[Taken from Reddit] Getting diagnosed feels like I've gone backwards.

I'm sorry. I don't think anyone commenting has any idea what you're talking about, which is a feeling you're probably familiar with by now. I understand what you're going through. I'm relearning life too and it's an incredibly painful process sometimes because I'm already very self aware and I now have an entirely different perspective to view my life from.

Maybe we can try to think of it like a puzzle that we've spent our whole life struggling to put together. Someone just handed us the picture of the box. It's not the picture we were expecting. There's some relief being able to make sense of the pieces but now we have to accept that the pieces we were trying to force together are never going to fit together. We'll never be able to make the picture we wanted. That's hard. And the picture doesn't change the fact that the pieces still have to be put together. It doesn't change the fact that we still struggle. All we know is why we struggle and that we will always struggle to some extent.

I do believe in time we will find peace and happiness. I know some autistic older adults and they live beautiful eccentric lives. But they had to find their way just as us.

Labels are useful on a population level and for research, but individually I think they can cause a lot of harm.

A diagnosis is only helpful insomuch as it helps you learn about yourself, but you are not the perfect encapsulation of the average of everyone diagnosed with autism. You are an individual, with a unique mix of traits and abilities, including an ability to grow & develop.

Does autism explain some of who are? Maybe! But does it explain all of who you or all you can become? Hell, no!

Learn about yourself by listening to yourself--there is no better teacher!

Up until my mid-30's, I generally knew myself pretty well. My father had bi-polar which led to my parents getting divorced when I was young, and that led to me spending a lot of time on my own just thinking about thinking.

I could see the systems and operate within them. High school and college were easy. Working in food service and retail and eventually an office were all easy. Being with my wife was easy.

Then we formed a polycule with another couple, with severe ADHD. Everything got harder. Work, marriage, running a household. My memory tanked, my mind slowed to a crawl. I stopped smoking weed but it didn't help. My new GF, in pursuing ADHD medication, got diagnosed as AuDHD and the 3 of them encouraged me to get diagnosed too.

I finally did and I was disappointed how little it did for me. A lot of it really was as simple as "do you like going out and partying or staying home and chilling?", and I would answer "chilling", and that... Means I'm autistic.

So what did I really get out of it? Well for one I'm more comfortable using the word. The biggest upshot of which is that I feel more comfortable interacting with the Lemmy autism communities.

The cognitive assessment was nice. I scored the highest percentiles in Verbal Comprehension and Working Memory, with terribke processing speed. After nearly a year of feeling like my brain was melting and I waa getting terrible at everything, it was nice to have some pretty solid evidence I still have my mind. I scored very low for Processing Speed, and I think trying to keep up with two hyperactive partners may be the source of my issues.

I started reading some books recommended by the psychologist, and so far they have not really resonated with me. Autism is so broad that I think it needs to, and will be, further broken down into subcategories over time. Reading about the experiences of others always has a mix of "woe that's just like me" and "wow that's nothing like me".

The diagnosis drove me to talk to my older sister, who was hospitalized several times before eventually getting diagnosed a few years ago. Talking to her reminded me of how my brain is supposed to work and helped me a lot. I should talk to her more often. She gave me a lot of good advice, but the most profound thing she said was that going out and socializing is something that was actively bad for her mental health, and that she stopped doing it. I had been treating it as a matter of taste. I had been going out tk bars and restaurants and festivals and bowling alleys and all sorts of other places with the polycule. The ADHD seeks novelty and stimulation, so I thought I was giving reasonable compromise to do things I don't like in order to spend time with them. I thought I could just try to deal with it and focus on the positives, but it was actually harmful to my mind and functioning.

There have been negatives too. My wife has said this diagnosis has been a huge revelation for her, but... We just celebrated our 15 year anniversary. We had excellent communication for 13 years before we entered a polycule (that was why were confident doing it in the first place). I kind of feel like she got lost in the sauce of the shiny me relationships and forgot about our marriage, and is blaming it on me being autistic. We astarted couple's therapy to work on things and its going well.

Another negative is... My boyfriend sent me a link to a BS article about a medicine to "reverse autistic symptoms" in mice. And like... I understand he means well. He's seen his wife start Ritalin and has gotten a tremendous increase in functionality from it. But... I like who I am, and I'm incredibly functional whenever I'm not trying to deal with a bunch of frivolous and shallow distractions.

Yeah probably not a good idea if op lives in a country that's compiling a list of people with autism

Maybe you're allowing yourself to have some feelings you got used to bottling before, and that's scary. You are learning to deal with them again, but in a healthy way rather than burying them deep.

Yeah. I didn't think a diagnosis would change as much as it did; I knew I was a scatterbrained introvert, thought I'd made peace with it and found ways to cope. But suddenly with the ADHD+ASD diagnoses, I began to really notice the things that annoyed/drained me. Or, allowed myself to notice.

I don't think I'm less sociable or more exhausted, per se. I just gave myself permission to function on my terms, which includes (but is not limited to) getting irritated by things that I used to not admit to myself irritated me, be a little bit less of a people-pleaser, not ashamed of my excitability, and admit exhaustion in the face of things that "shouldn't" be so exhausting.

In retrospect, it's insane that many people have internalised that medical permission is needed to admit they function better in a personalized (physical/social/cognitive/etc) environment.

What did you think getting a diagnosis would do?