No late diagnosis here, so i'm answering the prompt a little sideways, but the mechanism you describe, getting the right word at 35 and watching it re-file your whole childhood in one go, that part i know. i spent years labeled inconsistent and too much before working out that the label was the broken part, not me. smaller word, same relief!
Hi! Diagnosed with ADHD last year at 34. As someone who struggles to synthesize info without adequate context, I felt like my diagnosis was the missing puzzle piece in my life. It’s helped me accept parts of myself that I had previously fought so hard against. And in accepting myself, I have more grace for everyone around me. In the year after my diagnosis, I bought a house - a huge life goal of mine. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Thanks for this post - the part about seizing on bursts of energy and attention especially resonated with me!
Hey Dana, welcome to the club!! I was diagnosed almost five years ago (!!) at 37 and it's been a rollercoaster of a journey. Life is immeasurably better but there has been an intense process of grieving while also trying to get to know the "real me" buried under all the layers of masking. Writing has helped so much (including my own humble newsletter https://autcasts.substack.com) and going back over older pieces it's so interesting to see how the neurodivergence was there all along, screaming at me from the page! My only piece of advice would be to take as much time as you need to process this. I look forward to reading more from you!
As a fellow late-stage, self-diagnosed Autist, this obviously resonated with me. I've often said, long before I even started thinking about autism, that I just could never find places where other people were *like me.* I'd get close, but no matter how niche the group was, I still almost always felt Off from everyone else, a black sheep, a weirdo, in some way that I was unable to articulate. The community brought me in: students of mine, new friends, tattoo artists who were neurodivergent or autistic themselves started telling me to take a look at myself, with that kind of helpful honesty that only our community can truly provide, lol. Devon Price's writing was also influential to me. I too struggle with what it means to be self-diagnosed, mostly based on my trauma of being told how overdramatic I was as a kid, but a year or so ago, I finally made my peace with it along the same lines: if something has helped me make so much sense of myself in ways I honestly never thought I would, isn't that the answer? Anyway, it's hilarious now that pretty much everyone whose writing I've ever really resonated with is coming out as late-stage autistic. XD
I was diagnosed last year at 31 but before I started down that road, self-diagnosis helped me understand my habits and values around money far better than anything. I'd always been bad at saving (mainly because I had no real purpose in mind, just 'you need to set aside money for a rainy day') and financial jargon threw me. I realised after establishing that I might be autistic that I learn things one of two ways: a) pick up just enough to the basics to pass a fix point (such as exams) then forget 99% of it or b) obsess over something for months or years on end until people are actively repelled by how much I know about it.
Because money was a big topic and a life-long learning curve, I effectively had to make personal finance one of my special interests. I paid my way out of roughly £10k of (mostly credit card) debt, built up a couple of stocks and shares ISAs and a private pension, set up savings accounts for holidays, further education courses and vet bills (all the stuff I'd always gone into debt over in the past) and designed a number of tools including an income-expenditure tracker which worked well with my particular mindset. Along the way I became a money adviser, because I started reading the money advice training materials at work and realised my own difficulties managing money could be a strength to help others, not a weakness.
The amount of clients I've since seen who are struggling with debt primarily because financial institutions do not care about making their services accessible to neurodiverse folks is painful. My executive function has always been poor, so if I was trying to pay a credit card bill in the past, and the server was like 'wrong password' or required two-factor authentication and my phone was in another room, it would get put on the 'I'll do it later' pile. And whenever I've mentioned that to autistic clients they'd kind of exhale, get this look of relief that they're not going to be judged and be like 'SAME.'
I wonder if banks and lenders realise that a lot of the protocols they put in place supposedly to protect our money (complex password rules, long waits on the phone to speak to someone who will ask you for a bunch of secret answers, internet banking formats that change every five minutes) are actively creating barriers for neurodiverse people trying to access their services?
I once spoke to a client once who was like 'my mum manages all my bills and banking because I'm autistic' and had to fight the urge to respond with 'here I am managing 30 people's bills and other debts because I'm autistic', but some people are so disempowered by the minefield that is personal finance that they check out all together. Please don't ever feel the need to justify your self-diagnosis, the more autistic people who've found ways of managing money there are speaking publicly about it, the more likely they are to help people like that client.
