Hi, I’m brand new here (and feeling a bit daft about posting)!
I don’t know anybody who was diagnosed as an adult, but I had an assessment yesterday, will find out if I’m receiving a diagnosis or not in a month, and now I’m feeling quite alone with my emotions about it all - really hoping somebody might be able to relate and offer some words of wisdom!
So, I’ve suspected for about a decade, ever since my kid was diagnosed (lots of lightbulbs during that process), then my partner at the time gently suggested I might want to look into assessment for myself. I checked out AQ at that time, and did it again a couple of times over the years (other people also raised it with me during this time, hence repeated tests), and I always scored high…but I just convinced myself I must have been lying (though I know I definitely wasn’t), or that everyone gets results like that (I know they don’t). During covid lockdowns everything came to a head, I couldn’t pretend to myself that things were okay any more, and I was referred for both adhd and autism assessments.
I was diagnosed ADHD, and that was fine. I knew I obviously had it, as did everyone who’d ever spent time with me - not something I managed to hide at all! I didn’t hear anything at all about my autism assessment…until a week ago when I finally answered a call from a number that had been trying me for a couple of months (anxiety over ‘why are they calling so often’ outweighed anxiety over answering the phone 
) - suddenly I had more forms to fill in, then less than a week later I was having an assessment. Pretty overwhelming, to be honest!
The issues I’m having now, that I can’t really talk to anybody about: first, I didn’t realise that I was in denial. I’d asked to be assessed for a reason, I was referred for a reason, but I convinced myself I was either a borderline case or not at all. When I took RAADS for the first time before this assessment I was expecting a borderline score for sure…but it came out in the 180s (even with me being cautious in how I answered some of the questions to avoid skewing the result) and that sent me into a bit of a spiral. I went looking for other diagnostic tests, thinking I’d probably find one that would negate the others, but I consistently got results that essentially said “you’re autistic af mate“. I still felt like a fraud, and for some reason I don’t fully understand just didn’t want to accept this (thoughts like “haha no that can’t be right”), so I finally started properly looking into if/how I might actually fit the criteria and started to think about if there were any examples - again, I expected to find that my experiences didn’t ‘fit’…but it turned out there was a lot. Overwhelmingly so - to a point of suddenly thinking “how was this missed for four decades!??” I also seem to have had very, very similar experiences to other women who have gone through life undiagnosed. Loads of stuff from my past, from early childhood onwards, suddenly made a lot of sense when I looked at my memories through this lens. I then watched the Christine McGuinness documentary and felt very ‘seen’. Still felt like a total fraud for some reason, though!
After the assessment yesterday I’ve woken up at 5am in a cold sweat worrying I’ve made an idiot of myself, or that I didn’t communicate effectively, or that the (really lovely) woman I spoke to thinks I’m faking - going over every single thing that was asked, everything I said, how I behaved, EVERYTHING. I mask really well most of the time - I can make a great first impression and people usually wouldn’t realise how much anxiety I’m dealing with under the surface; I’m having thoughts like “what if I hid it too much?” but also “I was really nervous and stressed out - what if I didn’t hide it but she thinks I was putting it on!?”
Can anybody relate to any of this? Sorry it’s so long, hugest thanks to anyone who makes it through this novel!
