used that. At 14, before I even got saved, a youth pastor at my parents’ church taught me to play guitar. God used that. My best buddies in school were a druggie, a Jewish kid, and an Irish soccer player. God used that. I broke my back my senior year and had to take theatre instead of wrestling. God used that. I used to sleep on the couch outside of the Dean’s office between classes. God used that. My parents sent me to a Christian college for a semester in hopes of getting me saved. God used that. I majored in art, advertising, astronomy, pre-med, and finally English. God used all of that. I made a woman I loved get an abortion. God used (and redeemed) that. I got my teaching certification. I got plugged into a group of sincere Christian young adults. I took courses for ministry credentials. I worked as an autism therapist. I taught emotionally disabled kids. And God used each of those things. I married a pastor’s daughter. God really used that. Are you getting the picture? San Antonio led me to Houston, Houston led me to El Paso, El Paso led me to Fort Leonard Wood, Fort Leonard Wood led me back to San Antonio, which led me to Austin, then to Kentucky, then to Belton, then to Maryland, to Pennsylvania, to Dallas, to Alabama, which led me to Fort Worth. With thousands of smaller journeys in between. The reason that I am able to do the things that I do today is because of the process that God walked me through yesterday. Our lives are cumulative. No day stands alone. Each builds upon the foundation of the last—just like a stairway, each layer bringing us closer to Him. God uses each experience, each lesson, each relationship, even our traumas and tragedies as steps in the process of becoming the people He made us to be. They are steps in the process of achieving the destinies that He has encoded into the weave of each of our lives. We are journeymen, finding the way home. What is the value of the journey? If the journey makes us who we are, then the journey is priceless.

Adults often think that fair means impartial, equitable, unbiased. Family rules, school rules, and team rules apply to each sibling, student, or teammate equally. But autism un- levels the playing field. It potholes the field. All things are not being equal. So our thinking on the subject of fair must change. Here it is: Fair does not mean everything is equal. Fair is when everyone gets what they need.

Could some of the challenging behaviours that often partner autism begin as experiments on measuring human reactions? Are these children exploring boundaries - seeing what makes the toy squeak or the adult shriek?

Could some of the challenging behaviours that often partner autism begin as experiements on measuring human reactions? Are these children exploring boundaries - seeing what makes the toy squeak or the adult shriek?

The charity was for the Autism Speaks Foundation. It was to support the biomedical research for the causes and treatments of autism in both children and adults.

McCarthy’s movie career wasn’t limited to The Stupids. In 1998, she had a small role in BASEketball and the following year in Diamonds , directed by John Asher, whom she married in September 1999. A few years later, on May 18, 2002, their only child, Evan, was born in Los Angeles. But all was not well. Following a chance encounter with a stranger, McCarthy knew that something was different about her son. “One night I reached over and grabbed my Archangel Oracle tarot cards and shuffled them and pulled out a card,” she wrote. “It was the same card I had picked over and over again the past few months. It was starting to drive me crazy. It said that I was to help teach the Indigo and Crystal children. [Later,] a woman approached Evan and me on the street and said, ‘Your son is a Crystal child,’ and then walked away. I remember thinking, ‘Okay, crazy lady,’ and then I stopped in my tracks. Holy shit, she just said ‘Crystal child,’ like on the tarot card.” McCarthy realized that she was an Indigo adult and Evan a Crystal child. Although Evan would soon be diagnosed with autism, McCarthy took heart in the fact that Crystal children were often mislabeled as autistic. According to Doreen Virtue, author of The Care and Feeding of Indigo Children, “Crystal Children don’t warrant a label of autism! They aren’t autistic, they’re AWE-tistic.

Coaching offers customized, one-on-one support to assist individuals in reaching their goals. The process involves goal setting, identifying obstacles, brainstorming solutions and creating a workable action plan.

SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Reasonable and Time-oriented.

From very early on she had a love for books. She could read before she went to school, didn’t like sharing her books or people touching or opening them. She would rather stay at home and read a good book than go out. – Grandparents of literature expert

She has always been a bookworm and now she writes them. She just won an award for her best-selling book series. She is a fairly famous author now. – Niece of best-selling author

I would describe myself as an academic and research superstar. I love learning and I am an extravert who loves to talk, too much at times, or so they tell me. I also love to debate. I have been attached to a university for years now. I don’t ever want to leave, except to time travel back to live in the Jane Austen era. I absolutely adore English literature, Shakespeare, anything Victorian. I have always loved words, grammar, Pride and Prejudice …

I am a super-senser who seeks touch. I have always been sensitive all over. So for instance, my husband just caresses my side or kisses me and it transports me to a whole other world. I’m very lucky he is similar to me.

