In a world where star signs dictate everything from our love lives to our lunch choices, it’s no surprise that discovering a late-in-life autism and ADHD diagnosis could feel like the universe just threw a plot twist into your personal sitcom! Imagine unearthing layers of yourself previously obscured by labels like “loner” or “sensitive” – like a hidden subplot waiting to be revealed. At 43, I found that peeking back in time wasn’t about finding a lost persona; rather, it was about reinterpreting the colorful brushstrokes of my life, which I had confusingly dubbed with different names. Have you ever felt that spark of recognition when the cosmos suddenly aligns, shining a light on traits you once thought were just quirks? Join me as I walk through the signs I mistook for personality traits until the stars—quite literally—revealed the truth behind my identity. From the art of social management to unexpected sensory sensitivities, let’s embark on a journey of understanding together! LEARN MORE.

I was diagnosed with autism and ADHD at 43 in February, and one of the strangest parts of what followed was looking backward.

I didn’t suddenly discover a completely different person hiding somewhere in my past. Instead, I began noticing dozens of things I had spent years giving completely different names.

I was a loner. Sensitive. Stubborn. Obsessive. I liked doing things my own way and needed more time alone than other people seemed to understand.

Those were all words that family, friends, and eventually I had used to describe me. Some of them may even have been accurate; they just weren’t necessarily the whole explanation.

That’s something I’m still careful about now. Diagnosis hasn’t made me believe that every habit, bad day, or personality trait I’ve ever had was secretly autism. Sometimes I’m tired because I’m tired. Sometimes I’m stubborn because I’m being stubborn.

But certain things that had always seemed completely unrelated started making more sense when I looked at them together. These are some of the ones I missed.

Here are signs I thought were just part of my personality until I realized they were autism:

1. I could socialize, but I didn’t realize how much I was managing it

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One reason autism never occurred to me was that I could talk to people. I had friends. I’d had relationships. I’d worked with plenty of different people over the years. I could chat to strangers, joke around, and go out drinking with friends on a Saturday night. Surely that meant I understood social interaction?

What I hadn’t considered was how much conscious effort could sit underneath it. Another process could be running quietly in the background of a conversation: When should I speak? Have I been talking too long? Should I ask them something now? Am I looking at them enough? Was that a joke? Do they genuinely want an answer, or are they only being polite?

I’d been doing some of those calculations for so long that they felt normal. That was one of the bigger shifts after diagnosis: realizing there can be a difference between naturally navigating a social situation and becoming very good at working out how you’re supposed to navigate one. From the outside, those two things can look exactly the same.

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2. I regulated my eye contact 

Eye contact was one of the biggest surprises in my assessment report. I’d always thought I had reasonably good eye contact during conversations. I certainly never went through life thinking other people must have noticed something unusual about the way I looked at them.

At the same time, I was regulating it far more consciously than I realized. When walking my dog, for example, I would often keep my head down as I passed strangers on the street. I wasn’t dramatically afraid of looking at them. Looking down was simply easier.

During an actual conversation, though, I thought I was practicing eye contact properly. My autism and ADHD assessment report had another view. My eye contact was described as reduced and poorly modulated.

Reading that was fascinating because it exposed a gap between what I believed I was presenting and what somebody specifically trained to observe my behavior was actually seeing. I had been consciously managing something while believing I was doing it naturally and successfully.

Before diagnosis, the question in my head would have been: Can I make eye contact? Of course I can. Now I think the more interesting question is: Why was I thinking about making it in the first place?

3. I used to disappear from social events when I’d had enough

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For years, I occasionally did something on Saturday nights that I assumed was just another strange part of my personality. I’d leave.

My friends could still be happily drinking in town, and I would suddenly reach the point where I needed to go home. Sometimes I’d disappear without even telling them.

There didn’t need to have been an argument. I wasn’t angry with anybody. The evening might have been perfectly enjoyable. I’d just had enough. At the time, I usually told myself I was tired or bored.

Looking back now, I think some nights probably were exactly that. But some evenings, the crowded pubs, loud music, people talking everywhere, and the effort of following conversations had simply become too much. Eventually my quiet bedroom would feel infinitely more appealing than another hour in town.

