I didn’t read any autism books after my diagnosis.
I know that’s not what you’d expect. You’d expect me to say I devoured everything — the memoirs, the clinical guides, the what now handbooks. I did that too, in a way. Just not after. Before the diagnosis — when the question was still what am I — I consumed everything I could find. Podcasts, videos, research papers, late-night threads. It felt like detective work. I was looking for voices that echoed my own, trying to locate myself in other people’s language.
But once the word was official — written down, dated, handed to me in a document — I stopped. I think it’s because the question changed. It was no longer what am I. It was how do I live now, knowing what I know. No autism book could answer that.
I was diagnosed autistic at 39. Autism and giftedness, both — a combination that kept me functional enough to go unnoticed, and struggling enough to never understand why.
In the months after, I ran. Literally — excessively, compulsively, almost daily. It was the only thing that quieted my body enough to survive the noise in my head. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t sit still long enough to process a paragraph. Running became its own language, a way of outpacing what I wasn’t ready to feel. I ran for about four months, on and off — pausing to heal knee pain, pausing again when a toenail fell off, going back anyway. Constantly injured, aching, exhausted, and still lacing up.
Until I couldn’t ignore it anymore. Maybe running wasn’t what my body needed. Maybe I needed to listen, for once. Something less extreme. More grounding than pounding.
When the running slowed, I started reading again. Not new books. Old ones. I reached for the books I had read during my years in palliative care and oncology — books about meaning, suffering, and what a life is worth when you know it will end. I had read them as a young clinician, sitting beside people who were dying. I had highlighted passages, folded corners, believed I understood.
I didn’t understand anything. The words were the same. I wasn’t.
Man’s Search for Meaning was the first I picked up again.
Viktor Frankl wrote it from inside a concentration camp, and the argument is deceptively simple: meaning isn’t given. It’s made. It’s shaped in the mind — personal, stubborn, deeply individual. Two people can endure the same suffering and come away with entirely different meanings. The suffering isn’t wasted if you can make something of it. A seed of hope is enough. An ordinary life can be profoundly meaningful — if you decide it is.
The first time I read it, I was thinking about my patients. About suffering from a clinical distance. About how to sit with people at the end of their lives without trying to fix what couldn’t be fixed. The second time, it was me. Not a concentration camp — nothing that extreme. But forty years of struggling, masking, compensating, burning out, rebuilding, and burning out again. Forty years of not knowing why. And now, at midlife, a few words on a clinical report were supposed to explain everything.
I am trying to make meaning out of it. Out of the diagnosis, out of its timing, out of every decision that led me here. Not because I need the story to be neat — but because the alternative is that it was all for nothing. And I refuse to believe that.
Frankl didn’t make it easier. But he made it possible to sit with.
Edith Eger asked more of me.
I read The Choice and then The Gift back to back. Her message is unflinching: the biggest prison is the one we build in our own minds. We have to face our trauma. Process it. Move through it — not around it. Not bury it. Not pretend it didn’t shape us.
But what stayed with me wasn’t just her message. It was her life. She began studying psychology in her 40s. Earned her PhD at 50. Published her first book at 90. She built something meaningful out of what she survived — not by minimising it, but by refusing to let it be the end of the story.
I kept asking myself: could I do the same? Not in comparison — the scale of suffering is not the same. But in principle. Could the years of masking, the late diagnosis, the grief of what could have been different — could those lessons become something I offer? I don’t know yet what form that takes. But the question itself felt like the first honest thing I’d asked in a long time.
I have two neurodivergent sons. I raised them for years without knowing I was autistic — without knowing they were neurodivergent — carrying a fragile sense of self and a quiet, persistent belief that if you’re struggling this much, something must be fundamentally wrong with you. The diagnosis changed what I could give them. Not perfectly, not instantly. But it gave me language. And I want them to grow up more surefooted than I was. More accepting of themselves. Less haunted by the gap between effort and outcome.
Tuesdays with Morrie was different — simpler, faster, almost disarmingly direct.
Mitch Albom’s conversations with his dying professor don’t circle the question. They land on it. We can leave at any time. We may not grow old. Facing both life and death honestly is one of the bravest things we can do. I return to this one when I need to be shaken awake — when diagnosis feels like something that stole my past and I need someone to hand me back the present. Stop wasting time. Stop drifting through your own life. Be here, on purpose.
Ikigai didn’t resolve anything. I wanted it to. I wanted that clean, elegant answer — the intersection of what I love, what I’m good at, what the world needs, and what I can be paid for.
After diagnosis, I questioned everything. I had spent years pouring into my family. I wanted something that was mine — something that built my sense of self, that contributed, that meant something beyond the walls of this house. I explored the practical options: YouTube, parenting content, selling a product. All of it made sense on paper. None of it felt alive. It felt like working to live, not living to work, and I knew that wouldn’t sustain me.
Ikigai comforted me, but it left the question open. I’m still circling it. What I do know is that my heart kept pulling me back to writing — even when it felt too vulnerable, too exposing. I started this blog before my diagnosis, when it was instinct more than strategy. After the diagnosis, I stopped for six months. I was too deep in it — processing, grieving, running, watching Planet Earth at midnight because something about the scale of the natural world made my inner world feel less catastrophic.
When I came back, it wasn’t because I had found my purpose. It was because I needed somewhere for all of this to go.
I highlight when I read. Physical books, especially — pressing the highlighter into the page, tracing sentences that feel like they were written for me. Kindle is different. Faster. Less embodied.
Somewhere along the way, I started copying quotes into a calligraphy notebook — a blank Muji book, no lines, no structure, entirely mine to fill. Calligraphy came quietly, and then immediately made sense. The slowness of it. The precision. The way meaning shifts when you write a sentence by hand, at a pace your body can actually feel. It became its own kind of meditation.
I don’t know what it says about me that I processed a late autism diagnosis by sitting alone at a desk, in the quiet hours, copying other people’s words in ink until they felt like my own. Maybe it says exactly what you’d expect.
No one knew I was rereading these books.
My husband gives me space, which is what I need. I don’t process out loud — I never have. It happens on the page. I don’t have friends I talk to about this, not in this way. I’m not sure if it’s the nature of the friendships, or me. I’m autistic. How would I know.
What I do know is this: I didn’t choose writing because I had an audience. I chose it because I had no one to tell. The reflections, the sensitivity, the years of inner work — they needed somewhere to go. The blog became that place. Not because I knew anyone would read it, but because the alternative was silence. And I’ve already lived too much of my life that way.
Maybe someone will find this and recognise something. Not the books — the feeling. The quiet rereading. The highlighter pressed into the page at midnight. The way the same words land differently when you finally know who you are.
I think that’s enough.
This is the first in a series about what I consumed during and after my diagnosis. Next time, I’ll write about the other side — the podcasts, the videos, the searching that came before the books. The phase where I wasn’t reading for meaning. I was reading for answers.
If you’re curious, I’ve gathered all the books I mentioned here — and a few others that stayed with me — on my bookshelf. Not as a prescription. Just as a place to start, if you’re asking your own version of the same questions.
Grow with their Flow 
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