No late diagnosis here, so i'm answering the prompt a little sideways, but the mechanism you describe, getting the right word at 35 and watching it re-file your whole childhood in one go, that part i know. i spent years labeled inconsistent and too much before working out that the label was the broken part, not me. smaller word, same relief!
Hi! Diagnosed with ADHD last year at 34. As someone who struggles to synthesize info without adequate context, I felt like my diagnosis was the missing puzzle piece in my life. It’s helped me accept parts of myself that I had previously fought so hard against. And in accepting myself, I have more grace for everyone around me. In the year after my diagnosis, I bought a house - a huge life goal of mine. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Thanks for this post - the part about seizing on bursts of energy and attention especially resonated with me!
It's such a relief to unlock a piece of yourself!
Hey Dana, welcome to the club!! I was diagnosed almost five years ago (!!) at 37 and it's been a rollercoaster of a journey. Life is immeasurably better but there has been an intense process of grieving while also trying to get to know the "real me" buried under all the layers of masking. Writing has helped so much (including my own humble newsletter https://autcasts.substack.com) and going back over older pieces it's so interesting to see how the neurodivergence was there all along, screaming at me from the page! My only piece of advice would be to take as much time as you need to process this. I look forward to reading more from you!
Thank you, Aisling! Yes, I've experienced the grieving, too. It's such a long and touch process, but truly worth it and really rewarding.
Absolutely, and I would never want to go back to how it was before!
As a fellow late-stage, self-diagnosed Autist, this obviously resonated with me. I've often said, long before I even started thinking about autism, that I just could never find places where other people were *like me.* I'd get close, but no matter how niche the group was, I still almost always felt Off from everyone else, a black sheep, a weirdo, in some way that I was unable to articulate. The community brought me in: students of mine, new friends, tattoo artists who were neurodivergent or autistic themselves started telling me to take a look at myself, with that kind of helpful honesty that only our community can truly provide, lol. Devon Price's writing was also influential to me. I too struggle with what it means to be self-diagnosed, mostly based on my trauma of being told how overdramatic I was as a kid, but a year or so ago, I finally made my peace with it along the same lines: if something has helped me make so much sense of myself in ways I honestly never thought I would, isn't that the answer? Anyway, it's hilarious now that pretty much everyone whose writing I've ever really resonated with is coming out as late-stage autistic. XD
I was diagnosed last year at 31 but before I started down that road, self-diagnosis helped me understand my habits and values around money far better than anything. I'd always been bad at saving (mainly because I had no real purpose in mind, just 'you need to set aside money for a rainy day') and financial jargon threw me. I realised after establishing that I might be autistic that I learn things one of two ways: a) pick up just enough to the basics to pass a fix point (such as exams) then forget 99% of it or b) obsess over something for months or years on end until people are actively repelled by how much I know about it.
Because money was a big topic and a life-long learning curve, I effectively had to make personal finance one of my special interests. I paid my way out of roughly £10k of (mostly credit card) debt, built up a couple of stocks and shares ISAs and a private pension, set up savings accounts for holidays, further education courses and vet bills (all the stuff I'd always gone into debt over in the past) and designed a number of tools including an income-expenditure tracker which worked well with my particular mindset. Along the way I became a money adviser, because I started reading the money advice training materials at work and realised my own difficulties managing money could be a strength to help others, not a weakness.
The amount of clients I've since seen who are struggling with debt primarily because financial institutions do not care about making their services accessible to neurodiverse folks is painful. My executive function has always been poor, so if I was trying to pay a credit card bill in the past, and the server was like 'wrong password' or required two-factor authentication and my phone was in another room, it would get put on the 'I'll do it later' pile. And whenever I've mentioned that to autistic clients they'd kind of exhale, get this look of relief that they're not going to be judged and be like 'SAME.'
I wonder if banks and lenders realise that a lot of the protocols they put in place supposedly to protect our money (complex password rules, long waits on the phone to speak to someone who will ask you for a bunch of secret answers, internet banking formats that change every five minutes) are actively creating barriers for neurodiverse people trying to access their services?
I once spoke to a client once who was like 'my mum manages all my bills and banking because I'm autistic' and had to fight the urge to respond with 'here I am managing 30 people's bills and other debts because I'm autistic', but some people are so disempowered by the minefield that is personal finance that they check out all together. Please don't ever feel the need to justify your self-diagnosis, the more autistic people who've found ways of managing money there are speaking publicly about it, the more likely they are to help people like that client.