I have been mildly depressed for most of my adult life, which I self-medicated with alcohol for a about 5 years. Even though I always knew I was different, I had no idea I was autistic at the time. I knew I was ADHD, but I just tried to manage it on my own since when I brought it up to my provider, the didn't believe me. I sought professional help to get sober, and maintained that for basically the rest of my adult life with a ~6 month hiccup. While getting professional help, I went through sooooo many anti-depressants and similar. SSRIs were horrible for me. Mood stabilizers seemed to do nothing. Anti-psychotics made me a zombie. Eventually, I landed on Wellbutrin, which seemed to work the best, but I still wasn't great. I was just able to manage life a little better. I was on that for like 7 years. It seemed to stop working, paired with an abusive relationship, so I started going downhill and became severely depressed.

One day, at social gathering with a bunch of psychologists at my friend's house, I said something I thought was completely fine, but apparently, it was wacky. My friend said, "Don't worry, he's just autistic." I thought he was joking, so the next day, just to mess with him, I took online autism tests to send him the results. However, I answered honestly and the results on ~3 different tests all came back as I'm deep into the autism spectrum. I sent them to him with some doubt that maybe I was autistic? When I went over again, he said that he was sorry for saying that about me. Honestly, I didn't care because I didn't see anything wrong with being autistic. The conversation eventually landed on that he thought I actually was autistic, and he came out as autistic too. Then, he covered a bunch of reasons why he thought that about me.

I went on a deep dive learning about being autistic, and I was almost convinced, but I wanted complete reassurance. I got a professional evaluation that used the ADOS-2 and threw in there an ADHD assessment as well. I am 💯% AuDHD. This lead me to learn a lot about living with this brain. Regarding autism, I learned a lot about my difficulties and how to adjust my life and social environment to best fit my style of sensing and thinking. I also learned to stop blaming myself as much. Things slowly got better.

Yet, I was still dealing with depression. I then came to my new psychiatrist with the assessment report showing confirmation of not only autism, but ADHD. I finally got put on ADHD meds and...WOW!!! I had not realized how much ADHD was affecting my life. This is a whole new world. Apparently, the ADHD meds have some research to support its use with autistic people in particular (page 13). It's been crazy how much I've improved in the past few days since I started. It's like I'm a much better version of myself. The most salient improvement for me is how little I now care about meeting other people expectations. I just want to live my life to make sure I accomplish what I want with it respectfully. It's really weird.

Anyway, the whole point is that I'm sure a lot of us are dealing with depression for so long, that it just becomes who we think we are. Pair that with the autism, and we just internalize that by thinking we're bad or broken, no matter how much we might tell ourselves that we're not. There are a lot of things that can help, but getting a good assessment and professional support are valuable. Internally, self-acceptance and then the motivation to improve our lives is where it begins. Once that happens, the world is your oyster.

Relevant song ❤️ : https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=XdRskxDOJfQ&feature=share