Women Diagnosed with ASD as an Adult

Not yet, but I'm waiting for an assessment. I'm in my forties with anxiety and I only started to suspect I might have ASD when a doctor suggested that my daughter might  be autistic. The more I read about ASD in girls the more I thought that this all sounded a lot like me and my life too. I was actually, embarrassingly, shocked to realise that everybody didn't spent their lives feeling like freaks and outcasts. I'd always assumed that everybody was just better at hiding their discomfort at stuff or not talking about their interests or the fact they found socialising utterly exhausting. I've founded watching YouTubers like Purple Ella and Yo Samdy Sam really helpful. 

Yep! I'm 57, and blimey, where to start?

It's a common story for women - and some guys and quite a lot of people in the LGBTQ community, to go through difficult childhoods and no one notice that they are autistic until trying to live an ND experience in an NT world eventually smacks them into a mental health problem and then, if they are lucky, the services will spot it, and if they are not, they are left to suffer until they work it out themselves, like I was.  I'm relieved for you that your GP has done that screening and made the referral.

Common problems often misdiagnosed for women are: social anxiety, for obvious reasons, OCD, eating disorders and in my case a dangerous and debilitating specific phobia.

For my story, I've had a life long abject terror of doctors, dentists, my own body; often finding the brain shuts down can't get any words out, can't absorb what they are saying, freezing to the spot in a literal paralysis, then at times sudden escape sometimes into the path of danger, and finally BANG! One day there was a full blown, head banging meltdown with more afterward.  No one understood.  I did not understand what was happening.  Mental Health Services are useless with everyone, but when I just couldn't fit any of their NT therapies, they just put me in the bin and left me there to go through crisis after crisis.  

Then, one day as I hauled myself out of another anxiety crisis, I started googling the credible sources.  Someone, somewhere had to be experiencing what I was experiencing. There had to be a way to help myself.  So, having researched every personality disorder in the book every thing I could find on self harm - I couldn't relate to any of it, I was about to give in, then I clicked on the NAS link to the description of a melt down by mistake.  It had been coming up in all my searches and I'd skipped over it, time and again, 'cos I'm not autistic, right?

But I read it and I cried.  I showed it to my husband who agreed THAT was what he was looking at.  I was still scratching my head as to how that could be so; I was good at drama, I'm a linguist, I'm a qualified trainer, I have been known to go to parties and enjoy them... Then, I read the childhood indicators - all there!  The fact I played with no one in primary, 'cos I really didn't "do" play as a kid, I can't hit a ball with a bat or ride a bike, I had monumental issues with food and dinner ladies forever shouting at me, the long list of things that frightened me as a child were all sensory things, I had playground melt downs when I was relentlessly bullied in middle school, that I had zero attachment to my mother; even as a small baby I wouldn't be hugged.  And I already had a dyslexia diagnosis.  Suddenly I knew and my salvation would lie in some one looking at this objectively and telling me the truth.

See, I can't speak for every one, because we are all different, but thing is many of us have all these problems which are true of us and attribute them to something else; bullies are horrible people and the British just make vile dinners, my dyslexia explaining the co-ordination.   Moreover, girls in particular, and in particular clever girls, sometimes learn to compensate fairly early for the social and communication deficit. They can be great people studiers.  They listen and analyse their way intellectually to knowing what's going on around them, what people feel and need from them and how to talk to them.  But LISTEN and THINK are the operative words - for me anyway - I'm not reading their body language very well.  I'm not feeling my way to this information like NTs do.  In fact, I had no clue that they were doing it.  I thought everyone had to think carefully and hard to know what someone else intended or wanted. And you see we can get good at that.  So good, no one notices much more than the odd faux pas or missed joke or that we're sometimes looking a bit tired in a group setting. And we do not always notice ourselves until we start picking apart the processes we are actually using to get to the feelings and thoughts of others.  Same applies sometimes to our own emotions.  Sometimes I have strong emotion I can't identify straight away.  I have to analyse the circumstances around it to decide what I should or do feel.  My own body does not give me enough information to know. It doesn't even tell me I'm hungry half the time, actually.

Mine is just one story, others will tell you theirs.  But you are so not alone.  

The good news for you is that finding the truth can change everything.  We will never be NOT autistic and I wouldn't want to be anything other than I am.  And it's not going to be an easy ride, but once we know the facts about what causes our distress we can figure out some coping strategies.  To what extent are we prepared to bend to the NT world, to what extent so we want people to bend to us?  Are there therapies or gadgets or different approaches out there which actually work for us for the bits we are finding personally hard?  And then of course, you might find autism is lying behind a few of your strengths too

I hope that when you've been through this process, you find the truth that leads you to the solutions that will empower you.  Good luck