In June 2026, at fifty-one, I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, level 1, what used to be called "high-functioning autism" or, in many cases, "Asperger's syndrome". It wasn't a surprise. It was, if anything, a confirmation. But let's start from the beginning.
Before
For most of my life I've had the feeling of being built in a slightly different way from everyone else, without ever managing to give that difference a name. In primary and middle school I did well without effort. Then in high school, when the demands increased and the social dynamics got more complex, something jammed. Held back twice, the constant feeling of being inadequate, of being different. Few friends, often just one, often older than me. The teasing from classmates didn't help.
Around twenty came anxiety, depression and agoraphobia. From there on, decades of psychotherapy. Useful, sure, but it was like treating the symptoms without ever finding the cause. Nobody, myself included, had ever wondered whether there was something else underneath.
Meanwhile life went on. A career as an IT consultant, music, radio. Intense, all-consuming passions, the ones I now know to call "circumscribed interests" and that back then were simply my world. A direct, brutally honest way of communicating that sometimes created friction at work: I needed clear, explicit instructions, and when they didn't come I got irritated. Trouble following long, winding conversations. Trouble reading other people's non-verbal cues, compensated by a conscious, continuous effort of analysis. Sensitivity to certain noises, certain smells, certain textures. The overload in highly stimulating social situations, and that tendency to avoid them that for years I only called "anxiety".
And then the masking: that constant, largely unconscious performance through which you learn to appear the way others expect you to be. It works, but it has a very high cost that you pay in exhaustion, anxiety and self-esteem.
Remote work, which arrived with the pandemic, was an important clue. My quality of life improved sharply. It wasn't laziness or asociality: it was that my nervous system, finally, no longer had to manage a sensorially and socially hostile environment every single day.
The process
At some point I started reading about neurodivergence and recognized myself in too many things to keep pretending. I decided to get a serious assessment: clinical interviews, structured interviews following the DSM-5 criteria (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition), cognitive tests, questionnaires, and even an interview with my mother to reconstruct what I was like as a child.
The result: Autism Spectrum Disorder (code F84.0), level 1, without intellectual impairment and with functional language.
What it means, in practice
The autism spectrum in the DSM-5 is described in three levels, which indicate how much support a person needs. Level 1 is the one requiring the least support: the difficulties are there, they are real and cause clinically significant distress, but without the need for constant help in daily life. "High functioning" means that intelligence is average or above (in my case the cognitive test came back high) and that language is fully developed.
Beware of a common misunderstanding, though: level 1 does not mean "a little autistic" or "mildly autistic". It means the difficulties are less visible from the outside, often precisely because a lifetime of masking has hidden them well. The flip side is that people at level 1 go decades without a diagnosis, accumulating anxiety, depression and burnout as side effects of a way of functioning that was never recognized. Not by chance, the assessment concluded that my anxiety symptoms most likely developed secondarily to the difficulties related to the autism spectrum. Thirty years treating the effect, without knowing the cause.
Concretely, for me level 1 means: a need for direct communication, struggling with group dynamics and a preference for one-on-one interactions, routines that provide predictability, difficulty with changes, sensory sensitivities, deep and lasting interests, and an energy cost of social situations that others don't see.
After
The diagnosis didn't change who I am. I was autistic the day before too; I've been autistic for fifty-one years. What changed is the reading key. Episodes, struggles and failures that for decades I attributed to character flaws now have a coherent explanation. I wasn't wrong: I was a different operating system trying to run software written for another one.
There's relief, a lot of it. There's also some grief for all the time spent fighting against myself without knowing it, and for what could have been different with an earlier diagnosis. The two things coexist.
And there is, above all, the possibility of starting over from correct data. Now I know what I need: predictable environments, explicit communication, time to recharge after social interactions, respect for my sensitivities. They are not whims, they are system requirements.
If you recognize yourself in any of what I've written, know that an assessment in adulthood is possible and makes sense at any age. Understanding how you really work is not a label: it's a map. And after a lifetime of navigating by sight, having a map changes everything.