I am bad at it, too, but for me it used to be this excited 12 year old busting in with a wide smile and eager to make friends. Can you imagine? To me, now that I know, it fills me with the most ungodly, inhuman shame when I think about it.
I truly did not know.
Throwing my arms up and saying something with great passion, like a kid. Rolling around in the grass with the kids when they came by, not even realizing the other "grown ups" were not doing that.
If I had been Dxed and everyone knew, it would have been OK.
But, of course, can you even imagine the reactions?
Now I have lost all my spark. I never even smile in public. My eyes are dim and I don't even talk in public and have pulled away from even my closest family members. I do not even talk to God as I look back and realize that if he exists, he, too, hates me.
I have no more joy even in my special interests and see no point of anything other than doing the stims and actions I have to do to keep me from losing any more of my mind than I already have.
Every day is a struggle not the end it. But aging with autism is way worse than just having autism. Having it when you are young, your body still works, etc......having it as you age and the body breaks down.......can you say TERROR??
Social issues are the least of my troubles. It's how to handle when you need an operation or your foot gets crushed and you can't even walk and you are hyper and need to run. It's when your eyes get injured and you cannot even READ. It's being a piece of aging meat with no skills other than a 12 year old would handle it.
I think we incarnate on this planet in order to lose our naivete and learn to perceive ourselves - physically and psychologically - in relation to others:
"Shame which can make the body blush and writhe, confirms character’s instinctive abhorrence of innocence" ~ James Hillman.
Once we've learnt how our words and behaviours are perceived and evaluated, then we are in a position to decide how much importance to attached to others' evaluations. The point is not to do so blindly but to be fully informed when making that decision.
The character Katherine in the 2003 film 'Under the Tuscan Sun' gives a speech about always retaining your childish enthusiasm:
"You have to live spherically, in many directions. Never lose your childish enthusiasm...and...things will come your way."
"Remember at the end when another man left her in the most terrible way. She thinks it's all over for her. Then, she see's some children playing in the street making music, and before she knows it, she's smiling again. That's what [?] always said.. no matter what happens, always keep your childish innocence...it's the most important thing."
The unspoken caveat is that childish enthusiasm needs to be neurotypically expressed if it's to be socially acceptable - that is, with a measure of reflexiveness or self-awareness. Aspergers tend to be un-self-aware and that's the actual trait that seems to attract opprobrium: a lack of self-awareness.
There doesn't seem to be any way around this: we do need to lose our childish enthusiasm (naivete) and learn how we are perceived and evaluated BUT without losing one's spark - at least not permanently. It's a tricky balancing act: losing one's naivete without become cynical or embittered.
The loss of naivete requires a 'dark night of the soul' when our light does indeed go out - depression, anxiety, loneliness, low self-esteem, self-loathing, pain, heartbreak, loss etc. Anything less will not get the job done (raising our level of consciousness). Although unavoidably painful, it is important to maintain faith in oneself and one’s individual values. A great book to read while one is going through this process / re-evaluating the self is Thomas Moore's 'Dark Nights of the Soul'. It manages to find all kinds of beauty in the dark, but you do need lateral thinking to see it.
Maybe the spiritual test on Earth is how many hurts, disappointments, internal conflicts and insoluble problems we can live with without either imploding (self-destructing) or exploding (destroying others). How much meaninglessness, senselessness, emptiness, injustice, disapproval, rejection, thwarting, anonymity, tension and wrongness we can absorb without losing faith or giving up hope, whether in ourselves or in each other?
P.S. I should add that there are areas in which NTs are unaware and need to develop their consciousness - perhaps the topic of another thread?
