More on the Child Self

This is a letter i wrote in response to a letter someone wrote to me in a group, about the inner feeling of still being in a child's perceptual framework, vs. the public perception that we remain childlike:
...I appreciate the way that you articulated the factors that come into play for you with why YOU feel like a child sometimes, and i feel that a lot of that resonated strongly for me... At 54 i'm still struggling to find a sense of myself as an adult at any time, and yet, as you so importantly brought up, it would not be right for anyone to treat me liked a child because i'm autistic, or even because i feel like a child! (I don't even think children should be treated like children, at least not in the way that children are treated in our society!) I am acutely aware of this especially because i live in a HUD subsidized building, and there always seems to be the tendency for a kind of creeping condescension to seep into the tone of many of the officials of the company that owns the property: i think it's a way for them to avoid feeling a sense of responsibility (or guilt) for at times being ordered to strong-arm us by the heads of the company. One thing that i like about living here, though, is that most of the residents are elderly, and quite a few elder folk get to where they don't care much about labels anymore. I moved in here a year ago, and as i finally came out of my apartment some and started to meet people (after two months hibernating), i would just tell them, "i have Asperger's", and they were like "Oh, ok", and then said, so to speak "let's get on with talking about who we are", and didn't treat me any differently after they knew, other than to ask me more about it, so that they could understand when they needed to. That was so amazing to me! Kids, of course, can be like that too, i think. Of my two little cousins, the older one, age 10, was totally unfazed by my diagnosis: she hasn't learned the kind of prejudice that adults in our society use as the filter through which they see. That filter, i think, has a tendency to take away the humanness of a person. Filter notwithstanding, my little cousin still doesn't "get" me most of the time, anyway.
I think that what you mentioned about paying attention to "the right things", feels to me in part like my lack of "perspective in differentiating the relative significance, or 'importance' of stimuli". In addition to that, the lack of a definite sense of time feels very child-like to me (although how could i be sure about that: after all, when i was a child, i was an autistic-spectrum child ;~> ), but another thing that for me is not like the NT adults i meet, is that i don't have a sense of a role in life that i'm identified with. I have never had anything near like a stable career.
Despite the fact that being Autistic-spectrum has certainly been a disability for me, and this persistent sense of still being a child, i'm realizing there is a lot that i've learned from my experiences, and my therapist tells me that i have my own wisdom, which i don't need to judge by the standards of our society at large. He has a very non-typical orientation toward life, and people, however - that we all have value, our lives all have value, which is outside of whether conventional views see value in them or not. That has really helped me a lot, because i don't think i really completely believed that until he started telling me that (or maybe i just wasn't ready to believe it until recently - i think perhaps my diagnosis helped me with that) He has ADHD, so he is Neurodivergent himself.
I remember you mentioned a while back about how stress can make an Autistic person move into a deeper level of Autistic response, become more reactive to overstimulus, more prone to meltdowns, more negative toward change in environment etc. That has definitely been a seriously debilitating factor in my life, and yet people in my family, and other people i've met, don't seem to understand that, if they haven't seen me enter that state repeatedly throughout my adult life whenever things changed, causing me to be stressed (i've lost a lot of jobs that way...). My therapist says that i do have some characteristics which are more deeply Autistic, but then i think that it's likely that for many people on the spectrum we can contain a whole spectrum of characteristics within ourselves...
Thank you for writing and responding to my thoughts about the internal child perception (don't know quite what to call that), and i appreciate your thoughts very much! I will look forward to hearing more of your perspectives.