#CW #death #dying #suicide
You won’t find much first hand stuff written about #autism and #ageing because relatively few of us older people have been diagnosed (or recognised ourselves) as autistic. It’s beginning to shift a little, but quite slowly.
#AllAutistics
#autism
1/

I’ve never feared physical signs of ageing as the beauty industry suggests I’m supposed to. Worrying about wrinkles seems strange to me because I find older faces far more characterful and beautiful than blank Botoxed faces with expressions erased.
Ageing scares some people.
2/

Of course we’re all ageing from the moment we’re born but at some point we get defined as ‘old’. If we live in an ageist society where ‘old’ is seen as being unattractive, burdensome and ineffective it’s not surprising we want to resist this and stay young.
3/

Yesterday was my birthday. 61 sounds a lot older than 60. At 60 I was on the cusp of my sixties, but at 61 I slipped right in. Getting older means friends of a similar age start dying. I’ve lost two already. Mortality becomes a more immediate consideration than it was before.
4/

The day before our wedding my partner and I went and made wills. Some people said “that’s not very romantic” whereas we thought it was a lovely way to seal our enduring commitment. Back then when we thought about dying it was mainly in the context of an accident, not ageing.
5/

At the start of this year, when the pandemic first hit, my sense of mortality suddenly shifted. Imminent death seemed a real possibility. I thought about what being hospitalised might involve and wrote an advance directive. While I’m not afraid of death, I am afraid of dying.
6/

The reason I’m afraid of #dying is connected with being #autistic. In our society death is highly medicalised. My experiences of being under the care of doctors and nurses has not been good. On the only occasions I was hospitalised (during childbirth) I got told off a lot.
7/

There’s nothing worse than being scared and in excruciating pain, and getting an irritable response not empathy. One of the reasons I got my autism diagnosis was because I thought the medical profession might cut me some slack. But sadly that hasn’t been my experience so far.
8/

When I think about #dying it isn’t the fact of being dead that worries me. I don’t have any expectations of what happens afterwards. I imagine it’s just nothingness. But I have seen people dying in #hospital. That’s what concerns me. I think I would struggle with it.
#autism
9/

Last night someone tweeted a photo of a patient being cared for in an Intensive Care Unit. Their body was covered in wires and monitors and they were surrounded by machines. My reaction was driven by my sensory sensitivities. So much light, noise, touch. Far, far too much.
10/