Women's Health August 6, 2026 0 Comments

How a Late Autism Diagnosis at 49 Unlocked the Hidden Key to My Whole Life—and What It Means for You

Ever sat there flipping through channels, looking for a show that just clicks with you? That’s exactly where I was one steamy July evening in 2025, cuddled up with my husband, Jeff, when we stumbled upon Nathan Fielder’s HBO gem, The Rehearsal. Now, Fielder’s brand of cringe-comedy isn’t your run-of-the-mill sitcom; it’s this weird wonderful blend of awkward realness and meticulous rehearsal… kind of like life through a funhouse mirror. I found myself oddly connected to his awkwardness — a feeling that’s echoed through my nearly 50 years of being that “too honest,” overly talkative, ‘corner-dwelling’ person who’s always one step shy in social settings.

What really got me scratching my head though was an autism screening scene in the show — simple, yet profoundly revealing. It wasn’t just about guessing emotions through eyes; it sparked something else in me — a subtle tapping out of three letters that spelled AUTISM — my fingers typing out a hidden truth I hadn’t yet faced. It’s wild how a TV show can open doors you didn’t even know existed, right? That moment propelled me on a deep dive into what it actually means to be autistic — especially for women like me who’ve been hiding in plain sight, masked by years of trying to fit in.

So here I am, sharing my journey — from missed signals in childhood, to grappling with misunderstood behaviors, to finally hearing the word “autistic” not as a label but as a liberating discovery. Because let’s face it: How many of us go through life wondering why we feel so different, yet never quite knowing what “different” actually means? This is a story about finding that answer — with all its struggles, revelations, and a whole lot of “aha” moments. And maybe, just maybe, about finally owning the truth that no, you’re not broken — you’re simply YOU.

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13 min read

ON A WARM evening in July 2025, I find myself watching The Rehearsal, an HBO show created by and starring Nathan Fielder, the comedian known for cringe comedy that blends fiction and reality. He is deadpan in his interactions with people, and awkward.

My husband, Jeff, and I were flipping around for something to watch and landed here. Maybe I’m liking it because I kind of get this guy, although I don’t yet know how much I really do get him. I’m almost 50. I’ve always been awkward with people—known for blurting things out, for being too verbose, for being “painfully honest.” I was the one in the corner doodling or writing while others socialized; the one whose shoulders finally relaxed when everyone else left a room.

Tell a little girl she’s different from the other kids and she’ll want desperately to be the same. Tell a woman she’s the same as everyone else and she’ll yearn to be different, independent, unique. As people, our only gauge for how normal or not-normal we are is other people, and that’s where the trouble begins.

In this episode, Fielder is taking a common autism screening test called the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), in which you look at a photo of another person’s eyes and try to guess their emotional state. Fielder is looking at a photo of a woman’s eyes. The multiple choices are playful, comforting, irritated, and bored. I narrow it down to two before selecting playful. Fielder picks comforting. The correct answer turns out to be playful.

“Did you get it right?” I ask Jeff, sitting next to me on the couch. He nods, raises his eyebrows at me. I nod too. We return our attention to the show, where Fielder is exploring some of the challenges autistic people face.

My left hand rests on Jeff’s leg. The pads of my fingers are tapping a light, rapid pattern: three letters of a word—A, T, S—as though they’re typing on an invisible keyboard. I don’t notice I’m doing it at first. The fingers of my right hand are tapping too, on the armrest of the couch: U, I, M. I’ve been quietly, unconsciously typing the word AUTISM on a keyboard only I know exists.

We watch the rest of the show, and I have questions. Is Fielder autistic? It’s unclear. A quick Google search reveals the joy and validation The Rehearsal is bringing to the autistic community. They feel seen, they say. Their experience of constantly rehearsing for everyday life, playing a role they don’t want to play, is represented in the show.

I frown in the darkness of the quiet living room, thinking about how awful it must be. The rehearsing.

Alma Haser

After the show ends, as I’m getting ready for bed and doing more Internet searches, I find a reference to The Rehearsal’s visceral portrayal of “masking.” I look up masking. It leads to an entry on “autistic masking.”

Then a link with the title “Are You Autistic?” I click on it. It leads to a free online screening test: the Ritvo Autism Asperger Diagnostic Scale-Revised (RAADS-R). It takes only a few minutes, and I’m emailed a pdf (with the disclaimer that it is not a diagnosis, only a screening test). The result: 144 out of 240. I’m in the “Pronounced” range of likely autism spectrum disorder.

