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I am diagnosed with moderate autism only last year , but what freaks me out is all these other conditions that get talked about on here like everyone knows about them and easily recognises them and is diagnosed with them ,maybe it's my age mid fourties and i was never diagnosed with asd early in life and just feel like an idiot almost for not knowing that i have what i now know as dyspraxia,ocd,alexithmia mysphonia and possibly even more conditions i've not discovered .Is this common for older folks to have lived for decades with so many issues but not do anything about it or are the younger folks educated more on these issues or is it an autism thing to not realise you are suffering from all this.

Almost everyone assumes that they are normal. I was over forty before I realized that my family was odd. I went to various therapies and "recovery" programs for over 15 years, during which Asperger's hit the DSM but nobody mentioned it to me. Professionals are pretty useless at diagnosing even two concurrent conditions. Beware of labels that qualify you for prescriptions. Drug pushers are not out to help you.

I must admit I think i was in denial or just thought i was ok ,i remember even a friend of mine when i was in my early twenties snapping at me once when i wound him up and calling me an autistic f...k and it just went over my head at the time and I just laughed it off but looking back now i think some of my old friends from school ect knew there was something wrong with me but never said anything as i was quite a laugh back in them care free days,also i remember looking at this forum back around 14 years ago when i had some nagging doubts about myself and even then read a few posts and thought no this is not what i'm like, i drive a car, i have a job i was in the process of moving out and buying a flat i can't be asd .How wrong and deluded i was back then.

Yeah, I feel the same, I had very little self-awareness when I was younger.

When I was a kid, parents and teachers thought that as long as you had a high IQ, you must be fine, and any issues were just a personality thing. I was labelled variously as shy, immature, over-sensitive, awkward, tactless, lacking common sense, etc. and expected to "grow out of it". I just thought myself a particularly stupid kind of smart person.

It was only when I was in my late teens or twenties that Aspergers even became recogised, and then it was very much seen as a teenage boy thing. When the concept of EQ or "emotional intelligence" arrived, I realised I had high IQ but rock-bottom EQ, but it took until last year to connect that to Aspergers. And I still might not have got there if I hadn't chanced upon a list of traits in females, because some of the male markers just weren't relevant.

It was kind of annoying the reactions I got when I realised. If I asked friends and colleagues "can you tell there's something a little different about me?" every single one said "yes", but nobody had ever thought to discuss it with me. I guess people see the difference, but they don't know what it is, they just mentally label us in some way. Conversely, when I told my parents, they had trouble believing that my quirks were "bad enough" to need a label. I mean, it's nice that they are accepting me the way I am, but might be nicer still if they could recognise that the way I am now has a lot to do with dealing for a long time with undiagnosed Aspergers

OK, rant over