That post diagnosis feeling

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Maybe I'm odd but now I've got the diagnosis I'm not ecstatic or anything. It's just a 'Well I was right all along" feeling . I'm still the same person ,warts and all,than I was before.

It's not as though there has been a sea change or anything. I think this may be due to the awareness that there's little out there for adults , and I can't see how this is going to affect me going forwards.

I'm glad you got your diagnosis... you were getting stressed about it all(if I remember correctly). So it's all behind you now. Everything falls into place and it's onwards and upwards.

I think half or more of it is I find it hard to see what the future may bring , and really struggle with identifying goals .

Does the diagnosis affect that? I don't think I've had a goal in my life... apart from "I must quit work asap".

I think it's a long term thing , and not something the Asperger's dx makes better or worse.

I'm not the best person to advise... I'm hoping some wise WPer may pile in here.

For myself, I have small goals around personal interests... like trying to learn Spanish. Things like that stress me out because I can't keep to them... the Spanish book is just sitting there mocking me. So I put the Spanish stuff away, then I have to get it all out again... and so on around in circles.

As for life in general, as in "what will become of me"... I think I do all right, but I have my moments, like waking up at 3 in the morning and worrying like hell about everything. I just assume everyone's like that.

The only goal I could think of was to lose weight. My BMI at the time was 34. I didn't go for calorie counting as I get hung up about getting the calorific value of each food item eaten exactly right. Instead I just tried cutting down. That worked for about 7 weeks when I lost 9 lbs ( within the recommended weight loss range of 1-2 lbs). Then the weight plateaued . After a good number of weeks with it stubbornly staying where it was I gave up.

Post diagnosis felt somewhat anti-climatic for me. It was sort of like: okay, I’ve got this figured out but now what?

It was a relief in some ways because a lot of things I’ve always struggled with suddenly made sense. I often heard that I wasn’t trying hard enough, but I finally had an explanation as to why I struggled even though I was actually doing my best. Even though I understood myself better and had some sense of validation, it didn’t really change much else.

I found that these feelings of vague disappointment went away with time. Once I stopped obsessing about whether or not I was on the spectrum, I had more room to think about other things and focus on other special interests.