Hi everyone, new member and first post. I'm sorry if I ramble on a bit, but it's just the way I am.
I'm a single 61 year old guy, bought a house with my ex, had kids, she ripped me off, so I'm now single. Mortgage is paid off and I have no debts. I live in a nice bungalow, have it almost how I want but it's taken me 5 years to get here.
I've always felt different and even as a kid aged 4-5, I told my mother, "I feel different and don't know why", she just said, "you are who you are, so just be happy", this has stuck with me all these years.
A year ago I was diagnosed as possibly being on the spectrum and it's taken me a while to get this confirmed, though not shocked, it's given me the answer to why I'm the way I am. I did many tests, had question and answer appointments and was eventually informed I was a very high functioning adult and had scored 87% on the tests I'd done, whatever this number represents.
I've always been very intensive about my interests, to the point where I couldn't sleep for thinking about them. I don't think I've had more than 3 hours sleep my whole life, this took it's toll on me when I was working a highly stressful job with long hours and with constant changes to planning and I had a seizure. I didn't know who I was for 4 months and when I eventually recovered some of my memory, it was evident that I had very little in my head between 1986 and 2016, so thirty years of my life was missing and I could envisage a space in my brain where there was a gap and I felt it was a black hole.
I'm a country boy and once upon a time, knew all the people in the village I live in and could remember the smallest jot of information about them, (not gossip or bad things, just what I could remember as I was growing up). Now I could hardly remember anyone or anything about them, what my hobbies were or the simple things like what was the correct answer to a question. I had to relearn who my friends were and basically everything about me.
Eventually, a few things came back and I started building up a knowledge about myself, it was then my girlfriend at the time noticed I had a few peculiarities that I wasn't aware of, it wasn't anything scary, but what is as I now know is "stimming". The things I've found out about myself and the challenges I've gone through are nothing short of remarkable, but I have no knowledge of this, because of the seizure.
My memory is now shot, I still suffer from very little sleep, my trust in people is like a brick wall, I hardly eat, spend hours just walking and trying to revisit places and hope recreate a memory in my mind that I can rely on.
I have Irlen Syndrome, get frustrated at having to explain myself all the time, becoming withdrawn, and many issues linked to ASD, it's causing so much anxiety within me, that it's leaving me exhausted. I'm so highly strung, I have difficulty in concentrating, settling down, relaxing and sleeping, I just feel I have to doing something all the time and being busy.
I feel that I have to be constantly doing something and feel guilty if I take some time to myself to enjoy my hobbies, I plan to have a few hours to go fishing or mountain biking, then think I could use the time doing something constructive and go and do that instead. I've not been fishing for 5 years, rode a bike for 3, I've not been to the horse racing with my friends for over 10 years and hardly ever do anything sociable.
Is there anything I can do to get me out of this life wasting spiral I'm in?