A personal account of the decision, the process, and what shifts before you even get your results — for anyone who is thinking about going in, or has just come out.
The browser tab had been open for weeks.
I had found the psychologist through research. That is probably an understatement. I watched her talks, read her articles, looked at her credentials, her approach, the way she spoke. I shortlisted a few names, then eliminated them one by one — this one didn’t feel right, that one I couldn’t warm to — until one name remained. It was a feeling, in the end.
Still, I didn’t book.
Then Stefanie Sun’s My Desired Happiness came on. The line about asking for directions when you don’t know the way. About not pretending to be cool. Something in it reached into whatever I had been holding shut, and all the tension I had been carrying came pouring out.
I sent the booking form that evening. I kept it brief. Clinical, even. I am considering an assessment, what are the costs and available dates. Not: I have been going in circles for months and I don’t know who I am anymore.
Pressing send felt rash. It also felt final. After all the back and forth — am I imagining this, is this a waste of money, what if nothing shows up — I had started. There was no more deliberating, because there was no more going back.
The wait for the first appointment was two months.
If you’re still in the stage of wondering whether to seek an assessment at all, I Went In Expecting an ADHD Diagnosis. What I Found Was Something Bigger. is where that part of the story begins.
They told me I didn’t need to prepare for the intake session. It was just a conversation — background information, the psychologist getting a sense of whether to proceed with formal testing and what to include. I did not need to bring anything.
I prepared anyway.
I used an AI to help me put together a summary document: everything I thought was relevant, formatted and organised like a neuropsychological report. School certificates. Teacher testimonials I hadn’t looked at in years. Records of things I had explained away or forgotten or never thought to connect.
The hardest part was the childhood history.
Adult assessments rely heavily on it — developmental milestones, early behaviours, how you were as a child before you learned to compensate. I didn’t want to involve my parents. My memory has always been poor for details, and what I did remember I had spent years explaining away — anxious, pessimistic, easily stressed. Those were the words that had followed me. Not autistic. Never that.
So I sat down and wrote. That is how I process things — I pour it out and the shape of it becomes clearer. The more I wrote, the more I found. Memories I hadn’t visited in years surfaced slowly. I began to see that what I had always thought were ADHD traits — the scattered feeling, the difficulty sustaining, the sense of always catching up — had grown more prominent as I got older. But underneath them, earlier, were things that looked different. The food rigidity. The crying before school without being able to explain why. The recess spent alone not because I had no friends but because the canteen was too much. I had not seen any of it as autistic at the time. I just thought I was a certain kind of difficult.
Writing it down did not give me a diagnosis. But it gave me back a girl I had almost completely misread.
That girl, and the threads she left behind, are something I’ve written about in The Threads of Life — Growing Up as an Undiagnosed Neurodivergent Woman.
Going back through all of it confirmed what I already half-knew, but some of the it were worse than I remembered. I felt a pang of heartache for the girl who had been struggling back then. I wanted to reach back and give her a hug.
When I arrived for the intake session, I didn’t hand the summary over. I was afraid of being seen as too extra — too much. I sat across from her and answered her questions and left the folder in my bag. I have spent my life moderating myself, my feelings, my thoughts. Friends have told me I give the impression of being calm and zen. Little did they know.
After much deliberation, I sent the document by email instead. I thought: it’s already done, and I want the most complete assessment possible. At worst, she could ignore it. Maybe the sending of it was data too.
The intake session is the first formal step — a clinical interview where the psychologist gathers your background and history, gets a sense of your concerns, and decides what to assess and how. She recommended proceeding with both autism and ADHD assessments. The IQ component was optional. My husband suggested I do the complete package, for a fuller picture of my cognitive profile. At that point I didn’t think I was gifted. I mostly wanted to know why some things had always been so hard, and I thought a complete test would give me a better picture of my strengths, weaknesses, the shape of how my mind actually works.
