Late Diagnosed Women: Autistic, Not Difficult

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Please read on...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog ... e-changing

Thank you for the article.

I need to substitute "too sensitive" for "difficult" and this is representative of the deep shame I had, and am navigating in the light of my diagnosis a month ago.

Am I the only one who (subconsciously?) refused to notice that I didn't generally fit in? I thought I didn't fit in with women b/c I was specifically an engineer. I thought I didn't fit in with engineers b/c I was specifically a woman. I ignored that fact that I didn't fit in with groups of women engineers - after all there weren't that many so was easy to avoid. If was my AS-BFF who said matter-of-factly years ago that I wasn't like most people. I didn't know what she meant. Why wouldn't I be?

Nice read B19, thanks.
Articles like this reinforce my belief about the self harm aspects of masking, and not just in the late diagnosed. Though this group are more likely to have developed these masking habits for basic survival purposes, it may be more engrained.

That's not to say that women who have come up through the diagnosed system would mask less, I think like everyone, it depends on their environment and support structures/options. How much freedom and understanding they had to choose areas that would benefit them.

The more time that passes since I first self diagnosed, the stronger I feel about the harms of masking. Untangling the real me from the conditioned me is still ongoing and likely to be for another while yet lol.

Diagnosis and the benefit of talking about my individual experiences with experts in female autism was a game changer. It became very clear to me that there were levels of masking that were beyond doubt unsustainable.

I mean, if someone has standard unhealthy habits such as eating junk food, smoking or excessive drinking, high stress levels, essentially habits that have been proven to cause long term harm, it's not at all surprising when they experience the consequences later in life.

Problem is that there arent studies to estimate how harmful masking can be, what areas of health it impacts on and there hasnt yet been a related change in perception about what is acceptable to expect of women with this disability.

What does one do, wait for the, as yet, suspicions to be confirmed through research and studies? Not for me.

Your reply made me realise suddenly that masking can only be "successful" if it is coupled with hypervigilance, the same level of hypervigilance which would occur in PTSD.

Thanks Amity. You are an inspiration to me.

I always felt like an oddball. I always felt that I was a tiny minority within a tiny minority within a tiny minority. Besides being a woman engineer, I'm also bisexual and have long had a variety of unusual interests/hobbies/etc. Additionally I felt that I was much more intellectually-oriented than most people. Then there were various miscellaneous little quirks of mine (such as the left side of my body being more sensitive to heat than the right side of my body) that I didn't see as having any significant meaning; I thought it was just coincidence that I happened to have so many odds and ends of quirks.

Thanks for sharing this article. Some books and articles I've read have a bit too much "I'm special" for me to consider sharing it with an NT. I shared this with my S/O and said hey, this stuff looks helpful and I think pursuing it further is a good idea, and they said they were tired of me finding things that would fix me.

So that part didn't work so well, but I really did like the article.

Ah now I'm embarrassed B19 lol, thank you.
Yes the hypervigilance needed to "read" other people, to attempt to pass as something I am not, came from a fear similar to being categorised as difficult or sensitive, deep down I knew that it was something else, some other unammed reason (perhaps an alien lol, or that I had been adopted). Everyone's environment is different, its very individual, 2 people in the one family can have totally different outcomes from a similar environment.

I guess dealing with the PTSD aspect has helped me be more aware of other conditioning sources. My health has suffered quite enough and my aim is to be free, to live as I was intended to live, or lol, as close to it as possible.

Sharon and Mona I was always aware of not quite fitting in and for the most part I was happiest when I succeeded in belonging. It was the maintenance part of this approach to being social that I struggled with, it wasn't truly authentic and sustainable.
That's one part that I've stopped since first realising that I was autistic. It was such a relief to step off that merry go round.

Its possible that if aspects of my childhood environment had been accommodating then I may have had more space to bumble along, to find comfort in my own skin, my outcome to date may have been different.
Fortunately I've had many times in my childhood and teenage years where I was just me, for that I am thankful now, I have a point of reference.

I am very grateful for the input from you all, a group of older women. B19, thank you for posting the article.

I believe it was in my later 30s when I decided: screw it, I am difficult, live with it (said to partners.) Of course I had no idea even about the existence of autism. And this new attitude was difficult to implement and took many years of also oppression, quite literally oppression, too difficult to explain here.

It was about that time that I became aware of the hyper-vigilance and the anxiety that came with it. It is extremely difficult for me to manage those symptoms unless I am alone or with very close people.

As far as I can tell, I had two saving graces. I was, and am still, extremely stubborn. I am also very intelligent although most of that intelligence has been used to figure out how to get along in this world, leaving me exhausted.

When I had the lightbulb moment - which occurred about two years ago reading an article about women with autism - everything fell into place. My entire life. Nothing before ever came close to a picture of the person I am. I am self-diagnosed. I don't need someone to tell me what is so fundamental to my existence.

I am not sure how my life would have been different had I had an earlier diagnosis. I can imagine that would have impacted me more negatively, with people seeing me as disabled, instead of just weird.

I have fully accepted my level of weirdness and there are people who do actually like me, knowing I am weird. Not many, mind you. And maybe tolerate would be a better word. I would say, at this point in time, for others, I would rather be thought of as weird, than being autistic.

A useful topic that merits further exploration in my own mind.

The older women's group here: relatively small in number but very large in insightful experience. For us, "know thyself" has particular meaning, and our many different searches have provided a tapestry of knowledge and insight about being AS women amongst NT women, AS mothers and daughters and wives and relatives in families that did or didn't know us, and so much else from the sublime to the ridiculous.

If we had been diagnosed as children we would not have gone on these knowledge quests, and speaking for myself, I would have been more disabled by the diagnosis then and all its sequelae. So I am grateful that it came 6 decades later.

I really relate to this late-diagnosed woman's experience. I lost count of the times I was suddenly "in demand" to solve other students' assignment shortcomings as a student, the same people who often passed me in the corridors at other times where they had trouble acknowledging my existence.. perhaps my AS superpower included the way I could turn invisible at times without knowing it - didn't even need an invisibility cloak (though I could explain the physics of how they work...)

https://www.spectrumwomen.com/featured/ ... -m-ed-cas/