[ This page is the continuation of Part 1: Due Tomorrow? Do Tomorrow! ]

With these two major topics demanding attention, I decided it was time to stop postponing my self-exploration. I set myself some clear parameters, including how I would handle alarming discoveries. Accustomed to working with data, I now had to navigate experiences, reactions, thoughts, feelings, habits, preferences, and emerging patterns. I speculated that, like artificial neural networks, the human brain might reveal structure through iterative observation. If my method failed, I would seek professional help. I found myself in one of my familiar paradoxes: highly confident in my reasoning, but also deeply uncertain about my introspection. (This mirrors a common autistic strength: pattern-first cognition — the very trait that helped me spot the pattern in myself. How delightfully recursive!)

So, I set sail into unknown territory, armed with something intuitive but hard to define—what I later recognised as holistic patterning and novel connection-making. It wasn’t classic analytical thinking, like debugging a complex system, but it shared the same rigour. I treated my experiences and emotions as data points to analyse. My guiding principle was clear: health comes first.

I built a map while exploring the terrain. And it worked!

But it took time to “format” the data into something I could understand. By that, I mean identifying and structuring my experiences, reactions, preferences, and habits in a way that made sense to me. Just like raw data needs to be cleaned and organised before analysis, I had to translate my lived experience into a personal schema. I categorised emotions (including some I had never named before), tracked behavioural loops, and built a working model of my internal world. As I progressed, each map node became a kind of multidimensional matrix. I even applied concepts from robotics to make sense of dentistry—my way of forging unexpected but useful links.

I explored a wide range of topics—dental material properties, perception effects, and psychology. These became new anchors on my map. Some paths led to dead ends, and some early conclusions made no sense—like my theory that “contrast” was the root of my struggles. Odd as it sounded, that moment was pivotal. It forced a change of perspective. From contrast, I traced a path to perception → sensory processing → autism spectrum traits → broader neurodivergence.

Looking back, I realise that even if I had seen a therapist, I would have faced the same difficulty: organising and expressing my internal experience. The first barrier was my aversion to asking for help — a trait I later recognised as hyperindependence. But there was another risk I hadn’t fully considered: I might have seen someone who didn’t recognise neurodivergence, who could have misread my traits and offered a mixed or inaccurate diagnosis. That would have undermined my trust in the whole process.

Traditional therapy might have meant spending hundreds of hours in uncomfortable conversation, using models that didn’t match my way of thinking. That could have derailed me—or caused me to give up. By designing an autonomous, adaptive approach instead, I preserved momentum and protected my sense of agency.

I also realised that the two major threads—my work experience and sensory challenges—were parts of a single system. That realisation allowed me to stop analysing them in isolation. When I compared my lived experience to recognised neurodivergent patterns, the picture became clear: I was very likely autistic.

Neurodivergent refers to individuals whose brain functions differ from what is considered typical, often experiencing the world in unique ways that can include challenges and strengths.

Exploration of the Found Patterns

That self-discovery resonated deeply inside me. Suddenly, I was no longer that stranger who had so many unrelated and unexplainable issues and a history that didn’t make any sense. More importantly, I liked who I am for the first time in my life! As I didn’t get all traits from my dental experience filter, I turned to online screening tests for additional perspective. The results were striking—all tests indicated autistic traits. Even if the online tests may not be reliable, as some questions can be tricky, misinterpreted, or challenged, they matched my findings, and that was a relief.

I was almost certain that many different struggles, life experiences and even some of my skills that seemed isolated were part of a whole.

In the days right after, I experienced something unusual. I began to sweat at night. It wasn’t caused by heat or fever, and oddly, it felt good. Almost like my body was catching up to what my mind had just realised. Maybe it was stress leaving. Maybe it was a nervous system reboot. Or maybe it was just my way of letting go — quietly, physically — of all the confusion I’d carried for so long. Or perhaps it was just a pleasant coincidence, but it still felt meaningful.

Tired of reading and writing so much text, I turned to YouTube and some podcasts, and the shared life experiences of many others clicked with me to different degrees, but for each of them at least something resonated. They put words to things I didn’t know how to describe and situations I experienced that I didn’t think about as they just seemed irrelevant, when not simply ignored.

A very common experience I heard was about difficulty with social interactions. I explored the topic on my own, and my first thought — half-joking, half-serious — was: “Well, I can’t have social difficulties if I don’t have any social interaction”. But then I started thinking deeper: actually, I don’t struggle socially… except in noisy places. And when people talk vaguely. Or when I don’t know the rules. Or when the conversation jumps unpredictably. Or group dynamics. And suddenly, I realised I didn’t lack social skills — I just had an entire operating system that worked under a completely different set of protocols.

