This is an excellent, complicated, and frustrating question. I am in my 40s and only recently got an official diagnosis. I’ve always been “weird” even though a lot of that got repressed in childhood because of ostracism/punishments/etc. Friends were few (but always “weird”) and relationships were nonexistent. I struggled through early adulthood, trying to do what was expected of me and just being exhausted all the time. Because, you know, “lazy.” I found a bit of stability in my 30s via the woman who I am still with (also ND) and a “good” job that wrung me dry for a decade. During that time I made some serious mistakes (mostly revolving around friends and housing) and it felt like that no matter what I did, whether it was following my impulses or denying them because I knew something was “wrong” with me and reality simply couldn’t be as I perceived it, it was the wrong decision.

2019 was a string of stressor after stressor, monumentally bad decisions as I tried to “do what I was supposed to do,” eventually culminating in a breakdown. After this, I knew something had to change. I was not aware that I had been masking the whole time, but I began to set boundaries. Friends were puzzled but went along for the most part. My spouse and I talked openly about them. And my employer was not happy in the least.

Things were finally starting to settle down a bit when Covid hit. She lost her job and I had to take a pay cut, but I got to work from home and as a result we got to spend a lot of time together. Work became less of a stressor for a bit after the initial mad scramble. The flip side is that I was spending all of my time in my poor housing decision. Every time I tried to take a positive step forward, it was like someone was waiting to beat my kidneys with a baseball bat.

It was around this point that we started spending more time with select friends as part of a “pod” (Covid still seems surreal looking back… especially because it never went away and society just abandoned any adaptations that weren’t actively rejected at the time), whose young son was exhibiting many signs of autism. This is the first time I started to wonder about myself, as I saw many of my early behaviors in him. And then again with my nephew not long after.

Work began turning the screws pretty blatantly. Boundaries were ignored, responsibilities kept accumulating, and any pushback was met with either silence or empty platitudes (“we are working on it” etc.). Neurotypicals would have generally been out the door and into a different job by that point, but the prospect of looking for a new job, the amount of energy it would take, and the very real possibility of the grass only being greener because the field was knee-deep in shit just solidified my freeze response (the usually-omitted counterpart to “fight or flight”). Within the space of two months, they hired “help” for me, in the form of the son of a VP’s friend who I had to babysit even though he was treated as my peer, more boundaries were ignored, and the company got sold to a much bigger fish. At that point it was clear that it was never going to get better there, and I made the decision to leave. I had nothing lined up, just some savings. The plan was to take some time off for me and “recharge.”

The recharging never happened.

I kept myself afloat by selling off some of the things that I had collected over the years, which hurt. But it didn’t hold a candle to the thought of returning to work. Then my dad died suddenly, just before the holidays, which I then had to navigate with a family in grief that I had mostly distanced myself from. Money was getting tight and for like a week the biggest problem was how to repair/replace the washer. Then a big storm hit in early January and realized several of the fears I had suspected about the house but was unable to confirm, validating years of anxiety and instantly adding sizable housing repair costs that there was no money for.

I broke. I had been barely functioning for awhile, and that was the straw bundle of rebar that shattered me. After a couple of weeks of sobbing through most of the day I reached out to my doctor, eventually ending up in intensive outpatient therapy. During an early session, I was reassured by several group members that it was okay to unmask in that space.

But I had come to a realization… the mask wasn’t just for the world. The mask was for me. It was ingrained into my internal structure. It had changed over the years, sure. But without it, “functional human being MelodiusFunk” did not exist. Could not exist. The concept of “me” grew around the mask. Without that structure, “me” is just a quivering pile of trauma, repression, guilt/shame, and maladaptive coping skills.

This is not the case for everyone (or at least I hope not, I don’t even want to think about it). But this has been my experience. I am working on healing. Various doctors have mentioned ADHD, ASD, PTSD, OCD, adjustment disorder, and an assortment of flavors of depression and anxiety. Not all of them agree with all of the diagnoses but they agree that I’ve been making progress.

The kick in the balls is that none of it matters unless I can afford to live. And as many of you have probably noticed, that has become more and more difficult even without mental health issues. My credit cards are maxed. I’m still 5ish months away from getting (likely) denied for disability. Sales of personal items has hit a dry spell. I have no wealthy relatives or friends to lean on. My living situation hasn’t been good but it’s only going to get worse once I can no longer afford payments. The obvious answer is “get a job you lazy bum,” but even if I can successfully navigate around the trauma and hold something down, I will no longer afford to be able to continue treatment (shout out to Medicaid for being the best insurance I’ll ever have). Then it’s right back to using all of my energy to wrestle with severe executive dysfunction just to maintain a status quo that makes me miserable, and from there it’s just a countdown to the next mental break.

It’s funny… society says it’s fine if I starve in the streets. My own fault, Just World fallacy, etc. But me saying “I no longer wish to participate in this rigged game, I’m tired” sets off sirens and klaxons and sets the stage for a (very very expensive) grippy sock vacation. I did the things I was supposed to do my entire life. Stretched myself thin to meet expectations. Followed the rules. And now that I can’t anymore… yeah. I’m still trying, though. Even in the face of bleak hopelessness, both personal and at the world in general. I don’t know why.

Apologies if this was not particularly helpful. But this is my lived experience as someone who also only connected the dots late in life. I wish you the best, truly and earnestly.