That first session is also, I came to understand, about something else entirely. It is as much for you to assess the clinician as the other way around.
I knew this because of my son’s assessment. The psychologist who saw him was competent. I just never quite felt seen by her. Information came in pieces. When I had gaps in my understanding, I was afraid to push too hard. I went home and read research papers by myself and came back with more questions and worried the whole time about being difficult. A good clinician and a good fit are not the same thing. For an assessment to be accurate, you need to feel safe enough to be vulnerable — to show who you actually are, not the version of yourself you have spent years curating.
If you don’t feel that with the first person you meet, it is worth finding someone else.
She handed me questionnaires during the session and sent others by email. Some I filled in myself. Others my husband completed as an informant — someone who knows you outside a clinical setting, who can describe how you function in daily life from the outside rather than the inside.
I didn’t ask him what he had written. I knew he knew me well enough, and I knew he accepted me as I am. That, more than anything, was what I needed to believe sitting across from her — that his account of me would be honest rather than protective. The gap between how I experience myself and how I appear to someone who lives with me turned out to be more significant than I expected. What looks like coping, from the outside, often is. What it costs is less visible.
The scales covered different ground. The Conners Adult ADHD Rating Scale looked at attention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity — how I manage focus, how I lose it, whether the difficulty is situational or constant. The Social Responsiveness Scale mapped social awareness and communication, including how much effort social interaction actually costs. The Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire — the CAT-Q — was designed specifically for people who may have learned to hide their autistic traits so effectively that standard tools miss them. It asks not just what you do, but what you are working to conceal. The Behaviour Rating Inventory of Executive Function looked at planning, working memory, emotional regulation — the day-to-day business of running a life.
I completed all of them with the same feeling: that I was trying to describe something in a language that didn’t quite have the right words. The honest answer to almost every item was it depends — on how much sleep I’d had, whether I trusted the person across from me, whether I’d already spent my reserves on being fine before I arrived. The format doesn’t have room for that. It asks you to collapse something layered and lifelong into a single word.
I wanted to annotate every answer. The psychologist said I could. I did.
The formal assessment happened over two days.
I didn’t sleep well the night before. I couldn’t eat in the morning. I arrived at the clinic with a pounding headache and asked the receptionist for paracetamol before we started — I was genuinely worried about not being able to think clearly.
When I sat down, I told the psychologist: I don’t perform well under pressure. I’m anxious. I’m not at my best today.
At the time it felt like damage control. Looking back, it was the most honest thing I could have done.
The first day was IQ testing — the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, which measures cognitive ability across several areas: verbal reasoning, perceptual reasoning, working memory, processing speed. It is structured, timed, unforgiving in its format. The working memory tasks were the hardest. Some of what was read to me didn’t register by the time I was supposed to respond. There was a moment where I genuinely couldn’t tell if I hadn’t heard it, or hadn’t processed it, or had simply gone somewhere else without meaning to. I sat there and could not answer the question. I felt, leaving that first day, that the headache had cost me something.
The second day brought the Conners Continuous Performance Test — a computerised attention task that measures how consistently you can sustain focus over time, how quickly your responses slow or become erratic. It does not ask you anything. It simply watches how your attention moves when you think no one is looking. I felt I had made too many errors and was disappointed.
The ADOS-2 was different from everything else. The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule is a structured clinical observation — the psychologist presents specific activities and conversations designed to draw out the kinds of responses relevant to autism. It is less a test and more a careful watching. I knew she was looking at how I communicated, how I navigated social exchange, how I responded to ambiguity. Some of the tasks were strange, and she had warned me they would be — miming brushing my teeth, being handed unrelated objects and asked to build a story, working through a wordless picture book that made no obvious sense. It felt odd, even childish. I did it anyway. I understood, on some level, what each task was reaching for, even when I couldn’t fully name it.