These shared experiences, combined with my own, gave me the confidence to begin exploring my memories through a new lens. What once felt like random oddities or personal shortcomings began to reveal a coherent pattern of neurodivergent experience. During my self-research, thousands of memories — including long-forgotten ones — resurfaced like flashbacks, as if they’d been waiting for the right cognitive framework to re-emerge. I couldn’t write them down fast enough; the flood was overwhelming. It felt like I’d found the decryption key to my entire existence — and my life began rewriting itself in real time, like a recursive re-indexing of memory.

Among these memories were scenes where I had gotten extremely upset, with bursts of anger that seemed to come out of nowhere, or, more rarely when I suddenly started crying for an extended time, something completely opposite of my personality. Reviewing these moments from a new perspective, I realised that what appeared to be overreactions were actually responses to overwhelming situations triggered by small or insignificant events. And I acquired the vocabulary to describe it: a meltdown, which is an intense response to overwhelming sensory or emotional input.

In my case, these meltdowns were usually the result of accumulated events—such as pressure, stress, and noise. It’s as if I have an emotional bucket that fills with pressure over time — not from a single dramatic event, but from dozens of minor ones stacking quietly. Or like a pipe under tension, where every small stressor adds to the pressure inside.

But because I often miss the early signs — due to alexithymia, masking, or staying too functional — I don’t notice how full it’s getting until it bursts. And when it does, the release is explosive: either a burst of anger, or intense tears.

The outburst isn’t random — it’s a delayed signal from a system that had no safe way to leak and something as minor as a tiny misunderstanding, a slight tension with someone, or even just a light being unexpectedly switched on could trigger a meltdown. It felt like a nova explosion, sudden and intense, often catching me completely by surprise. Once, it even led to me being threatened with expulsion for unacceptable behaviour when I was in middle school — interestingly, I’ve had an amnesia of that event, which came as a flashback after I had finished the initial writing of this document.

Recognising this pattern allowed me to reinterpret those moments not as personal failings, but as overwhelmed nervous system responses. I had spent decades avoiding emotionally sensitive topics — a behaviour likely shaped by alexithymia and fawning — which made it harder to recognise when my emotions were altered, suppressed, or simply mislabelled.

Initially, some of my findings seemed contradictory or context-dependent. Also, I learned that you are either autistic or not; you can’t be a little.

However, two major inconsistencies nearly derailed my self-understanding: First, while my written notes showed clear signs of anxiety, I had never subjectively felt anxious. Second, unlike most autistic narratives, I had very little history of bullying. These inconsistencies made me dismiss my initial conclusions—until I discovered alexithymia and fawning, which were two major missing anchors on my map.

Alexithymia is a trait where a person has difficulty identifying and describing their emotions, often leading to a disconnect between experienced emotions and the ability to express or recognise them.

Fawning is a trauma response where individuals seek to avoid conflict or danger by complying with the wishes of others, often neglecting their own needs in the process. An extreme example of this behaviour can be seen in cases of Stockholm Syndrome, where individuals who are held captive begin to develop positive feelings towards their captors as a survival strategy. In everyday contexts, fawning can manifest as people-pleasing or prioritising others’ comfort over one’s own well-being.

Matching my own experiences to those explained by others and described traits in videos and podcasts gave a huge boost of speed in my exploration. It was like a railway construction. I had been slowly progressing, but now trains could run on the line at a much faster speed to explore further away. Every hour I was able to add something new to my map. I even forgot how many times I thought “Wow, this is me!“, when someone was explaining their experience. The pattern was always there, but often its intensity seemed lower on me, it was often contextual, or even the opposite; but I was prepared to expect other missing keys to map at this stage.

Suddenly, nearly all my lifelong struggles, defining experiences, and behavioural patterns aligned perfectly. Interviews with my mother about my early life further confirmed these patterns.

As I deepened my understanding of how autism and ADHD interact, how hypervigilance can mask ADHD traits, how alexithymia hides anxiety, or how fawning distorts social engagement, what once felt like living in a paradox began to make elegant sense. My experience also includes stealth dyslexia — shaping my writing and memory through layered, non-linear thinking — and possible gifted traits, which fuelled pattern recognition while complicating executive function and identity. This whole constellation reframed my contradictions: how I can be both rigid and wildly adaptive, intensely focused yet forgetful, analytical and emotionally delayed. For example, I failed completely at driving school — overwhelmed by sensory input and paralysed at intersections — yet I thrive on long-distance solo cycling, managing complex decision-making and sensory integration with ease (but can still freeze when choosing what to eat). Context is the lens that reveals which wiring shows up — not inconsistency, but dynamic interaction.

But my scientific mind demanded rigour. Like with any new theory or business idea, I immediately challenged my findings, expecting to dismantle them in an instant as I normally would. This time was different. Instead of collapsing, my hypothesis grew stronger. The more I questioned it, the more supporting evidence I found — particularly in common comorbidities associated with neurodivergence that explained additional aspects of my experience.

[ Read the Part 3: Reflections and Acknowledgements ]