I was just diagnosed earlier this month and I sought the diagnosis because my symptoms had progressed to the point where I didn't have enough energy to mask them effectively to myself. Since getting the actual diagnosis I've noticed that I try even less to mask.

I got my diagnosis whilst trying to do testing for anxiety. My dad think I put it on at his house but he just wants perfect children and he doesn't have it.i pretty sure my sister is autistic aswell but my dad just think I'm pushing it on to her

I self diagnosed but it still felt unexpected if that makes sense? I stumbled on a blog run by a psychologist who specializes in a number of neurodivergent conditions and got caught up looking at the similarities and differences between autism and ADHD [a condition I was diagnosed with already] and it made me realize two things 1: ADHD had been severely downplayed my whole life and how I was forced to cope with it with no help was unfair and 2: I had symptoms from all over the symptom venn diagrams for autism and ADHD but when comparing it to most of the other condition venn diagrams I only had shared symptoms or symptoms that fell under the half describing autism or the things I already had diagnosed. It blindsided me and I ended up going down one of the biggest research rabbit holes I've ever gone down, which says a lot, the entire time going "holy shit i have autism????" Then i started noticing and experiencing some severe symptoms and traits while feeling like i couldnt remember a time in my childhood that I really showed that many symptoms and I started thinking that I was wrong or that something else had to be wrong to have caused these symptoms so suddenly. I started stimming more and more noticeably for different reasons and I felt like I didn't do it that much or for those reasons before. I thought I never had issues with holding eye contact before, no one complained i wasnt and it hadn't made me uncomfortable that I had noticed. I thought i was having more issues with noises and light than before. I thought I never had an issue with introspection and suddenly i was relying on a dog to tell me when to pee and eat. I thought my social interactions have gotten weirder and less stable and easy to maintain. In reality though? It took me literal years to realize it all but I have always stimmed quite a bit, but the slight increase after learning I was autistic was more that I subconsciously knew itd help in new situations that I didnt think itd help before and i let myself do it more. I've always disliked eye contact so much so that when I was fairly young an adult in my life told me that if i didn't want to make eye contact I could just look at the center of people's eyebrows or their nose and they cant tell, I took it to heart so much that I tricked myself into thinking that I was making eye contact with people instead of staring at people's foreheads for so long it took until i was analyzing it to realize something is wrong. The funny thing is I've since been told that close up my eye contact is "weird" because i cant pick an eye to look at and end up darting between both so if I had been making eye contact someone would have pointed that out earlier. My earbuds broke and i was regularly in a new, brighter, environment than I was used to shortly before I found out about my Autism and the stress from that continued to build until i figure out the issue and I got new earbuds and asked professors to lower the lights. Before I had my dog to tell me when to pee and eat I was getting frequent bladder infections and UTIs because I was always holding it and acting as if that were normal for some reason and I would eat less than a meal a day on adverage, something I fully blamed on meds that I no longer take and an ED that I have managed but still have a pretty serious issue with unless I just eat with my partner or listen to the dog. And my social interactions DID get weirder, I stopped masking a little subconsciously because it was tiring but also i was transition [ftm] and still can't figure out how to mask in a masculine way. But I was also weirder and more wrong in social situations than I thought and every day im barraged with memories of a social screw up that I now understand made me look mean or intimidating or awkward or I learn a new social thing I've been misunderstanding and therefore also using incorrectly my whole life because I couldn't read the tone around it. Sometimes it takes a long time and a lot of digging around in yourself, feelings, and memories for everything to be put into perspective. Sometimes that perspective points to a misdiagnosis and sometimes it just confirms what you've already been told or already knew.