Preparing for evaluation, venting, seeking advice

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I have an intake appointment with a clinical psychologist on Thursday, with an evaluation appointment for autism (and probably ADHD and other related conditions) scheduled a week later. I feel like I don't know what to expect, though I've done a ton of reading so I assume that's mostly just my own anxiety.

I feel like I need to come prepared to frame my experience and brain and life to her. She hasn't asked me for that, but I'm afraid that if I go with my regular coping scripts I'll accidentally give her the patently false impression that everything's great. But if I go in catastrophizing and framing everything as terrible then maybe I'll bias her in the other direction and I'll have to figure out how to explain to my regular therapist I've been seeing for years that surprise I have ASD-2 (which, I don't know, might be accurate) without feeling like I've been lying to him. Or worse maybe she'll see it as catastrophizing and diagnosis-seeking and disregard my framing. Either way she'll presumably want concrete examples of the problems I'm having, and I feel like I have lots of them, but I'm worried that in the stress of the eval I won't be able to come up with them, or I'll come up with bad examples that misrepresent it all and obscure my actual stresses. I've tried organizing some written notes that I could maybe take to her, but I have a ton of trouble summarizing something huge like my entire life and psychological state into a few bullet points that I can easily communicate to her, so just trying has been overwhelming almost to the point of tears. So I'm worried that I have to do it or risk misrepresenting my needs, but also that I genuinely just can't, and it's frustrating and scary.

Maybe I just need some reassurance? Or some simple advice from someone who's been there?

In case it matters, I'm an adult in Atlanta, GA, USA. It's a private psychologist I sought out on the recommendation of my regular therapist: He (regular therapist) said she (psychologist) has a lot of experience with people with backgrounds like mine (adult, in a conventionally-successful tech career), and I have a good rapport and trust with him, so I'm cautiously optimistic. But even with that optimism I'm just super anxious about it. Any advice or reassurance?

Hello, don't worry. Just be yourself.

I would be surprised if you're not given pre-assessment papers, questionnaires, etc to complete before your autism assessment. That's how it was for me and for others here. I had weeks to complete the documents since my assessment had to be scheduled months in advance of an opening. I had pages of assessment paperwork and ended up writing 18 pages of typed responses to questions about my experiences and my history.

What I mean by "be yourself". I went into my assessment with the mindset of: "For the first time in my LIFE, I will be making a point NOT to "mask" in any way. If there's ANYONE I shouldn't feel compelled to mask in front of, it's an adult autism assessment professional with many years of experience. I told her at the beginning that I wasn't going to mask and she was perfectly accepting of it. I actually assumed she would ask me to mask during some point to see the difference, but she never did. It's humorous for me to think that after my assessment I had a twinge of disappointment because I kind of wanted her to ask me to mask for a bit so I could show her how good (or not) I was at performing.

Thanks for your reassurances. I didn't get much in the way of preparation, just a bunch of family medical history, nothing especially about personal experiences.

I guess it's sort of the "be yourself" that I'm worried about. I feel like I've trained myself to adapt my behavior to different situations, and with strangers I just sort of automatically go into a mode where I know how to people. And I don't do it consciously: I just learned young that it was unsafe not to, so I sort of adapted? Anyway I guess in retrospect it's probably masking, but it's just so much of a habit that I'm sort of worried I'm going to have to work not to do it just so that she can see what I look like once I'm out of energy for the day (/week/month/whatever). I'm actually honestly contemplating intentionally shorting myself on sleep just to make my low-functioning mode more apparent, but I'm struggling to find the line where that becomes manipulating the results.

For whatever it's worth, my appointment isn't tomorrow after all. It was going to be, but I got a call at the beginning of the week that the psychologist needed some unexpected medical attention herself and would need to reschedule. Which is stressful af because now I feel like I'm going to be stressing like this for the next three weeks (the new appointment), but hopefully it'll even out a little.

I think Magna has the right idea. When I was diagnosed, no one in my family knew what "aspergers" was and I'd only ever heard the word autism before. I wasn't trying to act a certain way. I just answered the questions, followed the test instructions to the best of my ability and didn't stress about the outcome because I wasn't expecting anything.

I did have a slight fantasy that they'd come back with the results saying, "Aha! We've determined that you're brilliant in [insert subject here]!", but that wasn't the purpose of those tests. Part of my diagnosis relied on past history, so my mom answering questions about what I was like in early years factored in.

No need to stress yourself or worry about influencing the test.