The Grief After Knowing: What Late-Identified Autistic Adults Aren’t Told About Healing

It often doesn’t hit all at once.

The realisation that you might be autistic —whether through a formal assessment, self-recognition, or an exhausted late-night search for why the world has always felt tilted —arrives slowly. Quietly.

First, a flicker of relief. And then, a landslide.

The immediate relief — and what hides underneath

In the beginning, there’s often a surge of liberation.

“I’m not broken.”

“I’m not bad at life.”

“I’m not failing some invisible test everyone else was handed the cheat sheet for.”

There's an unmasking, almost involuntary at first: You catch yourself stimming without suppressing it. You cancel plans without apologising endlessly. You allow yourself — for maybe the first time — to say, "This is too much," without folding into guilt.

It feels exhilarating.

But relief is only the surface. Beneath it waits something deeper, something heavier: grief.

The grief of a life spent hiding

Masking is not "pretending."Masking is survival. It is the learned, painstaking habit of translating your real self into something more palatable for a neurotypical world.

It’s forcing eye contact while every muscle in your body screams. It’s memorising the “right” answers to social questions. It’s laughing when you're confused. It’s suppressing sensory distress so convincingly that even you start to doubt it’s real.

One late-identified autistic woman told me:"I spent years thinking I was adaptable. Turns out, I was just disappearing.”

The grief comes when you realise how early it started. How young you were when you learned to distrust your body’s signals. How hard you worked not just to fit in — but to survive spaces that felt like foreign countries with no maps.

The doubt that seeps through the cracks

Once the mask slips, another fear crawls in:

"What if I made this up?"

"What if I'm just socially anxious?"

"What if I'm not 'autistic enough'?"

You replay your history, questioning even your clearest memories:

Was that sensory overload or just stress? Was that shutdown or just being dramatic?Was that autistic joy or just weirdness?

Self-doubt becomes its own kind of mask.Safer to accuse yourself than to risk being accused by others.Safer to retreat into over-functioning than to claim a reality the world still tries to erase.

Re-seeing your life — and the quiet rage it brings

Diagnosis (formal or self-recognised) isn’t just about the future. It rearranges the past.

You start noticing all the moments that once made you feel defective:

• The birthday parties where you hid under the table.

• The teachers who praised your grades but called you aloof.

• The friendships that ended because you missed a thousand unsaid expectations.

• The breakups framed around your “inability to open up.”

You realise you weren’t broken — you were surviving.

And with that realisation comes a grief deeper than words — and sometimes, anger sharper than expected. Not just anger at others. Anger at yourself, for how long you believed you were the problem.

A late-diagnosed autistic man in his forties — shared, voice shaking:"I don't know what's harder — forgiving the world for not seeing me, or forgiving myself for trying so hard to be someone else."

Healing doesn’t mean you stop grieving

There’s a fantasy — sometimes sold even by the "neurodiversity pride" movements — that self-knowledge will bring peace.

But in reality, healing is messy. It’s not a victory march. It’s a slow, aching series of homecomings — and sometimes, small devastations.

You cycle through phases:

• Euphoria (I have a name for my experience!)

• Grief (I lost years.)

• Anger (I wasn’t protected.)

• Disorientation (Who am I without the mask?)

• Softness (I can exist differently.)

And then you cycle again. And again.

Because healing from masking is not about rejecting the self you were — it’s about understanding why you had to become that version to survive. And offering that younger self compassion instead of critique.

What unmasking can look like (and what it can't)

Unmasking isn’t about abandoning every coping strategy overnight. It’s about permission.

Permission to stim when you're overloaded. Permission to leave early without guilt. Permission to say, "I don't have the capacity for this," and mean it.

It’s building a life where you don’t have to perform at the cost of your own nervous system. It’s finding people who meet your authenticity with respect, not punishment.

It’s knowing that you are not difficult — the conditions were difficult. And now, you get to build differently.

If you're somewhere on this spiral...

Grieving the years lost. Doubting yourself on the hard days. Feeling raw and real and closer to yourself than you've ever been.

Please know:

You are not too much. You are not faking. You are not too late to belong to yourself.

The mask served you once. It kept you safe when safety was not guaranteed.

But you are allowed to loosen it now. Slowly, gently, at your own pace.

And under it all — bruised but whole — you were never missing.

You were always here.

Waiting for the world to catch up. Or maybe, simply, waiting for you.

If this reflection resonates with you...I’ll be speaking more about the journey of late-identified and self-recognised autistic adults at an upcoming Autism Acceptance webinar next week. You can find details HERE on the Events page.

We’ll explore how masking, grief, healing, and self-trust weave into the journey — and what it means to finally belong to yourself.

(You’re welcome to join, just as you are.)