How do you find your way after diagnosis?

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Hi all, I was recently diagnosed with autism (I'm 23) and I'm trying to now put my life into perspective around it. It feels like such a blur and a mix of complete understanding and wild confusion. It puts my entire life into context, and it makes me a little sad. My family valued doing so much, and I'm just not able to keep up and with this diagnosis I know why. In the meantime, I'm trying to put my life together but feel like it's not going as planned. I have been looking for a full time job for the last year and all I got out of it was some depression and this diagnosis.

I guess what I'm after is hearing how you all manage on a day to day basis. What works for you? What doesn't? I'm stuck to my phone and video games and want to peel away from them into working/reading/something else and it's hard. I'm starting a daily routine that's already super helpful but a few extra ideas would be amazing.

Thanks!

I was diagnosed very late, and as I'd never seen myself as an Aspie before and had become rather set in my ways, it was just business as usual afterwards.

Of course it was useful to look at the traits and figure out how this or that problem in the past might have been caused by ASD, and I found out a lot about myself like that. It was also a blow to my self-confidence to have to carry this idea around that there was something about me that could make me socially inept, that Aspies are somewhat looked down on in society. But I took heart in the fact that I was still the same person as I'd been before the diagnosis. And it was a bit of a comfort to know that I was essentially sane and didn't have any personality disorders, and that nobody was going to urge me to take any psych meds, which often seem to cause more trouble than they're worth.

Anyway, overall I didn't need to find my way after the diagnosis. I was no more lost than I'd ever been, so I carried on steering my own ship with very little change apart from having an extra map. For the most part I didn't bother telling people I'd been diagnosed. It's a complicated condition and most people don't seem to understand it anyway.

Scoop Scoop (Nice username BTW)

As ToughDiamond stated, you are at the beginning of your exploration and are asking aloud the questions all of us NT and ND alike have to wrestle with. The challenges life has in store for us are unique for all of us, so a one size fits all or even a 'sizing' that stays valid over time is not within our human reach .
BUT, indeed having a diagnosis or as TD calls it our 'extra map' and because we have a communality in our types of obstacles, forums like this here our wrong planet are very useful.
If not to vent there is no shortage of people willing to offer their stories, hoping someone might find inspiration from them.
Myself I was late diagnosed and that offers a completely different set of challenges as you have constructed a life already and have found(hopefully) some ways to get a handle on NT-ND-... Life...

My best advice I can give you that seems to hold up regardless of circumstance for us is sit down with your self and have an open conversation with yourself, treating yourself as your very best friend and set some goals (short-medium and long term) of situations/scenario's you would wish to avoid. next and most importantly make a week-schedule for yourself, again treating yourself as your best friend and stick to it. Not the absolute times and dates, but the actions set in the schedule. creating a healthy routine is the basis, once established you have a solid ground from which to build up. mini extra tip: always be honest and unjudgmental with yourself even if that means you have to re-evaluate a goal.

Kind regards,
Kada

I never did...Its been downhill for a lot of the time since then.

Moneyman, thank you for sharing.
From my neurotypical children, I learned that; finding our 'way' in life is a challenge for all peers NT or ND. And more importantly it is not or never was about the 'way', the road or even the destination;
it's about the experience of traveling.
And I know that you are now thinking, what a load of high-level philosophical &@#&@.
To which I can only state that this is how I stopped going downhill .

kind regards,
Kada