I told myself, going in, not to mask. As a deliberate instruction. I spoke more than I normally would. I asked for coffee mid-session because I needed it — which sounds small, but for someone who has spent years calculating whether a request will make her seem like too much, it wasn’t. When I was anxious, I said so. When something didn’t make sense, I said that too.
There was another fear underneath that one, quieter but persistent. What if I was too good at this? What if I had spent so long learning to appear fine that even here, in a room designed to look past the appearance, I would just look fine?
It is a fear many late-diagnosed women carry into that room. The tools used in adult autism assessment were built largely around male presentations — more visible, more behavioural, less concealed. The smarter and more verbal you are, the easier it is to compensate in the moment, to find your way through a task even when the effort costs something. A good clinician knows this. The CAT-Q exists precisely because standard tools can miss people who have spent a lifetime hiding.
What I decided, sitting across from her, was to do my part. I told her to reach out if she needed more information or clarification. I had already sent the summary. I had written into the questionnaires. I had said, when I was anxious, that I was anxious. What I could not do was unmask something I couldn’t always see in myself. That part I had to trust her with.
I still don’t know how much I masked without realising. That is the part that unsettles me. I have been doing it so long that I cannot always see it from inside. The assessment was measuring, in part, a behaviour I may have been performing even while trying to stop.
There were also tears that came during the clinical interview.
She asked about fear. What I was afraid of. And I told her: not living a good enough life, by my own standards. Not a meaningful one. Falling short as a mother, as a person. Reaching the end of something and feeling I had not done enough with what I had.
These are things I think about in quiet moments. To say them out loud was something else entirely. There they were, out in the open, no longer just thoughts I could push aside. I had named them in front of someone else, and now they were real.
I hated crying in front of her. I hate crying in front of anyone. There is a particular shame in it — the feeling of being caught — that I have never been able to fully explain. But I noticed something underneath the embarrassment. Everything I named as a fear was entirely internal. Nothing about what other people thought of me. Everything about whether I was living up to something I couldn’t quite name.
I held onto that on the way home. I had no more space to think about it then. But I didn’t let it go.
That evening, I didn’t think about it.
I noticed that later, with some surprise. Two days of being fully present to my own history, and then a kind of blankness. I couldn’t have processed any more even if I had tried. I ate something. I went to bed. The questions that had been running on a loop for months had gone quiet — not because they were answered, but because there was nothing left to do.
Before I had walked into that room, what I feared most was a negative result. Results that showed nothing, confirmed nothing, left me with the same unanswered question I had been carrying for years. But somewhere during the two days, that fear had shifted. My gut had settled into something closer to certainty.
And I also knew, for the first time, that even if I was wrong — even if nothing showed up — the process itself had already given me something. The memories I had written into that summary. The patterns I had finally let myself see. The understanding that my experiences were real, that my pain was real, that I had not been imagining any of it. That was already mine, regardless of what the report would say.
I walked out into the corridor, headed to the washroom directly and closed the door behind me. I stood there for a moment.
Heavier and lighter at the same time. Heavier because somewhere deep in my gut, I already knew. Lighter because some weight had lifted — I had started, I was closer, I had let someone see what I had been carrying.
I didn’t have results yet. But two days of being really asked about myself — and really answering — had already shifted something.
The results were two weeks away. That waiting is its own experience, and I’ve written about it separately. But walking out of that room, I was already different from the person who had pressed send on a booking form months before, still not sure she had the right to be there.
It turns out you don’t need to be sure. You just need to go.
After the assessment came the wait — and then the results. If you want to follow the full journey:
Waiting for Answers — Coping with the Two-Week Wait After an Adult Autism and ADHD Assessment The two weeks between finishing the assessment and receiving the results. What that particular suspension feels like, and how I moved through it.
The Wrong Operating System: Being Gifted and Autistic Without Knowing It On what it means to have spent a lifetime running the wrong software — and what it looks like when you finally understand why.
Grow with their Flow 
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