Did you receive a very late autism diagnosis/realisation?

This is a wonderful thread and really great to hear about people’s experiences. I was diagnosed very recently in my early 40s. I’ve experienced many of the challenges others here face and come up on the threads throughout my life, but just thought I was weird and my family just thought I was ‘special’ (not always in a good way). Like many NTs my lack of awareness about the realities of autism and how it is experienced by people meant that I had a stereotypical view of it myself until I went on a work course a year or so ago that explained that (as we know) autistic people do have empathy (which some of us describe as too much sometimes) and other myth-busting things that made me think ‘hang on a minute, I know what’s going on now’. Diagnosis for people that seemed to ‘cope’ was out of the question in my area in the 80s and 90s, so I don’t wish I could go back, but I do wish I’d known and could then have avoided trying to be someone I wasn’t in my youth. Very happy to know now though and to have found this community.

This is a wonderful thread and really great to hear about people’s experiences. I was diagnosed very recently in my early 40s. I’ve experienced many of the challenges others here face and come up on the threads throughout my life, but just thought I was weird and my family just thought I was ‘special’ (not always in a good way). Like many NTs my lack of awareness about the realities of autism and how it is experienced by people meant that I had a stereotypical view of it myself until I went on a work course a year or so ago that explained that (as we know) autistic people do have empathy (which some of us describe as too much sometimes) and other myth-busting things that made me think ‘hang on a minute, I know what’s going on now’. Diagnosis for people that seemed to ‘cope’ was out of the question in my area in the 80s and 90s, so I don’t wish I could go back, but I do wish I’d known and could then have avoided trying to be someone I wasn’t in my youth. Very happy to know now though and to have found this community.