On being newly identified as Autistic.

You have not become Autistic. You have always been Autistic. What has changed is that you now have a word for it, and a community, and a way of reading your own life.

For many of us, identification comes late. In our thirties, forties, fifties, sixties. Sometimes after a child is identified and we recognise ourselves in the description. Sometimes after burnout, breakdown, a relationship ending, a job lost. Sometimes after years of following the wrong diagnoses into the wrong treatments. We were called anxious, depressed, bipolar, borderline, difficult, shy, intense, rude, too much, not enough. In some cases those diagnoses were real. In others they were guesses made with the wrong frame.