34 just now diagnosed AS... now what?

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Oh I so hear you guys, and I'm coming at it from a totally different angle and I STILL relate. I've known I've had this all my adult life. I think one of the great things about knowing you have this...at any time in life...is that you can arm yourself with knowledge NOW.

When I was a kid in the 80's and was diagnosed, they only focused on fixing my social deficits, and as long as nobody had to see the deficits or deal with them, and adults didn't have to feel uncomfortable around my unnerving silences anymore, they didn't care about much else. Therapy consisted of a lot of books on interpersonal skills like Dale Carnegie and books on body language, and speech classes (like intro to drama, not remedial).
Even through the 90's I didn't bother reading up on autism much after awhile because the theories changed every time I read them. I had a year of asperger's+ptsd therapy in the early 90's. I was the first patient she'd ever met with a high functioning autism (rural areas, lol). There were no self help books on asperger's for a very long time. Zilch. It was an informational wasteland out there for the average person for most of my life. So you haven't been missing much.

Only recently are they starting to get some good solid theories that make sense to me. Especially now that people with vHFA are studying it themselves, and we now have the ability to do brain scans and see the brain in ways like never before. It's easy for people who are recently diagnosed to think this storehouse of valuable information has always been here for your use, if you only knew you had it before now! But it hasn't always been here.

Even having had this all my adult life, I still have trouble with my doctors. My neurologist of 5 years still forgets I have it. I really think it's kind of wishful thinking on his part, like he likes to pretend I don't have it, or that the symptoms are due to something else like they haven't been an issue all my frikken life. I just roll my eyes and sigh and let him think whatever he wants as long as it's harmless.
I don't think my insurance company cares. Autism is a relatively inexpensive thing to cover as my problems go. This is my idea of a support group. I get a headache from speaking for more than a few minutes.

One of the things that's kind of important to know and I had to find out the hard way from the experts after the fact, is if for some reason you have a major trauma, or if you get put on a *bunch* of CNS depressant meds that slow down your cognitive processing or ability to compensate, it can affect your Asperger's or "autistic symptoms" and where you are at on the autism spectrum...but it will not affect your IQ or problem solving abilities, or learned skills.