Autism

Sorry if this seems stupid.

It's not stupid. It's where I was for a while (I'm in my 50s now) figuring a d/x would tell me what I probably already knew but would also carry a bit of a stigma with it. Like you, I'd learned to adapt, but the thing I didn't see for myself was how hard I'd been working to hide that there was anything to adapt to.

At my wife's urging, I sought an evaluation and in retrospect I'm very glad I did. The results came back mostly telling me things I already knew (I'm super-smart in specific ways, distinctly average in particular ways) but the thing I didn't see coming was that a d/x would put my marriage in the context of my Autism, and that means my wife gives me grace she didn't before when it comes to my hyperfocus and attention deficits, for when I need to leave social situations because I'm out of my social-energy budget, stuff like that.

Things that used to annoy or embarrass my wife (that when a social situation became too much for me I'd ghost, that I'd struggle in circumstances where unfairness feels intolerable, etc.) now show up to her as me responsibly doing self-care, or as me living my values as my identity- and instead of bending herself to fixing those broken parts of me, she understands that these are just me doing my best job of peopling in the face of how my brain works. Long story short, being understood in this light gets me better understood, I'll never regret it. Not feeling like I'm an imposter with broken parts that must be hidden is sooooo good.

After recognizing the value of this dynamic in my marriage (and in my relationships with my wife's friends) I made it a project to recreate it in my workplace- and it happens that as my co-workers re-contextualized my foibles and eccentricities into that light, it became a lot easier for me to ask the kinds of questions I've long not asked for fear of looking dumb- and they're more than happy to answer and so much has gotten so much easier. Not feeling like I have to mask is a great big relief.

Along the way, freeing myself up in the contexts of my marriage and in my career, I've found ways to be a better parent as well as be a husband and co-worker. It's as if masking doesn't work.

Of course, like any good denizen of the spectrum™, I've made unpacking my own neurodiversity into a special interest. It explains soooo much. (there's too much to pithily explain, I'll spare you the info dumping in this thread)

Perhaps non-intuitively, recognizing all the ways I've been living life the hard way (masking, avoiding social interactions I've been thirsty to participate in for fear of being too weird) brings quite a bit of grief with it- why did I do all that the hard way when it's easier not to? Processing all of that is quite a bit of work, but it's oh so liberating.