Life with Aspergers

  It seems an odd question but it's one that crops up with alarming regularity on autism forums with older members.  It's also a loaded question because the literal answer is clearly, "No, there is no charge in the level of autism in us as we age. The subjective answer however is quite different. Image by Cheryl Holt from Pixabay What does it mean? When we ask whether we become more autistic,  what we're really trying to ask is whether our autistic traits become more pronounced over time. It's an interesting question. The visibility of our autistic traits waxes and wanes throughout our lives based on personal and environmental circumstances. To answer this, we need to take a look at how autistic traits manifest in different age groups.  Babies When we start out in life,  the expectations on us are fairly simple.  We are expected to sleep, cry and drink milk. Any differences that we may have will usually have little effect on our ability to deliver in th...

I've been taking a break from blogging for a while because it seemed to me that the world had bigger problems than autism and Asperger's syndrome. I figured that eventually things would go back to normal but now it seems they never will. Too much has changed.  One of the key moments was the loss of one of my good friends, a fellow blogger with autism who I met a couple of decades ago when we all used to call it Asperger's. We never met in person, though we once got within 100 miles of each other before illness intervened.  Her passing hit me hard, but it's odd. It didn't hit so much immediately, but it's certainly been hitting me over the past few weeks.  I'll try to explain that.  Kate. from her facebook pictures, June 2014 (with a few colour tweaks) Losing People I think that initially it's much easier to lose someone online than it is to lose someone you see every day in "real life". It's because with people who are online, we're use...