What is the difference between excitement and anxiety?

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Got it in one.

It seems a part of the problem for the OP is that they may feel anxiety in situations that an NT may be excited, so when people say things like "you must be excited about that," you're confused as to the emotion you're feeling because they're assuming you'd be excited when in reality you're feeling nervous & anxious and may not be looking forward to ______ life event as NT's commonly would.

Fear is excitement without breath. --Robert Heller. At least, this is what I try to tell myself before I start panicking...

Anxiety and excitement are both arousal emotions, which increase our heart rate and breathing because the body has gone into fight or flight mode. So they are the same however, the thoughts and stimuli that accompany the feeling are situational and dictate how we perceive the feeling as being positive or negative.

Pretty much this.

Well, you have Excitement:

And you have Anxiety:

Me Wolf, you Alexi

Excitement is "Oh boy!".
Anxiety is "Oh no!".

Excitement: how you felt as a kid trying to fall asleep the night Santa Clause arrives.

Anxiety: how you felt as a kid (or now as an adult) the night before you go to the dentist.

Part of the problem is a particular vocabulary issue.

Having "anxiety" means "to be anxious about something".

Children tend to use the word "anxious" wrongly, and more and more adults retain the wrong usage into adulthood.

Kids say "I am anxious to go to Disneyland [or do some other desirable thing]" when they mean "I am eager to go to Disneyland". Kids say "anxious" when they mean "eager".

So if you were going by kidspeak and were being consistent then: "anxiety" would be the same thing as "excitement" . But don't go by kidspeak.

Excitement = happy
Anxiety = afraid

Yes, certainly in my own case, I tend to agree with this answer. My autism is characterised by pretty extreme alexithymia, and even as an adult I can feel the physiological effects of extreme emotion, yet still be extremely confused about which emotion I'm feeling and what event triggered the emotion. For a child experiencing this, how are they to learn the connection? As your post suggests, the only thing they can learn this from is by listening to the interpretation of the people around them, who could easily mistake anxiety for excitement when, as is common for alexithymic people, our introspection leaves us at a loss when trying to describe what we're feeling.

For example, in my last job, I had a manager who could pick up on the fact that a task was stressing my out long before I noticed it myself; he would come to my desk and reassure me that I was doing OK and not to panic, and after he walked away, I would be perplexed for a while about why he had done that, only realising later that he had picked up on the messages from my observable behaviour which I hadn't picked up on myself.

Likewise with the most recent CBT counsellor that I was seeing; she had a good understanding of autism and particularly alexthymia, and helped me enormously by working on my ability to connect the physiological sensations of emotion with their psychological causes. As she explained, there is not always a direct connection between the parts of the mind responsible for emotion and our conscious awareness; it often requires the emotion to trigger physiological responses via our endocrine system, which are then picked up consciously, causing us to then introspect about what we're feeling. This seems to be confirmed by research which I've seen [link to Google search results] suggesting that alexithymia is correlated with hypo-sensitivity of the sense of interoception (perception of our body's internal sensations.)

Excitement-joyous anticipation
Anxiety-worry, fear

Wow, you had really good luck with that former manager as well as your most recent CBT therapist. It's nice to hear stories where someone was actually helped.

I try never to forget just how fortunate I've been!

I was nearly put off CBT entirely by counsellors who didn't recognise or adapt to my autistic traits (alexithymia particularly), and it really was good fortune rather than design that I ended up being assigned to someone with the right experience (autism had been suggested to me but not diagnosed at this point). I do feel blessed to have seen the difference that working with, rather than against, my autistic traits can make to CBT. I can understand from my earlier periods of CBT why many autistic people write it off as a treatment, so I always try to highlight that it can help, even for autistic traits specifically, when best practices are employed.