I stare at the number for a long moment. I picture my life—the kid whose favorite place was the nearest library; the teenage years of social gaffes and alienation interspersed with high achievement; the friendships that mysteriously withered; the career that went nowhere. My life, with its mystifying turns of misfortune, confusion, underachievement, and self-loathing, actually spins in front of my eyes, like a sped-up movie reel.

I walk out of the bathroom, hands still damp, the score glowing on the screen. “Hey, honey, guess what?”

It’s five days from my 50th birthday, and I’ve just completed an extensive autism assessment with Crystal Lee, PsyD, a clinical psychologist and the owner of LA Concierge Psychologist, an online neuro-affirming therapy and assessment practice. I was referred to Dr. Lee by Thriving Spirit Counseling, which I found through a search of providers that take my insurance.

I met with Dr. Lee for five hour-long secure video-chat sessions, during which she asked me about all aspects of my life and experiences, starting with childhood and progressing to the present, moving through the criteria of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). The assessment evaluates for three areas of social communication and interaction deficits; at least two areas of restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviors, interests, or activities; symptoms having been present since early childhood; symptoms causing significant impairment in social, occupational, or other areas of functioning; and no evidence of another diagnosis that would better explain these symptoms. A total of eight criteria.

The time has come for Dr. Lee to share the diagnosis. My fingers are tapping triple time. She walks me through the criteria, six of which are needed for an autism diagnosis. I meet all eight.

I feel dizzy. My fingers keep typing the word AUTISM, but now with relief, even euphoria. The last time I was this thrilled, I was looking down at Jeff as he knelt in the snow at my doorstep with an open ring box in his right hand and a bottle of champagne nestled in a snow-filled grocery bag slung over his left arm.

It’s official. There is a reason—a real, medical reason—that I am the way I am.

I’m not broken.

I’m autistic.

But.

How could I not have known, all this time?

1980

A girl in brown pigtails follows her father down the narrow center aisle of the hardware store in her small Northern California town. The place is musty and dim, fragrant with paint, sawdust, and metal. Old floorboards creak and sigh under her little feet.

She plucks absently at the inside corner of her right eye, letting the soft skin fold against itself and then releasing it. She does this a lot, especially when she’s in new places.

There’s something shiny at the end of the aisle, on the back wall of the store. She tiptoes toward it, peering: Gleaming chains are wrapped around giant spools, silver and black and copper, some thick and wide, some thin as a necklace. They remind her of fairy tales—princesses and kings in crowns of gold and silver.

She is alone. Her father has disappeared, talking to the clerk at the front of the store.

She dares another step forward, and a grating screech rips through the air. One of the giant spools is turning, moved by some invisible dark magic. The thickest, most menacing chain plunges downward, links clanking against each other as it rotates: a monster lumbering down from its lair, roaring at her. Coming to get her.

The little girl’s hands fly to her ears, clamp hard against them, and the sound is muffled—not enough. For a second she’s frozen. Then she whirls toward the front of the store, tears streaming down her cheeks, palms pressed against her ears. She reaches her stupefied father and the clerk, points with a trembling finger to the back of the store, where the clanging chains have gone silent.

1992

At 17, the girl is an achieving machine. She takes honors classes; she runs the school newspaper and cartoons for it; she writes a column for the town paper; she runs cross-country; she’s president of French Club, Environmental Club, Junior Statesmen of America. As she hustles from one meeting to another, from one project to the next, she’s focused, eyes on the future.

She gets up at 3:30 or 4 a.m. to study for tests and eats voraciously as she works in the quiet darkness, gobbling toasted butter-and-jelly tortillas and huge bowlfuls of orange sorbet. She notes her consumption in a journal and plans her next exercise session, the expected calories-in vs. calories-out. She exercises doggedly, focused on the calories. She hasn’t yet learned how to purge—that will come later. When she binges until her stomach hurts, she abandons the calorie count, instead writing punishing journal entries: I pigged out. A whole carton of Fiddle Faddle. I look in the mirror now and I’m repulsed. What is wrong with me?

