Anyone feel like their Autism is the least of their worries?

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There was a time when being Autistic was my main problem. Since then, I've worked hard on improving myself. I now know all those little social rules and boundaries. I'm still a little awkward at times, but I can blend in with crowds with embarassing Aspie moments kept to a minimum.

But now I feel like other disorders remain. OCD is killing my productivity and free time. Depression hurts. Social Anxiety, due to years of reclusiveness, has hurt my ability to make friends (despite being good socially when I do meet people).

When I think about my autism, I sort of just laugh. Ah, the days of old when I had to deal with those disorders plus being really autistic.

I feel the same way. I've got other things to worry about now but discovering I have autism has been one of the hardest things I've had to go through. I seriously hope I don't ever have to go through that again.

Yes, I feel OCD is more of a worry for me, too. In fact, I have accepted my autism to the point that I think it's cool!

Yes actually! I've gotten a lot of my issues under control (I'm still struggling with not info dumping and annoying people with my special interests though), but my anxiety and depression are killers, as is my ADHD. I also think I have some undiagnosed personality disorders (disorders because you rarely just have one), and the symptoms are very frustrating and cause me so many problems.

If you can afford it I'd recommend getting therapy for your OCD. My friend did (I believe she said it was a form of exposure therapy), and she's doing much better and rarely has problems with it anymore. I have OCD that's brought on by my anxiety, so it's something that has to be addressed alongside the other.

They're kind of comorbid, I don't think my issues with depression and anxiety would exist without being Autistic. The OCD I think could be lived with otherwise. It's all connected, it's all my brain so I don't really think of one as my main worry. I do think I to get control of my anxieties more than anything I guess but again that means addressing a lot of things.

Not really it's more or less the central tree trunk of why I developed other mental problems and has skewed and tinted much of the existence I persisted at until I had two mental breakdowns... after the second I ended up on the path toward diagnosis and my life has turned a peculiar brighter corner since then as has my mental health, because I had began exploring the autism, I had therapy for many years unraveling the other components of my mental health but I could never find the whole fabric of what was going on and what had been going on. The abrasive but also idk the icing qualities that the complexities of the condition causes you to experience and feel things... it's not exactly a curse once you understand what it means but it's treacherous as much as it is uplifting, it's hard to explain, the profound difficulties the autism brings with it certainly place it as the centrepiece of my worries but it's not constantly glowering like a depressive phantom, I guess my mental health is the most of my worries and autism is basically the sky whilst the other things are clouds.

Anxiety has been on the top of our list for me since high school. In middle school it was Asperger's and then it evolved to anxiety. In elementary school, it was just language delay and more about social skills. But I was told the anxiety is part of the AS and so is the OCD.

I'm taking meds and getting therapy for my OCD, but I wish it worked as much as I'd like it to. Anyway, it has improved a lot and I know my life would be much worse without my meds.

OCD, social anxiety, and loneliness are my main concerns.

It seems like throughout my life it was others who made my "autism" such a big deal. I have horrific struggles to be sure, but to pin a single label on it doesn't really explain it. I feel I am more simply "different" than autistic. I don't have all the specific autistic traits. I understand social rules for the most part, at least intellectually. I can read emotions. I'm just awkward in a way that's impossible to describe in specifics. More importantly though, I think the things that motivate me and make me happy are vastly different from the norm. The lack of accommodation for this is probably involved in the core of the damage to my psyche that has lead to lifelong depression. Lack of common cultural interests can destroy a self-aware person. At a certain point we lose contentment being mostly in our own mind, driven by our own interests. I never see this really discussed in regards to autism though. Everything is just about making people "normal".

Didn't find out I had autism until 2 years ago. The damn psychiatrists up here in Alaska are 95% rejects that barely passed their boards. They'd been treating me for the 4 years prior to my diagnoses as a Bipolar with no "Good manias", just the bad ones, the dysphoric manias. My "Ups" were flat-line neutral moods.

To the point, I am glad I finally got the correct diagnoses of ASD, since I'd spent the previous years in treatment for bipolar, the drugs of which nearly drove me insane. BUT, Autism is just a curiosity to me, an explanation for my quirks.

It's my MDD that's going to kill me, not autism.

Other issues impact on me more negatively at this stage of my life - the huge variation in my energy levels, and being immune-compromised makes me far more vulnerable to illness now. Also visual issues - I have macular degeneration and cataracts which prevent me from driving safely at night and may soon prevent me from driving at all.

Some days I get little done due to a mixture of these factors and they are more of a determinant a lot of the time than AS things like executive function and so on.

Depression, income, and housing, in no particular order, are massively more pressing problems for me, and that's saying a fair bit.

In fact if my housing situation were only slightly closer to more suitable for me, a lot of what autism brings about for me would be very much minimized, because basically my stress levels would be less.

I would trade an amputated limb for depression. I'd take an amputated limb if it meant I would never be depressed again. There is literally nothing worse than feeling empty every day and missing joy in life. Depression eats me alive. There is just nothing positive about it. Not when it seemingly never ends.

I definitely feel like my anxiety is my biggest problem.

I can't understand eye-contact. I don't have a problem with having eye-contact with someone, but people constantly thinks I'm up to something and I don't understand why.