Published on 12, July, 2020
I was diagnosed 2 weeks ago at the age of 31 and I definitely wasn’t expecting this huge sense of imposter syndrome!
What I find confusing is my issues didn’t really start to come to light until I was 17/18 and started having panic attacks (they generally happened in busy environments or around flashing lights). After that it was down hill from there and my ability to function just got worse and worse.
Prior to that though I was so good at hiding the things that made me anxious and I never really shared my emotions. I don’t recall having panic attacks and coped reasonably well with flashing lights etc. While especially in my teen years I always felt different for no particular reason, I still managed to get by with no obvious issues.
I did stim as a child and teen but very subtly (scalp picking, picking the skin around my nails, swinging on chairs, smelling things, rubbing my feet together when in bed, dancing, moving about a lot etc) but as I went into adulthood and I became more educated about stims I definitely started doing more obvious stims (rocking, ticing, singing, swaying from side to side, rolling of the eyes, nose scrunching etc) I sometimes feel I started doing them due to being influenced. Yet I now can’t stop doing them because they make me feel so much happier. This whole thing is confusing to me.
Why do you think a lot of adults who get diagnosed late seem to have got by with no obvious signs until something big happens to them as they get older? Why do you think as we get older we can’t seem to cope as well? I would love to know other people’s thoughts on this because it blows my mind that I had this my whole life yet managed to get by and function.....
I've thought about this a lot and honestly I think I just got lucky and went to a secondary school that was a really good fit for me. I liked having a regular timetable and I was good at enough subjects to stay out of trouble. Didn't have many friends but not many enemies either. It was a grammar school full of kids desperate to go to university so mostly people shut up and got on with their work, which created a nice quiet environment. I loved exams because each one was three hours where I could sit in silence and solve interesting puzzles. So even though I'd been labelled "shy" since early childhood and it was obvious I wasn't normal, I was doing very well on paper. It was only with the chaos of adulthood that I started to struggle, and even then, only when COVID threw off my routines and forced me into far more contact with others than I'd had before that things got extreme enough for me to realise it wasn't just anxiety I was experiencing. As soon as I picked up a book about anxiety in autistic adults, everything clicked.
Yes, I was probably relatively fine until I started my first job. I drank a lot when I was at university but so did most students in my day so at the time I didn’t think much of it but with the benefit of hindsight I was probably self-medicating.