I Just Got Diagnosed with Autism. Now What?

1 New Email.

My heart started pounding. I took one big, deep breath in and quietly muttered, “Here it goes.” I had been through this once before.

When I was nineteen, sitting in couples counseling over something as ordinary as how my husband loaded the dishwasher, the counselor paused and looked at me with a kind of curiosity that felt misplaced for the moment. “Do you like to read books?” he asked. The question caught me off guard. I had just been explaining why the dishwasher had to be loaded a certain way.

“Well, I’ll read about twenty pages and stop,” I said, confused. “Why?”

A series of questions followed, strange ones at the time, and then he said it plainly: “I believe you have ADHD.”

“ADHD?” I remember thinking. I was here about dishes. Now you’re telling me I have had something my entire life? That is something other people have, not me.

It felt like one of those movie scenes where a character sees their life flash before them. I began scanning backward. Math struggles. Messy rooms. Half-finished projects. A constant search for motivation. It made sense. ADHD fit. It explained the chaos, the velocity, the restless appetite of my mind. It was easier to accept because it felt explanatory.

Autism did not feel like that.

Autism felt heavier. More complex. Less flattering. ADHD felt kinetic. Autism felt structural. And structure felt harder to accept.

Still, I opened the email.

Thirty-three pages of analysis. Testing. Observations. Clinical language summarizing my life. “Yeah, yeah,” I thought as I skimmed the opening paragraphs. “I already know these things about myself.” I did a quick ADHD speed read and gave the mouse wheel a scroll for its life and made my way to the only question that mattered. Diagnosis.

Autism Spectrum Disorder, Level 1.

I sat there asking myself, “How? How does this make sense?”

The emotions came in waves. Denial. Confusion. Curiosity. Irritation. Something close to grief. I told myself to do what I had done at nineteen. Go backward. Let's look at this retrospectively. Revisit the past. See if it fits.

But this time the resistance was louder.

“That couldn’t be Autism, surely that is just ADHD or…. I don’t know, because you are weird? People like you don’t have Autism.”

I could hear the internalized ableist voice of a world that has little tolerance for difference or nuance. I could hear my own protective parts trying to preserve normalcy at all costs. For years in therapy I had asked, “What is wrong with me? Why do I feel so different?” ADHD explained some of it. It never explained all of it.

The autism diagnosis did not feel like a discovery.

It felt like an audit.

Late diagnosis is not about becoming someone new. It is about re-reading someone you have already been. In the quiet hours, I replayed myself backwards. Childhood became evidence. Lining up toys. Insisting on rules. Memorizing entire films. Hating certain fabrics. Not wanting to be touched. Were those quirks? Preferences? Discipline? Or were they architecture?

You do not wake up different or new after a late diagnosis. You are asked to reconsider whether you have ever been who you thought you were.

ADHD made sense when I was given that label. It explained the velocity of my mind. The scatter. The intensity. The way interest could swallow time whole. ADHD felt kinetic. It felt like movement, like appetite, like a brain that runs toward stimulation.

Autism feels like a counterforce. It feels like a hand pressing against the acceleration. It feels like brushing your teeth while eating Oreos. One system craving novelty. The other system demanding predictability. One pulling toward chaos. The other recoiling from it.

AuDHD, they call it. The word itself feels stitched together.

What no one explains is what it feels like to hold both at once. To crave stimulation and collapse under unpredictability. To thrive under pressure and then retreat into hibernation. To be capable and competent, even charismatic, and also rigid, depleted, and easily overwhelmed. The paradox is not theoretical. It is lived.

The part that unsettles me most is not the sensory profile or the special interests. It is the contraction.

When I reflect on past interactions, I see moments where my rigidity cost me connection. I see the times I insisted something be done a certain way because it felt correct, even when I could not articulate why. I see the bluntness that I framed as clarity. The inflexibility I framed as standards.

At the time, it felt principled. It felt like efficiency. It felt like being direct.

Now I wonder how often it was regulation.

There is grief in that recognition. Not because I was wrong. Not because others were right. But because integration requires humility. It asks you to consider that what felt like moral clarity may also have been difficulty tolerating ambiguity. It asks you to admit that sometimes coherence mattered more to you than comfort.

Late diagnosis does not absolve you. It contextualizes you. It does not rewrite your past. It reframes it.

I am still sitting with the question. Not “Am I autistic?” but “What does it mean to reinterpret a life through a different lens?” Maybe it means accepting paradox. That I can be restless and rigid. Spontaneous and structured. Independent and contracting. Capable and overwhelmed.

Maybe it means recognizing that brushing your teeth while eating Oreos is not absurd. It is simply how my brain has always negotiated the world.

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