What am i ?

No you aren't alone. ASD or not, lots of folk have to battle to get the diagnosis that leads to the right solution.

Thanks Dawn. One journey ends and another begins. . . At least I have a more settled mind (for now). More investigation is def required, but I’m not the only one in the boat.  Thankyou for your insight.

Happy to be useful. I'm diagnosed as autistic, but there are times that I doubt that I am, I think that imposter syndrome is quite common in autistic people who manage to function reasonably well in society. It often surfaces when having an interaction with someone who is more obviously debilitated by their autism. I have a useful way of combatting these feelings, as I have a very specific sensory problem with touching nylon fabric. It revolts me at a visceral level, I feel like curling up and dying, I just think about that and realise that I am definitely not neurotypical.

Hmmm....this needs a really thorough second look.

You can't diagnose either autism or ADD/ADHD in an hour. You might in that time pick up that an assessment is necessary, but they'd need to dig a bit deeper than that as all sorts of other things are possible.

It maybe you have anxiety because of a sensory processing disorder without ASD, you might have something else altogether but have some ASD traits even if sub-spectrum, or you could just be a subtle presentation of autism. And errr yeah, I'd never have suspected that linguist and a qualified trainer like me could be austic either, but so am. I'd been watching Rainman too many times too, I guess. So, yes, it IS possible you are one of us. Or this could all be way off the mark.

No diagnosis of any kind will help unless it's the right one and the wrong one can result in treatment which would make matters worse - walked that road! And you are kind of feeling this might not fit. You say the diagnosis was 'informal'...and anyway no one diagnoses Asperger's anymore - just autism. You need more digging to get there.

Gather together what you can about your child hood and see some one with experience in autism AND other conditions who can detect co-morbidities and other things ASD could be confused with and get an in depth assessment. You will know when the diagnosis is right. You'll read the criteria and see you. Good luck.

It’s like your telling my story. I can do everything, but it just makes me tired. That’s so reassuring. 
Thank you.

No single autistic individual has all the traits that have been ascribed to autism. Every autistic is a patchwork of traits, difficulties and abilities. I get sarcasm and irony, I'm also very good at faces and expressions. I'm poor at body language, however. Even social difficulties can be overcome with intellect, which is where autistics differ from neurotypicals, who do these things subconsciously. For example, I make good eye contact with people, but I do it consciously, I time duration and when it is appropriate to make or break it. I have learnt what people find comfortable. For about 99% of the time, when I'm in public, I pass as neurotypical, but it comes at a price, exhaustion. Doing apparently neurotypical stuff using the intellect is just tiring. When I was working, my family suffered, as I needed a lot of time when at home just being alone, in order to recover from all the effort of socialising at work.

So much of that makes sence. Most of my school therapists were probably thinking that i stuttered because i didnt have the words of the sentence in my head before i said it. "Think of the words them say them" my speech therapists would say. They probably thought i was peeling or finding the words. With me i stutter less when im free forming. Saying my name at age 10 however could take a whole minute. (A very long minute) and i would invaribly have to write it down for them at the end. Thanks for the link

I failed to mention- my awareness = stuttering are more to do with actively peeling through the 'library' of this brain of mine, and due to my brains computational problems in these Lobes, experiencing a glitch. 

When I was young, I just didn't speak much. Shy, Mouse, Ghost were tags I'd receive. It is the active effort of a part of the brain we don't innately heavily focus in on (semiotics / grammar) that will take a minute to catch up to speak / speed. 

This is written in a way NTs might want to read it, but it basically suggests we tend to have Hyper-Symmetrical neuro-wiring. www.huffpost.com/.../amp

Thankyou so much for your observation. Communication has always been an effort and fitting in is something I consciously do. It looks like im going to do more reading up on ASD. Cheers

The Doc that diagnosed me was a very busy General Psychiatrist that normally deals with younger people. I suggested it may be comorbid with ADHD and he shut me down. His main arguement was you wouldnt have gone to Uni with ADHD, you wouldnt have handled it. Indeed it took a monumental struggle to get a 2/2. He made it very clear that i didnt need any meds.

I agree 1hr is a little too short for an assessment. Thankyou so much for your input

I definitly get rumination (constantly) and dont like noisy rooms. I do wear a tinted photo chromatic glasses. Its really interesting to hear your perspective on this. Thankyou

Being conscious of social nuances and making the conscious effort to fit in, understand, communicate is - from my understanding - one thing which marks an Autistic brain. There are some sayings which make sense because they're sensible. I can genuinely say when I was 15 and told I couldn't see the forest for the trees, I didn't even know that I didn't know how confusing that statement was. I was so far removed from understanding I didn't understand that I wasn't even prompted to work out what my instructor was 'suggesting'. 

NeuroTypical individuals have these "Defence Mechanisms" which originally were thought of as 'encoding' from society. Their Nature is designed to be Nurtured a particular way. And so through language, they are able to integrate these encodings because that's how their asymmetrical brains are wired. So, there will rarely occur a prompt that something is getting lost in translation. What's more, they can seamlessly 'mature' through a mechanism called Sublimation, where some things you've mentioned never need to happen on a conscious level. Communication almost always feels fluid. Language is fluid. It's REALLY odd when someone doesn't understand what they're communicating and so, The Double Empathy Problem. 

Some of us spend a little more time and work studying matters of communication - especially when the confusion is severe or, in your case, there is a noticeable stutter. As I've become more aware of my communication deficit with neurotypicals, I occasionally stutter. Before I 'woke up' to just how confused and in a haze I was, my timing was terrible, my rhetoric unrecognisable, I have a feeling that being hard met with a very tactile reality something is amiss, forces us to do a bit more work. 

Sometimes an Autistic individual will have made it through life with little complications or able to ignore the nuances of differences because this person is not greatly impacted. I would suggest this might be more often found in a male dominant within his own culture who's specialised in a field and has a steady income enough to make his wife happy. That's an observation. 

There is some overlap between autistic and ADHD traits so you may have ADHD and have been misdiagnosed. But it is also possible to be both, what kind of doctor did you see? 1hr seems a bit short for an ASD assessment

I get idioms. Often I get a literal picture in my head but switch and know what the idiom means. I have always been interested in language. 

I think I notice small facial details that other people don't do. On the other hand, facial expressions can go completely over my head and I can't interpret or misinterpret them. Or theres a delay. Social interaction nuance is something which I struggle with however. Everyone else seems to get it except me.

Sometimes my sarcasm has been missed by others and interpreted literally.  I think it was my tone of voice and facial expression not matching the sentiments. I can have quite a dry sense of humour.

Maybe think about not just social interaction. There are many facets to autism such as executive function difficulty, inertia, rumination, sensory aspects.

Maybe your score is indicative it's not autism. You said the doctor said it was an informal diagnosis. A specialist like a clinical psychologist would be able to fully assess you.