Hi all. I'm a 24-year-old recently diagnosed with ASD. I’ve had a lot of mixed emotions since my diagnosis – at first, I didn’t really feel anything except maybe justified in having sought a diagnosis in the first place. However, I got a copy of the letter from the assessing psychiatrist to my GP the other day, and when I read it, I immediately burst into tears. It wasn’t like the letter was a personal attack – it was just detailing what the psychiatrist observed when they spoke to me, but I think it stuck in a way that simply knowing didn’t. Like up until that moment, my autism was little more than an abstract concept and a bundle of crippling hypersensitivities. But seeing it all written in plain English – things I hadn’t realised about myself, like my ‘unusual and rehearsed’ speech pattern, missing conversational cues (still questioning what exactly those were), and limited emotional understanding – affected me in a way I really wasn’t expecting. Now, I don’t know what I feel. Has anyone else had a similar experience after their diagnosis?
