EDIT: Oh, whooops, I genuinely misread the subreddit as being the autism memes one, I’ll still leave this one here, that rant felt too good to delete.

Yes, I feel this one so much. Only make it “in my thirties” - and I completely internalised my masking, leading to self-hatred and inability to properly overcome it. I got misdiagnosed with a whole slew of different disorders over the course of my life, too. Which made me try so fucking hard to do what is right and push myself again and again, only to break down into long phases of complete withdrawal, burnout and depression every damn time, even though I did “the right things” to overcome stuff like anxiety and depression. Now, to be fair, it’s correct to be noted that throughout that life, I also developed a personality disorder from internalising all those things I heard, being lazy, having to remain restrained in my behaviour at every moment, questioning and repressing every intuitive emotion out of fear of it being “wrong”.

I only very recently ended up being able to recontextualise all the prior shit in my life, am currently in a phase where I am reconnecting with my anger, which I had forbidden myself completely and repressed it deeply into my unconscious in my early teens, after having had daily aggressive meltdowns in my childhood, which led to both physical violence and deep shaming and essentialist shaming of me “being wrong” by my parents. And looking back at my life, considering I was in different kinds of psychological and psychiatric care almost my whole life, I simply don’t understand how no one even considered autism at any point. Yeah, sure, it was not as well known as today in all its details, but the more I reflect, the more things I discover in my past that were just clear signs even back then.