I had this same debate with myself earlier this year, after speaking with several therapists and a doctor that specializes in autism diagnoses, I decided the time and money to get diagnosed was not worth it.

For me, I considered how I was struggling and whether a therapist could help. I struggle with overstimulation, but a therapist can’t do much for that; I addressed it by getting noise cancelling headphones and wearing sunglasses inside. I struggle with burnout, but a therapist can’t do much for that; I had a frank discussion with my boss and we agreed to reduce my work hours and I started saying “no” to social events that would be too draining. I stim and hyperfocus but I don’t find those problematic. I’m extremely lucky that although I have poor social skills and no friends, I am not lonely and don’t feel like I need to make any adjustments to my personality to make friends, this might be one area where a therapist could help.

My point is that, autism is something where you can’t treat it overall, you can only treat the “symptoms”, so narrow down what is causing you stress and look for solutions. If an autism diagnosis requires meeting a threshold for 6 issues, but you only have 5, that doesn’t mean you can’t get help for those 5 things. A therapist may be able to help with that and if you want them to see you as autistic, just say you’re autistic. I doubt they’ll ask for any proof and if they push it just say you were a kid when you got diagnosed and you don’t have any paperwork. I’ll say that in my experience, the most important aspect of therapy is getting the right modality and this can be tough. It can be difficult to find providers that don’t just do CBT and sometimes they aren’t very good about discussing what you really need they’ll just do whatever they are trained to do. I found it really helpful to go to Psychology Today’s website and see all the different modalities that existed, then researching what each of them were and thinking about which may be best for me.

Try not to get hung up on the idea of getting that diagnosis. There’s a school of thought that diagnoses are a capitalist construct that aids a doctor in getting paid by giving them a billing code to submit to your insurance company.

For the last week, I’ve been the sickest I’ve ever been. Covid tests came back negative and as far as I know I haven’t had covid before, but I am miserable with all the symptoms you listed and I didn’t socializing at all.

I loved that she narrated the audio book, her accent is fantastic! I enjoyed her memoir. I don’t really remember how it ended, so maybe that part could have been tightened up. I mean, she is still so young, I wouldn’t expect her to have worked out a big overarching moral for her story yet. I hope she writes another as her career progresses.

Not sure if it’s really an accomplishment but I got out of a burnout that started in January. I’ve been in and out of burnout before but this time I set some personal boundaries and requested and received some accommodations from work. Now I feel better set up to maintain work-life balance.

I’m pretty adverse to fermented, pickled or spicy. Anything in the kimchi universe, big no thanks.

I found this. Seems like idiosyncrasy applies to human behaviors while anomaly indicates an unexpected variance in a system.

https://wikidiff.com/idiosyncrasy/anomaly

Thanks so much!

My nail art is all gel. It doesn’t chip and does “dry” until I’m ready, which let’s you do really cool stuff like this 3D pizza nail I did.

I’m into nail art, Seinfeld and watching my cats destroy my house… and I usually enjoy them all at once.

Interesting! I actually did a psychological assessment recently (naively thinking that autism would be included), so I completed the intelligence testing too. I think it was the WAIS2. I didn’t realize it would be included and I was in an extreme state of burnout but I still got a result of “superior” processing speed. It’s one metric that sometimes makes me question whether I could be autistic because so often the narrative is that autistics are slow processors, but your perspective and result indicates that I shouldn’t allow that to cloud my judgment.

Thanks for sharing that resource. I’ve gotten some validation from neurodivergent therapists and am okay with my self diagnosis for now.

I’m 40 and unable to get diagnosed because I don’t have anyone from my childhood that can provide the information required to prove my traits existed back then. Based on online assessments and self reflection, I’d say ASD level 1, no ADHD.

My burnout is a bit more complicated. The elements you described are involved but there’s also an element of being trapped or out of control.

Mine are also much worse and I suspect it’s because I’m I’m a near constant state of burnout.

I’m not surprised to see downvotes on the comments saying you don’t need a diagnosis, but I completely agree with them. I googled “neurodivergent therapist” and found a local practice that had an autistic Psychologist who focused on assessments. I reached out to schedule and she said “I guess you could get a diagnosis of high functioning ASD, but why do you want this”. I told her I was sure of my self diagnosis but wanted the validation. She said a therapist could do that without me paying thousands for the full assessment. She strongly discouraged me from the process. It was disappointing but after watching countless YouTube videos of people who had gotten their diagnoses, told family/friends, then revisited the subject months or years later, there was a resounding consensus that the diagnosis didn’t change anything. There are also drawbacks to an official diagnosis, especially when it comes to emigration and child custody. If you feel disabled by ASD and want to try to get benefits, it would probably be easier and cheaper to go to a regular therapist and get the alphabet soup of diagnoses that we tend to get from those not sufficiently trained in neurodiversity (bipolar, depression, anxiety, OCD, BPD, ODD, etc). I’ve started receiving helpful accommodations without saying I’m autistic by telling people, I have auditory processing issues, so I need to be somewhere quiet, or telling my boss I burnout really easily and needed to reduce my hours.

Technology Connections is fantastic. I’m usually very possessive of my attention but I always end up listening to him infodump for a hour about something I couldn’t care less about.

I seem to do better with higher protein intake. I also try to eat a gummy multivitamin each day to help with any deficiencies that may come from a less than well balanced diet.

Eating the same food all the time is just one example of repetitive and restrictive behaviors. You don’t have to have that exact behavior, that trait could be manifesting in different ways. I’ll try new foods and I don’t like eating the same food day after day, but I do have a sort of weekly pattern. I like pizza on Fridays, etc. But overall my repetitive patterns manifest outside of eating, an example is that I listen to Seinfeld episodes as background noise on a daily basis. It’s also okay for those patterns to change over your lifetime.

I don’t think you’ve got a good grasp on what narcissism is. There’s the official diagnosis and the layperson definition and both require externalization. You can’t just think you’re better, you’d feel in your soul that you were better and would use and abuse those around you. Thinking people are worthless is another indicator that you aren’t. If you were one, you’d see the value in those idiots because of how easy they are to exploit.

I have the QC 35 and QC 45. I prefer the 35 though they are likely harder to find. The 45s have different software and the headphones remind me to pair intermittently when I am not connected to a device, which is annoying because I usually don’t listen to anything, I just want the noise cancelling. The 45s also allow more of certain sounds in, like wind and other things that, in my opinion, should have been canceled out.