 may be fully convinced that you're autistic at this stage. You may have got a diagnosis, you may have decided not to. You analyse your traits, your behaviours in solitary areas of life, isolated places, and you get the opinions of other people in your life on your behaviours and your thoughts and the way that you see life. With this knowledge comes a lot of self-reflection. You learn a lot about autism in the education stage and so you try to think about experiences that you've had in your life and try to reframe them in the lens of autism to see if they make a lot more sense. If you are autistic they tend to make a lot of sense. This can be really liberating in some respects, but really painful, really difficult to delve into in other ways. You may even start asking yourself, am I masking? Who actually am I? If I've just been hiding who I truly am, then what truly is my identity?