Hi. So I'm new on here. I'm 40 and currently trying to get a diagnosis for autism. Not something I would ever have thought I had until a year ago when my counsellor suggested it as a possibility, but the more I read, the more likely it sounds and really begins to explain all the things I've suffered with through my life.
Looking back, I've spent my whole life masking my issues - even to myself because I didn't really understand them and couldn't have explained them to anyone even if I'd wanted to. It got to a point though where the effort of trying to 'act normal' wore me down and I began having more regular meltdowns. The biggest cause is social anxiety and a real difficulty interacting with groups of people, even when I know them quite well.
Through help from my counsellor I've tried to get better at being aware of where the anxieties are coming from, being less hard on myself when they cause me to act oddly and to be more open with people about who I am and not having to put on an act all the time. It's kind of helped, but it's also meant I now find it even harder to be in some social situations. Before I would have hyper-focussed, got through it and gone home exhausted. Now I feel like I've lost the ability to do that. On Friday night, we went for drinks after work - it was a fairly busy bar and almost instantly I had massive anxiety and had to leave within a few minutes.
I don't know whether I should keep pushing myself into these situations and hope I can develop some new coping mechanisms. Or just accept I can't do them? I would dearly love to be able to hang out with people more easily as I have almost no close friends any more and am feeling pretty isolated - so I'm reluctant to give up on being able to socialise in this sort of environment. But I get so frustrated and depressed when I have to run out of things almost in tears, that I don't want to keep putting myself through it if I might not ever be able to change now.
Does anyone have any experience they can share on this?
