Welcome to the neurodivergent club - we’re glad you could finally make it!

Some sketches of advice that I can try and fill out once I have more time:

• You haven’t changed, you just happen to be armed with a better understanding of yourself now. If you’re ever overwhelmed or feeling down about the diagnosis, try to remember this because in a quantitative sense essentially you are still exactly who you were the day before your diagnosis.
• You don’t have to tell people. I’d recommend taking this one slowly because sometimes people’s reactions can be weird - they can be condescending or patronising, they can reject you, they can deny your diagnosis etc. so imo it’s important to be calculated about it and to have a few responses at the ready if you happen to encounter less positive responses. Unfortunately some people might treat you differently if they know you’re autistic too so it’s worth taking that into consideration.
• I think it’s very positive that you want to tell people - that makes me think that you accept yourself and that you aren’t feeling stigma or shame about being autistic. I would make an effort to cultivate and protect this attitude towards yourself because it’s very important.
• It’s hard to say what the attention to detail score means specifically because “lowest” doesn’t therefore necessarily mean “low”. At a wild guess, given that the incidence of ADHD for autistic people runs between 20-40% approximately and given that you’re late diagnosed, this would be an indication that, in your own time, you should consider the possibility that you may have ADHD (although keep in mind that co-occurring ADHD and autism doesn’t really look like either condition independent of one another and that’s a whole post that I feel like I should draft for this sub one of these days…)
• Off the top of my head, it’s worth looking into autistic burnout, unmasking, and your sensory profile. It’s possible that it’s worth looking into autistic catatonia (another post I need to draft…) depending on whether you experience episodic depressive periods, especially if they seem to be unresponsive to the typical treatments and therapies for depression, because there are a number of novel treatments and preventative measures for this, some of which I have been exploring in partnership with my psychiatrist.
• I’d recommend Unmasking Autism by Devon Price (there’s rumors of a book club happening on this someday soon), We’re Not Broken by Eric Garcia, Taking Off The Mask by Hannah Belcher, Autism and Masking by Felicity Sedgewick et al. - take a look at any of those books and see if they resonate with you. They should all be available on Anna’s Archive.
• There’s a debate in the autistic community over terminology but generally speaking the consensus is that we opt against person-first language (I have autism, they are a person with autism etc.) and for language that centres autism (I’m autistic, autistic people etc.) Terms like “on the spectrum” tend to be frowned upon. Asperger’s is a term that is mostly deprecated in medicine and psychology although there are at least a few countries which are holdouts on this matter. Asperger was not the first professional to describe and study autism - it was actually Grunya Sukhareva but she was a woman and—worse yet—a soviet! 😱 so Lorna Wing (debatably) named Asperger’s after an active eugenicist who collaborated closely with the Nazis, of course. Describing autism in terms of “severity” is frowned upon because it divides the community and it’s basically assessed on how much your being autistic inconveniences neurotypical people and how well you mask rather than a genuine appraisal of how severe your experience of autism is. Framing it in terms of “higher/lower support needs” and, at times, “higher/lower masking autistic people” is preferred. Also try to remember that neurodivergent means a broad array of atypical psychologies and developmental conditions and so there’s neurodivergent/neurotypical (with neurodiversity referring to the entire span across these two points). To be precise, the terms autistic and allistic refer to austistic and non-autistic respectively and so it’s worth practising saying “allistic” when you mean “non-autistic” but avoiding saying “neurotypical” in this case because it excludes people who have ADHD or experience mental illness etc.

That’s all that comes to mind immediately.

I try to keep a reasonably close eye on this community but my health and my commitments fluctuate so feel free to ping me if you ever want to get my take on anything. I guess it’s pretty obvious already but my interests include late-diagnosed autism, ADHD, co-occurring ADHD & autism, unmasking, psychopharmacology, catatonia, and mental health & trauma. If you ever have questions about these topics in particular and you ping me then you’re probably going to goad me into writing an effortpost.

Good luck and remember to be gentle with yourself!