Retiring While Autistic

Someone on LinkedIn asked how people were doing in their autistic retirements. "Great!" I responded. After all, I had written a book and several articles, spoken several times about neurodiversity, played music in public, read a ton of books, traveled extensively in Italy, twice, and even learned to bumble along in cracked Italian. 

But what about when energy flags, or when I'm too ashamed of our disintegrating democracy to travel abroad? What about when I miss having a kid in the house? What about when I miss the old joy of taking on and exposing a corporate defendant, or the small pleasures of an office chat?

I'm beginning to think a lot about how to continue living a full life as an aging autistic person. If anyone finds this blog, I'd love to hear your thoughts, too.

An Autistic Year Abroad (and a Rebirth Fifty Years Later)

Most of what I have written for the press are articles about the value of neurodiversity in the workplace. (See HERE or HERE or HERE). Neurodiversity is like every form of diversity--it brings new and useful ways of seeing and understanding into our businesses and civic enterprises.

But life as an undiagnosed autistic or neurodivergent person can be bewildering, so recently I wrote about my experience fifty years ago in a year abroad program in Florence, Italy. 

You can find that article HERE. 

I write about how neurodivergent people can find themselves alone in a crowd. Happily, however, we adapt to some degree, even if it takes a long, long time. We gain hard-won skills. We learn to recognize a facial gesture. We learn to talk about nothing. We learn to get by.