Holy fuck, I just had the sudden realization the other day that I'm almost positive I'm on the spectrum. I've had severe depression and mild anxiety for as long as I can remember as well as PTSD from around 10 years old and onward due to some childhood trauma that was getting much better toward the end of this past summer but I still felt "off" regardless, like there was something else in the background that had been overlooked. I've always felt different from people in general my whole life, like I was an outsider looking in and that no matter how hard I tried or how badly I just wanted to be normal like everyone else, I simply never could and I would almost always feel weird even when I wasn't in social situations. I used to attribute this to my self-esteem which has never been very good because of a lot of things that happened in my life growing up, but it's greatly improved lately and I'm much more outgoing than I really ever have been yet that feeling still persists which, when I really think about it, feels less to me like I look down upon myself and more so that I think and behave differently than anyone else I know to the point where it's almost yin and yang. And then, just the other night when I was tripping on acid (which has given me a lot of helpful introspection and has actually helped me make some important changes in my life such as meditating, quitting masturbation every night, etc.) and I was coming down from a pretty intense peak, I somehow started thinking about my behavior and thought patterns and looked up symptoms of Asperger's syndrome and was completely shocked at how many metaphorical boxes I checked on the list. Obviously, it's different for everyone but holy shit, there were just too many things on that list that pretty much defined me to seem like mere coincidences. At first it was almost scary but after a while, I gradually began to feel like this is the answer for why I am the way that I am instead of just not having a great self-esteem or being somewhat eccentric. I'm not a psychologist/psychiatrist so I can't just diagnose myself but I'm almost 100% sure I have at the very least a high-functioning form of Asperger's, SPD or something else like those two. I'm leaning more toward Asperger's because even though I do have some traits of SPD, I used to have many more growing up which have since faded away or are so mild they're hardly even worth mentioning. I had my therapist recommend me to a psychiatrist he works with a couple days ago and I was able to schedule an appointment for neuro-psychiatric testing in mid-March to determine whether I actually have something so that makes me feel better.
When I approached my mom and brother about this for their thoughts on it, they were both in agreement. My mom told me she thought I was on the spectrum even back when I was as young as only a few years old (banging my head off the couch repeatedly when I'd get angry, enjoying locking/unlocking padlocks and flipping light switches instead of playing with plastic toys, having a ridiculously verbose vocabulary for how young I was, always difficult for me to make friends growing up, etc.) and said the only reason I was never tested for it was because the doctor at my school said she didn't think I needed it when my mom asked her (female doctor, of course). My brother told me he felt similarly but didn't really elaborate on why exactly. I haven't spoken to my grandfather about this yet but he noted that I had a pretty bad temper growing up, which I never took out on anyone else but would instead be more toward myself where I would almost growl and hit my hands off of things when I'd get angry.
Has anyone here been diagnosed with some form of autism late in the game, and if so, how old were you when you actually got the diagnosis?