She is a bookworm and a professional student, always learning. I swear she was born with a book in her little baby hands. She has a master’s degree in library studies and I am really proud of her. – Mother of librarian daughter

during conversation faces are so expressive that they distract individuals with ASC. So people with ASC have to decide, Do I watch or listen? This is why those of us with ASC so often don’t look at you when we’re speaking or being spoken to. We can only do one thing at a time.

These are examples, however, of how we can sometimes be taken advantage of. Our loyalty and strong work ethic, combined with not always being able to read people, mean that we can end up in situations where we get saddled with more than our fair share and are overworked and underpaid.

I have yet to meet a woman who was diagnosed as an adult (virtually all of us born before 1990) who has not been sexually violated, abused physically, emotionally, verbally, or all three, by a romantic partner, or is a survivor of rape or incest.

I’ve been surprised at how many autistic people I’ve chatted with who have had similar experiences with meditation, and I wonder if this is because of the way the autistic mind experiences the sensory world. Perhaps for us, to focus our attention on the present moment means that we let in a rush of unfiltered sensory information that is simply too much to endure...

often have somewhat delayed interoception, meaning that I may not realize I am hungry or tired or cold or hot until I am so hungry/tired/cold/hot that I am on the very brink of a breakdown.

When I’m not “productive” (according to my own harsh standards), I struggle with guilt and a wilting sense of self worth. I often have to remind myself that this attitude is actually ableism, embedded deep in my thoughts—that I would never be so hard on an autistic friend as I am on myself.

My interest in learning the names of things in the world has been with me for as long as I can remember.

The names of things, specificity, mattered to me more than it seemed to matter to most other people I knew, and it was puzzling.

You spend a lot of time wondering what’s wrong without ever knowing why—and, for someone who values specificity? It produces the worst anxiety you can imagine.

I still preferred the company of names, of fascinating things in the world, of words. I learned with the advent of universal internet access that my ideal medium for communication, for initial connection, was through written correspondence and chat interfaces.

Not everyone is prepared for exchanges as intense and earnest as the ones I prefer. Not everyone sees hyperfocus to the exclusion of nearly all else as a strength. Not everyone considers encyclopedic memory an advantage, and not everyone regards passion for forms of writing that aren’t guaranteed to earn a fortune as admirable.

What I’ve come to realize is that most people seem to like an exhausting array of things in a general sense, whereas I love a specific and carefully-curated array of things with all my heart.

What are your interests, and why do you take pride in them? Why do they bring you pleasure, or a sense of security, or whatever benefit it is that they happen to bring you? How do these pursuits help you to feel more secure in who you are, and how do you feel about yourself when you have the chance to share them with others?

We construct systems, whether entirely of thought or by using some combination of thought and external manifestation, that help us to interpret data the world throws at us and also to find our place in relation to it.

our difficulty interpreting social cues as maliciousness, our sensory sensitivities as pickiness, or our difficulty with eye contact as disrespect, they are likely to mistreat us—especially if our explanations are then treated as evidence that we can’t be trusted to report accurately on our own experiences.

To avert some of that mistreatment, we often spend major effort to appear more superficially “normal,” which can be necessary, but passing (or attempting to pass) as neurotypical in this way carries its own kind of damage.

You spend a lot of time wondering what’s wrong without ever knowing why.

Many adult autistic people come to a diagnosis or self-diagnosis due to burnout—a period when, after many years of struggling to cope, the demands of everyday life become increasingly difficult or impossible.

Many autistic people have differences in sensory perception. Noises, sounds, textures, or other sensory input unremarkable to others can be painful or aversive to us.

People often wonder what the point is of identifying oneself as autistic in adulthood. The way they see it is, you’ve made it this far, what difference does it make now? What they don’t understand is how autistic people like me have only made it that far by clawing our way there, by struggling in silence, by turning ourselves inside out, and we can’t do it anymore.

And that’s when we will finally seek the answer to a question that’s been at the back of our minds for most of our lives: exactly why am I different from those other people?

Getting an official diagnosis as an adult is difficult:

process of giving meaning to experiences is sometimes known as sensemaking or creating a sensemaking narrative. It happens when our current way of understanding ourselves or our situation is inadequate. Without the Asperger’s piece of the puzzle, I was forced to cobble together incomplete explanations for my developmental history and my life experiences.

meltdowns or shutdowns: periods of intense emotional upset, often characterized by uncontrollable crying, physical withdrawal from the surrounding environment and/or reduction in verbal skills, often followed by a period of intense fatigue

Or a child will be labeled a late bloomer, seeming practically “normal” in their teen years, then seem to backslide dramatically when they go off to college or enter the adult world of work and independent living.

I just liked being around adults a whole lot more than braving the completely unpredictable terrain of recess or the cafeteria (shiver). Anything could happen there. It got loud, and when the other kids shouted, it seemed that they were mad or maybe about to be mad or maybe going to do something they weren’t supposed to and then what??

