Good morning all 
Here is a quick intro. I am Steve. I'm in my 50's. After years of struggling through school, college, Uni, work and life in general I was diagnosed as dyslexic about 20 years ago. That diagnosis changed my life, it helped by giving me the WHY to my struggles. As life moved on I eventually came to terms and I even reached out to others like minded people to help them through my real life experiences.
In general I feel that I have been fairly successful in education but definitely in work. I've always achieved well and over come my struggles. To me my struggles were normal and I had realised from an early age that if I want to achieve my goals I had to work hard and sometimes make sacrifices.
In these later years I have started to learn more about myself. About 3-4 years ago I had a mental breakdown at work. I started to feel that the world was just simply getting on top of me and I was just too tired to carry on. For years running up to then I had been having suicidal thoughts but I knew I would never act them out, well that is what I thought but who knows what would have happened if I did not eventually seek help. At work I became increasingly tired and even emotional. One day after eventually mentioning my suicidal thoughts to my wife she told me that those thoughts were not normal and I needed help. Up til then I thought that everyone had such thoughts and it was normal. After a period of contemplation I eventually plucked up the courage to call my doctor. I also spoke to my boss at work who I found to be surprisingly understanding and accommodating. Through my doctor I was placed on meds for depression and anxiety and I had CB T therapy. The therapy I found was pointless.
At work and out of the blue a colleague asked me a genuine question about if I was autistic. At that time I had very little knowledge of autism (my only experience was the film Rainman). I became intrigued and started looking into it more. From my research I found out much more about the condition and found that I felt that I did in fact have many autistic traits. Consequently about 3 months ago I was diagnosed with autism. I am in fact now on route for an ADHD assessment.
Despite my diagnosis I still find it hard to talk about it with friends and family and other non-autistic people because I feel that they just simply do not understand and they do not really get it at my mind processes things differently. I would really love to laugh and joke with people who do understand. I therefore thought about setting up a community chat group for autistic, ADHD and AuDHD people where we can talk freely about how we think differently. The group, called WAFFLE (Wonderful Autistic Friends For Life) is set up on the discord platform as I have found this to be a good commuity focus platform and a safe place. The trouble is that I have struggled to find anyone to join it. 
hence I am just talking to myself 
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I have now found one other member who suggested reaching out on this blog. So here I am. TBH I had no idea this blog existed, so since I am a member I my also chat here more. However I would like to invite anyone here to also join my discord group. You are welcome to me anonymous there and you can come or go as you please. I would like it to be a nice place to chat so bad peo5are not welcome. If you are interested then below is an invite link which you can use to join. 
. I hope to see you there and here.