I've been reflecting on the double whammy of having undiagnosed autism and alexithymia. If you say it quickly, it doesn't sound like a big deal to most people. But it really is. Undiagnosed autism makes us wear ourselves out emulating others, and having alexithymia means that we don't notice anything is wrong until we go pop and fall over. So:
Having alexithymia is like driving a car with a broken temerature guage. Most of the time you'll get away with it, but there will come a sunny day on a long uphill stretch where everything goes wrong. Having undiagnosed autism as well is like driving that car across the desert without knowing that it was designed specifically for the arctic(*). (We could extend this to say that after you find out where the car was designed for, try to fit a more sensitive temperature gauge and trogg off to somewhere cooler, how all your desert pals keep asking if you're coming back to the sand when you feel better!)
I was going to write a little story about Alexi, the little Russian bear who can't feel pain who discovers that his feet have been bleeding for weeks though he couldn't feel it, and then his mother asks him why he didn't put his wheels on and Alexi says "Wheels? What wheels?". But the car one made more sense.
(*) in fact, probably the temperature gauge *isn't broken* - the car simply doesn't have one because *it doesn't need one* - it was designed for the arctic, duh!