That’s horrible.

That’s still very expensive!

Fucking death to paid healthcare

For real!?
(Cross-lingual pun very much intended)

I know you didn’t ask me about this but I think having a conceptual framework to understand that the struggles you have faced through your development and into your adulthood is generally pretty empowering because it’s kinda like “Oh, I’m not failing - I’m just fundamentally at odds with the world/society”.

It’s super common to go through a period of grief for lost time, lost opportunities, and anger or frustration or disappointment in how all the people around you let you down by not figuring out all of the now patently-obvious signs of neurodivergence so yeah, if you get a diagnosis then you might want to brace for a bit of a grieving process.

In regards to potential for change there’s a lot of stuff that can be done with regards to unmasking, which I kinda object to the absolutist framing of, or being much more conscious and selective in when you mask and how much you choose to mask. There’s also a lot you can do about seeking small accomodations, especially in a social context - for example, if you meet me irl and I think you’re worthy of being a friend or if I’m going to be working alongside you then I’m going to drop the fact that I’m autistic when it’s relevant pretty early on these days because it’s just a sort of heads-up to say “I’m going to miss social cues, I’m kinda odd, and I’ll work a lot better with direct communication”. It’s not necessarily using excuses but if someone is saying something cryptic then I’m just gonna say something like “I am wayyy too autistic to understand what you’re getting at here” (which is admittedly a problematic way of framing it but idk, I’m not about to drop some crash course monologue on what a spectrum disorder actually is in medical parlance so I’m just working with what I’ve got y’know?) before seeking clarification. It’s a bit self-deprecating but it’s also a way of giving people a better understanding of how I go about communicating and what my needs are, with the hope that I’ll be able to train them in more direct communication with me over time.

With other accomodations there’s stuff around embracing a need for security and stability, and actively cultivating that as a form of self-care. There’s managing your “sensory diet” better so that you can avoid and mitigate noxious sensory stimuli while putting in conscious effort to seek out positive sensory stimuli, including allowing yourself to stim more freely or spending time (re)discovering your stims and actively cultivating habits to bring them into your daily life. That sort of thing.

Then there’s probably a fair bit of personal work to do in regards to internalised ableism as well. Living as a neurodivergent adult that is late self-identifying, you don’t go through that experience without picking up a fair share of internalised ableism.

There’s other stuff that comes with being appropriately medicated for ADHD that I could go into but that’s probably getting ahead of things a bit.

Ultimately there’s a lot of small changes and accomodations that you can start working towards right now if you are so inclined - the worst thing that can happen is you shed a little internalised ableism, you become more connected to your sensory experience and you engage with it in a more positive and supportive way for yourself, and you make life just a bit nicer for yourself - it’s hard to imagine these things could ever be negative outcomes for anyone, neurodivergent or not, diagnosed or not.

I don’t know. My struggles remain my struggles. The diagnosis did give me more leeway to go easy on myself and avoid spiraling when my real abilities were so far from how I felt they should be. Autistic stuff isn’t really managed with medication like ADHD is so it really depends on the outcome for you too.

so I truly don’t know what to expect.

Don’t stress too much. Go into it with an open mind, give it a decent shot, don’t be afraid to be open about explaining what’s going on for you.

For example, I’m terrible with visual-spatial learning tests. If you ask me which image is the mirror of a shape I’m going to struggle like fuck because there’s a hole in my brain where my visual-spatial reasoning is supposed to be and I’d be pretty upfront about that, partly because that’s how I am and partly because imo it’s kinda important to put your cards on the table with these assessments so they can get a handle on whether you happen to make a lucky guess or if you’re actually engaging in processing to arrive at the correct conclusion based on logic.

Like when I did my autism assessment, I explained that I’d be able to describe how people form friendships based on what I’ve observed and that I’d be able to provide a textbook answer but when it comes to the application of this knowledge it’s a very different matter for me and I don’t really get how it’s done. This was me doing a very honest self-assessment and it wasn’t an attempt to skew the results, it was just me being like “I could explain the basics to an alien who is visiting us just like how I can explain the basics of how to paint but that doesn’t mean imma be able to do a good job of painting a landscape” kinda thing. It’s the snapshot of what’s going on in your brain which, if you’re capable of providing it with some degree of objectivity, can be really useful in a diagnostic process.

I’m not gonna lie: what scares me the most is my test results being “welp, looks like there’s nothing wrong here, you’re just a bit smarter than average, just carry on and meditate a bit, maybe do some therapy sessions and you’re golden”. I did therapy for almost a decade (until a year and a half ago) and I still feel like shit.

Yeah, I hear you but a diagnosis isn’t the be-all, end-all. It’s rare for a person to be falsely diagnosed with autism or ADHD but on the flip side it’s not wildly outside of the realms of possibility that you will get a false negative diagnosis. That fact isn’t going to replenish your bank balance though and I get that.

