For outside observers, my autism diagnosis at age 27 appeared to have come out of the blue. Perhaps they understood me as anxious, awkward, blunt, weird, highly-strung, sensitive, rude, overwhelmed, exhausted, odd, erratic, intense, stuck up, or strange… but autistic? No, surely not.

When I met someone I liked, I enthusiastically overhauled my entire personality, trying to contort myself into the person somebody else wanted me to be. In fact, I did it more than once. Happily. Being someone else’s idea of a person was much preferable to being myself, whatever that even meant.

My midwife says I have a high threshold for pain. That can’t be right. How could I better tolerate pain when I am less able to cope with everything else?

It is hard not to romanticise my autism diagnosis. When a lifetime of seemingly random and unrelated struggles is contextualised with one key piece of information, there is much to be thankful for.