I didn’t have a word like overstimulation for any of this then. I just knew that something inside me had reached its limit. That distinction has helped me understand myself much better since diagnosis.

Enjoying something and having enough capacity left for it are not always the same thing. I could love being with my friends and still desperately need to get away from everybody.

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4. I was really awkward about plans

One of my closest friends lives at the top of my street. He might text me after lunch on a Monday and ask whether I fancy going up around seven for a catch-up and a drink. That invitation is rarely inconvenient.

I like him. I enjoy spending time with him. I barely have to travel anywhere. And I will almost always say no. If we’d arranged exactly the same evening a week beforehand, I’d happily go.

This used to frustrate me because it didn’t make logical sense. The problem isn’t him. It isn’t the drink. It isn’t even that I want to stay home instead. It’s that I woke up on Monday with a version of Monday already in my head.

By lunchtime, suddenly turning that ordinary day into a social evening can feel remarkably difficult. A few hours doesn’t feel like enough time for me to rearrange myself mentally.

From somebody else’s perspective, I’m free at seven. From mine, being technically available and being mentally prepared are completely different things.

Before my diagnosis, I would never have connected that with autism. When I heard about autistic routines, I imagined somebody needing every part of every day to happen at precisely the same time.

Mine doesn’t look like that. Sometimes I just need to know what my day will contain before it begins.

5. There were a lot of strange things I couldn’t stand

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For most of my life, I would never have described myself as somebody with sensory difficulties. I just had things I couldn’t tolerate.

Food texture is a big one for me. I can’t eat shop-bought sandwiches, and cold leftover food is another immediate no. They don’t feel like preferences in quite the same way as preferring chicken to beef. Something about them makes eating them feel almost impossible.

Crowds are less predictable. Sometimes I’m absolutely fine in them. Other times I’m really not.

Last October, I went to London for the day with my mum. At one point she went into the restroom in Selfridges while I waited outside. Suddenly I became overwhelmingly aware of everybody around me.

It felt like people were coming toward me from every direction. Instead of the crowd becoming one mass of background noise, I felt like I could hear every individual conversation around me. It completely spun me out and ended in a panic attack.

I’m not claiming autism necessarily caused that panic attack. Anxiety and sensory overload aren’t interchangeable, and one frightening experience in a department store proves nothing by itself.

What the diagnosis gave me was another way of understanding why some environments occasionally seem to hit me much harder than I expect. The NHS includes differences in sensitivity to sound, light, smell, taste, and texture among possible signs of autism in adults. I’ve also realized how easy it is to reach your 40s without recognizing these as sensory difficulties at all.

I’ve spent years choosing the food I can tolerate, avoiding things I can’t, leaving places when I’ve had enough, and arranging parts of my life around what feels comfortable. Eventually those adjustments simply become life.

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6. I was often misunderstood

There have been times throughout my life when the way somebody interpreted me seemed completely disconnected from what I thought I was doing.

I could believe I was being honest, and somebody else would think I was confrontational. I could think I was simply answering a question while somebody else thought I was being difficult.

I might believe I was listening while the other person interpreted my expression or behavior as disinterest. Over enough years, you learn to compensate. I learned to soften what I was saying, add friendliness, think about how something might sound, regulate expressions, and give people responses I had learned were expected.

That eventually led to masking, something I’ve written about separately because I didn’t realize I was doing it either. But one thing that interests me now is what came before the masking.

I had learned to adjust myself because simply behaving naturally had sometimes produced reactions I didn’t understand. At the time, I didn’t connect those experiences. I just assumed there were certain things about interacting with people that I needed to get better at.

7. I was called obsessive a lot

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Golf. Fitness. Music. Food. Clothes. “Obsessive” has been used to describe me in more areas of my life than I can probably remember.

Again, I never thought much about it. Some people are passionate about things. I was apparently just particularly passionate. But when something interests me, it can become enormously important. I’ve had periods where fitness became so important that I trained beyond what my body could handle and injured myself.

Golf has consumed huge amounts of my attention at different points in my life, sometimes again reaching the point of exhaustion or injury.

