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.

This sounds like the schools don’t handle the payments for lunches. A third party does and as an electronic payment processor, they probably don’t provide a physical address where a check can be received.

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.

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

For me, it was What About Bob?

Because this is a forum where people share perspectives. If you don’t want to hear them then don’t read the comments.

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

https://wikidiff.com/idiosyncrasy/anomaly

That’s very noble of you, but in our capitalist systems, those who provide the most needed and valuable services are often paid the least. You may feel that telling someone to get better educated and moving somewhere cheaper will solve their problem, but then someone else will fill their past role. Our most expensive cities will always need janitors, line cooks, laborers, shelf stockers and many other roles that will never pay much. We can’t all be coders making 6 figures working remotely from bumbfuck nowhere. This doesn’t even take into account disabled people who can’t provide much or any value in the eyes of our system. You basically want to tell people to bootstrap, just in a gentler way.

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.

Also grants wishes!

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 just got rejected by a primary care doctor because they “are not accepting new patients with PPO insurance”. I spend extra on a PPO because when I had an HMO they let me see a doctor but the doctor wouldn’t treat me because “insurance won’t cover it”. What an asinine system.

The Taycan has only been around a few years. Are these batteries that have been replaced or were the original cars tossed? I’m glad the batteries are getting additional use, I’m just afraid of how much other waste is being created. I know my boss leases a new Porsche every 3 years and it breaks my heart to think they aren’t getting resold and are getting destroyed.

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.