I think if you get the chance it’s gonna be really worth drilling down into this and articulating it with the psych. Again, going back to my own autism assessment in my additional notes I described that I have very clear indications of being dyslexic, dyspraxic, and dyscalculic (?? Is that even a word?) but I have no intention of seeking out a diagnosis for these things - it was my way of being like “Yeah, I have a really strong case for why I fit all of these things and it has a lot of descriptive power but also I don’t care for collecting diagnoses and that is not something that’s going to serve me - either I am those things and I’m at the point in life where I just deal with it and compensate as best I can, like I have already been doing, or otherwise I just suck at maths, I’m very clumsy, and my handwriting is garbage” and it’s only useful insofar as it’s indicative of comorbid developmental disorders that are super common in autism especially so it was worthwhile bringing it up.

In fact, I’m really surprised that I have to go through all this just for an assessment. I remember going to a psychiatrist a decade and a half ago, telling him I was feeling anxious, and walking out ten minutes later with a Ritalin prescription, which in retrospect is kinda fucking wild. Things seem to have changed a lot since then.

Haha yeah, depending on which country you’re in and what era this was it might have been a bit like the wild west of ADHD diagnoses.

On the other hand, I have a comrade who is well into adulthood who just screams ADHD and it took until they were describing their symptoms of RSD blow by blow in their own words where I finally cracked and was like “DidyaeverwonderifyouarentbipolarbutinsteadyouvegotADHD??” because I couldn’t hold it back any longer. He got to a psychiatrist and I knew exactly what happened before he told me but the report back was a very quick turnaround time before the psych announced unequivocally “There’s no doubt in my mind that you have ADHD” and, who knows, you might be in that category yourself which might explain your Ritalin-in-10-mins-or-your-money-back experience?

Sorry, I’m rambling a bit.

*gestures broadly at my entire comment history, including this comment* lol

You’re alright. I get that conflict of wanting to do well but also not wanting to mask your symptoms while not wanting to subconsciously exaggerate the symptoms because you’ve somehow convinced yourself that this is what it is yet wanting to have the answer to what’s going on for you but not wanting to pin all your hopes on a diagnosis if it happens that it doesn’t truly fit, and all of that stuff. It’s gonna be a bit of a conflicted jumble and you wanna know the worst part about it?

If you have ADHD, you’re probably going to be conflicted about it well after you’re appropriately medicated, you’re responding well to the meds, you notice significant improvements and positive changes, and people around you remark on how you’re handling things so much better all of a sudden. Those old thought patterns die a slow, agonising death and there’s still some days where I think if someone made a convincing argument to me personally I’d be halfway to doubting that I’ve got ADHD. It doesn’t go away, it just gradually recedes over a long period of time lol.

People who aren’t autistic or ADHD or auDHD don’t spend much time thinking about this stuff, except if there’s something big like full-blown hypochondria going on behind the scenes. It’s like being trans - cis people really don’t entertain the thought of what it would be like and feel like and look like and what sort of clothes they’d wear and what name they’d pick for themselves and… you get the idea, right? If you’re not trans and someone asked you then you might entertain the thought for a little while before being like “Nahhh”. But you sure as hell don’t spend your time preoccupied with these thoughts.

It’s a similar deal for this type of neurodivergence - people don’t spend time doing and redoing the RAADS-R multiple times or researching how close to the threshold they are or anything like that. People who aren’t neurodivergent generally aren’t preoccupied with what the results of this sort of assessment will be either - imagine if you were taking a test to assess how much you are politically liberal. You aren’t going to fret or worry and you won’t have an urgent need for clarity about the process to try and better understand what the outcome will be. You’d probably shrug your shoulders, nonchalantly waltz into the test and complete the thing half-heartedly without much investment in the whole process. That’s the sort of attitude I’d expect the average neurotypical person to approach this assessment with - nonchalance and maybe some idle curiosity at best.

I guess on that note it might be worth dropping the idea that you might be autistic with the psych. I think it would be a good idea to just do the WAIS first and let them get a sense of how your brain works and then in the subsequent appointments maybe bring it up when it’s relevant.

Psychs generally don’t take kindly to people who seem to be diagnosis-seeking but if you’re like “Idk, seems like it would be worth mentioning because I came up high on the RAADS-R when I did it and it might be a confounding variable. I’m not looking for a whole new identity to adopt or for some diagnosis to hide behind as an excuse - either I’m a socially awkward oddball who gets really fixated on subjects and who misses cues or I’m all of those things and I’m autistic but either way it is what it is and a label doesn’t change that fact” then they are probably gonna be receptive to it.

I mean, ultimately you’re going into this to try and understand yourself better and to arrive at the truth about who you are/what condition(s) you have, so if you approach it from that perspective with a healthy degree of skepticism and openness and honesty then you’re gonna be totally fine.

You’re in limbo right now and, in a sense, you have been for a long time. But you’re still the same person that you were yesterday and you’ll still be the same person the day after the psych provides you with their expert opinion (a terribly undialectical thing for a Marxist to say, but you get what I’m driving at here). You’ve got this.