Like it or not, until we grasp the “whys,” we won’t find effective tools to support the day-to-day tasks that must happen in order to keep a job, maintain a relationship, and feel like competent adults.

Even now as an adult, I know there are few people with whom I can sync up intellectually and emotionally. Everyone else prefers small doses … so I’ve learned to quickly tuck up the deep stuff, bring in the small talk, and smile.

I happened upon the phrase “diffuse sense of self,” and suddenly the existentialist first grader and nameless adult fused into one person. Me. My sense of self is, I realized, often a lack of it.

DSM-IV unwittingly contributed to three new false epidemics in psychiatry—the overdiagnosis of attention deficit, autism, and adult bipolar disorder.

Linda Kreger Silverman describes giftedness as follows: Gifted children and adults see the world differently because of the complexity of their thought processes and their emotional intensity. People often say to them, ‘Why do you make everything so complicated?’ ‘Why do you take everything so seriously?’ ‘Why is everything so important to you?’ The gifted are ‘too’ everything: too sensitive, too intense, too driven, too honest, too idealistic, too moral, too perfectionist, too much for other people! Even if they try their entire lives to fit in, they still feel like misfits. The damage we do to gifted children and adults by ignoring this phenomenon is far greater than the damage we do by labeling it. Without the label for their differences, the gifted come up with their own label: ‘I must be crazy. No one else is upset by this injustice but me.’ (Silverman 1993)

One common denominator was that each person profiled was encouraged and 'stretched' just outside their comfort zone by at least one adult in their life.

While most children with ASD establish warm, loving relationships and secure bonds with parents, siblings, and understanding adults, most, if not all, individuals with ASD experience difficulty relating to peers of approximately the same age. Some children

Already in my field of neurology, researchers are studying the application of low-carbohydrate diets for epilepsy in adults, as well as for Alzheimer’s disease, autism, brain tumors, and Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS).

It can also be awkward when you argue with your partner, for the very person you go to for comfort and advice is the one person you can’t go to in that situation.

Back to School As surreal as being a grown adult in high school was, it was also brief: in only one semester I had completed enough credits to obtain my diploma. From there I went directly to the “Adult Entry Program” at my local university and enrolled. I would spend one semester in remedial classes to catch up on missing prerequisites and then college would begin in earnest. One might imagine that by now I would have learned that being a good student takes significant effort, but I continued to coast my first semester, missing classes, and skipping homework. Then, one time after missing a few days in a row, I returned to discover the professor handing back a midterm exam –– one that I had not written! Apparently, I had skipped class that day. Although it would not lead to me failing the class (and as a remedial class it would not affect my overall grade,) it did require a “mercy pass” on the part of the instructor to get me through. The approach I’d been following all along simply wasn’t working. I had the right goals now but evidently I still lacked the right approach. As I think it might be for many people, the fundamental shift in how I went about things came with the realization that I was not going to school because I had to. No one was making me go. I was there of my own accord, for my own purposes and reasons. This understanding completely transformed the way I went about school; from that point forward, I treated it as something I wanted for myself, and I worked accordingly. By the end of my next semester, I was on the academic Dean’s List, and I would graduate with Great Distinction from the Honors program four years later.

More than thirty years later, I look back on us both with compassion and even some degree of regret. A six-year-old lunchtime existentialist is charming in theory, but exhausting in daily life. Even now as an adult, I know there are few people with whom I can sync up intellectually and emotionally. Everyone else prefers small doses … so I’ve learned to quickly tuck up the deep stuff, bring in the small talk, and smile.

She would never have qualified for a diagnosis of Asperger’s, the term that was associated with verbal skill and “high functioning” autism. But many people whom doctors characterize as “high functioning” have just as many, if not more severe, social impairments as people we might think of as “low functioning.” In addition, bright and verbal people with Asperger’s, who perhaps have undergraduate or graduate degrees, might expect—or their parents might expect—that they will find employment that demands far more social ability than they possess. In those cases, it’s difficult to set one’s sights lower. The same is true for the parents of so-called low functioning adults who set their sights higher.

– but what exactly do we mean by happiness? Is happiness a short-term state (‘I’m happy when I’m playing tennis’) or a longer-term condition (‘I’m a happy person’)? The very thing that makes one person extremely happy (going to a football match, reading a book, being alone...) might indeed induce a state of extreme unhappiness in another. But happiness, however defined, is something generally considered a positive state worth cultivating.

-success does not bring long-term happiness, but that being happy can increase the likelihood of success.

The sad fact is that many autistic adults do not have a job or have never worked for pay. Many autistic people do volunteer work while living on disability payments because they encounter too many issues at a workplace. Even though volunteer work also comes with responsibilities, there's less pressure regarding expectations and deadlines.

High-functioning autism is not a disability but a different way of seeing life, and we should focus on our skills and the things we are capable of rather than the things we cannot do. We are defined by our abilities and our potential, not our problems.