She has replaced her skin-plucking habit with a more satisfying one: typing. She types everywhere now, all the time, fingertips of both hands tapping on anything, the world’s surfaces her personal keyboard. She particularly likes words that can be divided into equal groups of three letters, which creates a pleasing rhythm, a keyboard waltz. But her favorite word to type is TIME, because the index and middle fingers of both hands tap equally—index-middle-index-middle—so it’s symmetrical. She thinks about time a lot. Its steady march troubles her. On her 17th birthday, she felt as if she were already descending toward decay and death.

Journal entry, 9/23/92: On the fashionable, pastel-colored couches sit a row of hair-sprayed, makeup-bedecked girls, chattering and waving their hands. They all wear short shorts and lingerie-like tops, displaying perfect tans. They talk of cruises, beach parties, getting drunk with their parents, and cheating in science class.… Sitting off to the side is another girl, in a plain green shirt and black shorts. She watches the others, smiles a little, talks a little…and all the while she feels different. This girl is me; did you guess?

1996

She spends her 21st birthday alone in her apartment, eating ice cream and watching Pulp Fiction four and a half times before she drops into sleep, awakening in the morning to a blank blue screen. She drags herself up at 5 a.m. to drive to the gym, where she works out doggedly, desperately, writing essays on the machine as she climbs. Working the puzzles she sees everywhere.

She’s the administrative assistant at an investment firm, hired straight out of college. She’s about to get fired and she knows it. The gym workouts help ease her anxiety, but not much.

She gets fired shortly after her birthday.

Her father sends her to a psychiatrist, who tells her she’s depressed and needs medication. The psychiatrist observes that she ruminates excessively and that she has a great deal of anxiety. She urges the girl to stop ruminating so much. The medication will help ease her anxiety. It does, a little.

Journal entry, 2/17/97: Dr. ______ says I seem to be inappropriately obsessed with the pursuit of self-definition. Why do I need defining? Why do I think I’m different from most people? It’s always a feeling of differentness. Doesn’t that sound strange?

She goes to graduate school and gets a teaching credential, breaking down partway through the program, overwhelmed, with thoughts of suicide. Limps onward, lying about the bandages, gets a job teaching preschool.

When she’s writing, her fingers finally find their runway. They race along the keys, powered by the ideas streaming from her brain. Ideas about identity, about human nature. Something is eluding me, she writes. It flits around the edges of my mind and taunts me. It feels like something huge. I often slip into such a depth of despair that I cannot move, cannot think, cannot feel anything but dark hopelessness.… But I know this: I love ideas; I love trying to figure out the world and myself.… Frankly I will see my efforts as wasted spent any other way.

As the years pass, she writes novel after unpublished novel, she creates blogs and websites that she quickly takes down, she writes a newspaper column. All of them create scenarios in which she works on the puzzle of the world. So many pieces, so much information, all shifting and moving, eluding solution. “Forgotten Future,” “The Dead Stream,” “Social Anxiety Club,” “A Woman’s Value,” “A Month of Sundaes,” “Wonky Robots,” “Letters Under the Bedroom Door,” “Cascade,” “Burning Questions.” Each project fills her with new hope. Each time she fails to make it work. Each time she tries again. The same thing happens with people, with friends.

She wonders why friendships wither away, why people get busy and never call back, leaving her bewildered, analyzing every interaction, wondering what she did or said to make people leave her.

2026

Now, I’m learning a lot about what it means to be autistic. I’m grieving the five decades mired in ignorance, suffering, and self-loathing. I’m rejoicing that I finally know.

Why do women like me remain undiagnosed for so long, to such a degree that the moniker “lost generation” of autistics, used by ScienceDirect, the National Institutes of Health, and the British Psychological Society, has begun to circulate the Internet like a mournful echo?

According to Dr. Lee, my traits are shared by most of the late-diagnosed autistic women she has assessed over the years: the finger-tapping and skin-plucking behaviors (known as “stimming”), the bouts with what I called depression (but that were probably autistic burnout, which is different from—and benefits from different interventions than—depression), the obsessive interest in writing and climate change. “These experiences had previously been explained as being anxiety or depression, when in reality they were likely a result of being neurodivergent and not knowing it, living in a world made for neurotypical people,” Dr. Lee explains.

She says I was a “high masker, which is common for late-diagnosed autistic women.… Not perceived as socially inept but perhaps a little more ‘quirky,’ while internally you felt very different from those around you and struggled to feel like you belonged.”