And then there’s music. I’ve seen Fleetwood Mac five times, and in October 2023, I flew to New York alone specifically to see Stevie Nicks in concert. Flying across the Atlantic for Stevie Nicks obviously doesn’t make somebody autistic. Plenty of music fans have traveled much further for somebody they love.

What I recognize now is the pattern underneath it. When something matters to me, it can matter a lot.

I can spend far more time, energy, and sometimes money on an interest than I ever intended. I want to research it, know everything about it, organize things around it, and immerse myself in it. 

For decades, I called that obsessive. Now I understand that intense and highly focused interests can also form part of an autistic profile. That doesn’t mean every obsession I’ve ever had was autism. It means the pattern makes more sense than it used to.

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8. Everyone had descriptors for me; autistic just wasn’t one of them

Perhaps this is the part I find most interesting when I look backward. Long before anybody called me autistic, people had already spent years describing the traits they saw.

Loner was one. I’ve always needed a lot of time alone, often more than my parents or friends could understand. Sensitive was another. I could become very upset by things that other people seemed able to shrug off.

Then there was stubbornness. Once I’d made my mind up about something, persuading me otherwise could be extraordinarily difficult. If I decided to do something, I tended to go all in. And, repeatedly, obsessive. 

None of those words mean autistic. Millions of stubborn, sensitive, obsessive loners aren’t autistic. But being diagnosed later in life has made me realize that people had been noticing pieces of my personality and behavior for decades. We simply had different language for them.

That’s why diagnosis at 43 didn’t feel like discovering eight brand-new characteristics I’d somehow missed. I hadn’t missed most of them. Neither had the people around me. We had just spent decades explaining each one individually.

Why did it take me until 43 to be diagnosed with autism?

Part of the answer is historical. I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, when the diagnostic landscape was remarkably different. The UK’s first all-age specialist autism diagnostic center didn’t open until 1991.

The version of autism I grew up understanding was therefore much narrower than the one clinicians recognize today. I certainly didn’t see myself in it. And then adulthood gives you decades to adapt.

I worked out which environments suited me. I avoided some of the ones that didn’t. I developed social strategies, built routines, found people I was comfortable around, and learned countless small ways to navigate situations that didn’t necessarily come naturally.

Eventually, coping mechanisms become so familiar that they stop feeling like coping mechanisms. They just feel like you.

ADHD complicated the picture further for me. Anxiety, personality, upbringing, and ordinary human differences can all overlap with parts of an autistic experience too.

Sometimes you collect enough partial explanations that you stop wondering whether a larger one connects them. I did.

RELATED: Life As An AuDHD (Autistic + ADHD) Adult

My diagnosis didn’t rewrite my past. It gave me another way of understanding it. I’m still wary of looking backward and declaring that every strange, difficult, or intense experience in my life was autism.

An article like this couldn’t diagnose somebody else either. Recognizing yourself in one of my experiences, or even several of them, doesn’t mean you’re autistic.

A proper adult autism assessment looks much more broadly at social communication and interaction, resistance to change or restricted interests, sensory differences, day-to-day functioning, and whether relevant characteristics can be traced back into childhood.

For me, diagnosis has been useful because it gave me a framework. Sometimes I’m tired because I’m tired. Sometimes I’m stubborn because I’m being stubborn. Sometimes I leave somewhere because I’m bored.

And I can dislike a sandwich without it being a diagnostic event. But things that had once been unrelated flaws, preferences, and peculiarities suddenly connected.

• The need to be alone.
• The stubbornness.
• The obsessions.
• The eye contact I thought I was doing perfectly well.
• The nights when I’d abruptly had enough of everybody.
• The invitations I genuinely wanted to accept but couldn’t cope with receiving at short notice.
• The environments that sometimes became too loud, too crowded or simply too much.

None of those things individually told me I was autistic. Together, as part of a much bigger lifelong picture, they began to make considerably more sense.

Perhaps that’s the strangest thing about recognizing autism later in life. The signs weren’t necessarily hidden. I had been looking at many of them for decades. I just called them different names.

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Karl Frederick is a Medium writer exploring body image, identity, mental health, late-diagnosed autism and ADHD, and the complicated process of starting again. He created The Later Chapters, a project built on the belief that the years ahead can matter more than the years behind.