I saw someone’s tiktok that said it hasn’t been open and am just curious if that’s true and what your experience has been recently (we’ll be there next week).
Our daughter’s bun Joel is free roam but his home base is in her room. She’s in Florida working at Disney this semester so we got a camera so she can check in on him and I love checking it to see what kind of antics are going on when I have to go into the office. My husband works from home and I’m home most of the time but I caught this today and it made me laugh!
He does not like when the cats come sniffing around his cage! 😂
Hi, so my son is turning 20 in a few weeks and is high functioning autistic, has anxiety and severe OCD. This all manifested itself when he was about 13/14 yrs old. He had some mild traits of autism when he was little and we had him evaluated twice growing up but they said he wasn’t. They think that puberty just made it all blow up. The last 6-7 years have been so difficult. He went from being fairly neurotypical to within a year needing an IEP and couldn’t write or hardly talk anymore because of how bad the OCD was affecting him. He has “just right” OCD. We have been to every doctor imaginable, every OCD program you can think of, had scans and tests and bloodwork, psych evaluations, therapy, we’ve tried experimental stuff, so many things to get him help but the best we’ve been able to do is cut the OCD symptoms in half with meds.
Anyway, he is so lonely and it is breaking my heart and I don’t know how to help him. He’s just interested in all of this stuff most people aren’t and he will start talking to people including close family and their eyes just glaze over within 2 minutes. He doesn’t read social cues well at all but will finally realize or we will try to discreetly pull him away to relieve the people and then he’ll end up hiding in the bathroom crying because he feels like such an outsider and he’s so lonely. He thinks people don’t like him and he doesn’t fit in and there’s no place for him in this world. Life is so hard for him, he just processes things so differently and everything upsets him all the time.
I’ve tried to get him playing D&D at our local library and he does go to that sometimes and enjoys it but hasn’t made any connections outside of it. He’s very polite and kind and is not afraid to talk to people. He tries so hard which is why this is killing me.
I’ve tried to get him to come see if there are subs on here but it’s hard for him to type conversations because the OCD really affects the way he writes. He puts tons of unnecessary extra words and certain phrases in his writing.
He is going to college but not even really for a degree or anything at this point because the way he is now, he can’t really handle working. Our state disability board is working with him to maybe find him a job for a few hours a week. But I work at a huge state university near me so I get free tuition so my motivation for him enrolling is to just get him out of the house and still around kids his age. He goes PT and rides in with me since he can’t drive. He’s in an exploratory program now but I don’t even care about the academics at this point (although he is a good student but needs a lot of accommodations), I just need him in social environments with the hopes maybe he’ll finally make a connection with someone. He said he has tried to start conversations with people in class and a few times he did chat with others about something they were learning about but that was it.
Are there any sites for young autistic adults to meet people where they can look for others with the same interests? I feel like there HAS to be people out there that are similar to him and like the same stuff, right? I just don’t know how to find them because what we’ve been doing is not working and I worry so much about him.
One of the things he loves to do is collect and customize action figures and he is in a big action figure collectors club and they have a meet up once a month but it’s basically just a bunch of gen-x guys (me and his dad’s age) that get together to trade or sell each other action figures. I’ve taken him many times and they are all very nice to him and he has a good time but they aren’t really people he is going to be close friends with or meet a girl if you know what I mean.
I’m just struggling and would love some advice!