Autism has historically been so narrowly and rigidly defined that women like me have been undetected until recently, when the DSM finally, in 2013, expanded its clinical definitions to incorporate the actual spectrum (more like a color wheel) of autism spectrum disorder. (Common misdiagnoses include depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue, and personality disorders.)

There are few statistics on late autism diagnoses in women, but specialists like Dr. Lee are starting to note common traits and symptoms by age. Masking and camouflaging are the most common, which Dr. Lee attributes to the ways girls are often socialized. “Girls are raised with an emphasis on being generally interpersonally skilled [i.e., emotionally aware, socially fluent, ‘nice’],” she says. “As a result, autistic girls spend more time studying others, trying to figure out the social rules and the ‘right’ way to behave.”

Taylor Heaton is a Texas mother who runs a YouTube channel called Mom on the Spectrum, which has more than 200,000 subscribers. Heaton, 37, was diagnosed six years ago (which, although earlier than I received my diagnosis, is still considered late) after learning that a family friend had been diagnosed.

Alma Haser

“As a child I began to see myself as shy, even though that didn’t line up with my internal experience,” she tells me. “I generally enjoy talking with people. I did not then have the words to communicate how anxious the timing of conversations would make me, or how I was constantly thinking about what my face and tone of voice were doing rather than what the other person was saying. I was trying to juggle it all and blaming it on the fact that I was shy when really I was overwhelmed and lacking supportive communication strategies.”

Since her diagnosis, Heaton has learned ways to accommodate her needs and regulate herself, including dimming lights, turning off background noise, and wearing comfortable clothing. And she has found purpose: In addition to her YouTube channel, she runs regular connection groups for autistic people. (Among the autistic community, I’ve learned, it’s preferred to refer to “autistic people” or “autistics”—known as identity-first language—rather than “people with autism.” It’s not an acquired disease that one gets or has; it’s a neurotype that we’re born with, and it’s an integral part of our identity.) “There was one video that really took off—16 traits of autism in women—and the numbers started coming in,” she says.

As someone who has spent months wondering how many people like me are out there, I’m not that surprised by Heaton’s success. So many adult women, who grew up before the expanded clinical understanding of autism would have identified them, are coming to realize that the vague sense of alienness, of working twice as hard as most people to just seem normal, was actually not a solo endeavor. Taylor is reaching them. Reaching us.

“Autistic girls often remain undiagnosed until adulthood, so they grow up blaming and criticizing themselves for their social difficulties,” Dr. Lee says. “The social mistakes they make—and the relentless bullying they often encounter—wear down their sense of self-worth, leading them to later overlook poor behavior. They may also agree to do things they’re uncomfortable with in order to receive the attention they want.”

I stumbled upon my autism accidentally, after watching a TV show. For other late-diagnosed autistics, it can be the diagnosis of their child that leads them to explore their own possible neurodivergence. A common thread appears to be a persistent sense of feeling awkward or out of place, of being misunderstood. The range of experiences varies widely, and no experience is exactly like another.

Diana Partovi, PsyD, a clinical neuropsychologist, assistant clinical professor at UC Berkeley, and founder of California Neuropsychology Services, also received a late diagnosis of neurodivergence, at 52. She attributes the increased numbers of diagnoses in recent years, especially among adult women, to both the expanded DSM criteria and the increasing demands in women’s lives that exacerbate challenges and lead to autistic burnout. “As the demands increase, they can feel more overwhelming. People just realize, I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep pushing myself,” she says.

I’ve been told more times than I can recall, by therapists or others, “Stop ruminating.” (Oh, okay, sure!) The “rumination” is my brain’s way of trying to synthesize an enormous amount of incoming data without the filter that most people have. I have no other way of making sense of things around me.

I’m middle-aged, but in a way, I feel as if I’m starting my life over. I’m learning to see myself for who I am and, little by little, recover from the negative messages I absorbed for decades from a world that didn’t understand me, scary sparks from crossed wires. They all make sense now, and all those things I did and do make sense now. Well, more sense, anyway.

I must have written a million words in my life, a million desperate efforts to reckon with what the world was telling me about what I am—different, awkward, weird, alone—and what I am not: normal.

Of all those words, the ones you’re reading now are the most important, because now I’m telling the world what I am and what I am not. I am a woman who loves to think. I love to write. I love to formulate ideas about the world. I am autistic. I am not awkward. (Well, yes. I am awkward. The world and I can agree on that.) I am not weird. I am not alien. I am not broken.

I am not normal.

I am not alone.