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

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.

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.

Yes, I did a full assessment (not just autism) and I kind of gave up by the end. I panicked a bit but I’ve also had really bad brain fog lately. The room I was in had very bright lights, the HVAC was buzzing and humming and I was in a chair without a headrest…it felt like literal torture. I had to skip an entire visual processing section and passed on several of the intellectual questions because my brain simply could not work.

I’m the same. My mind is always churning. I’m getting evaluated for ADHD next week.

The map would be tough. If someone showed me the map and said, go to the kitchen, I would try remember, turn left then right then its around to the left. I would remember it in words, not visually.

Brown and pink dog…in my mind I see a hazy face of a poodle with fluffy pink ears. I can’t see the full dog. I can’t walk around the image and explore it more. Its just a hazy partial visual that flashes in my mind for a moment.

Be careful, I logged out for too long and forgot my password and they wanted a copy of my driver’s license before letting me have access to my account.

Difficult to execute advice doesn’t make it terrible.

Yeah, I wasn’t trying to give you a hard time, just sharing how drastically different housing markets can be. I could sell my house in California and buy a 400k house outright from the equity that has accumulated. Alot of middle class Californian are doing just that, selling their houses and buying in the south or midwest with cash. It’s part of what is inflating your housing costs because your market is more affordable than mine. For comparison, the median houshold income in my city is 89k but the median house list price is 1 million, making your market more affordable and attractive for those that need some relief from inflation.

Those numbers mean nothing without knowing the local wages. In my neighborhood the lowest priced 800 sqft homes are 950k and one bedroom rent is $2400. So your area sounds like a killer deal.

We bought in 2016 with 50k down at 3.5% and our payments were $2,800. We refinanced and now our payments are $2,400. Zillow says if we bought our same house today, at today’s rate with the same amount down the payments would be $7,700, an utterly unfathomable amount.

I think they are pointing their fingers at “Biden” on the flag.