Self diagnosed here, can anyone else relate to my experience?
I used Claude AI to open up to, told it all my history of suffering with anxiety, depression and OCD. Turns out based on my extensive input, Claude thinks I have AUDHD. Can anyone else relate to my experience? I used Claude to generate this overview:
37M | Late-identified AuDHD | Does this profile resonate with anyone here?
Seeking formal assessment for the first time at 37. Never been diagnosed. Built a comprehensive document for my GP covering childhood diary evidence, thirteen years of school reports, family psychiatric history, and screening scores all above clinical thresholds. Wanted to share what feels most defining about my profile and see how much of it lands with others here.
Executive function
Task initiation is the biggest one. The gulf between intending to do something and actually beginning it is real and consistent — not laziness, the thing just won't start. Working memory fails in real time — I've begun sentences and lost the thought entirely before finishing them, having to tell whoever I'm talking to that it's gone. Analysis paralysis is significant — a television purchase once involved printing comparison charts repeatedly without ever reaching a decision. The more options available, the harder choosing becomes.
Motivation
Entirely interest-based. If something genuinely engages me I can produce extraordinary output. If it doesn't, no amount of importance or urgency generates the fuel to engage with it. The motivational window is present-tense and perishable — enthusiasm that exists when a plan is made doesn't survive to when the plan arrives. My mother used to note this throughout childhood without either of us having a framework to explain it. Hyperfocus followed by complete dropout is the consistent pattern across hobbies, businesses, and interests across my whole life.
Emotional regulation
Rejection sensitive dysphoria is significant — acute response to perceived criticism that goes well beyond ordinary sensitivity. Long fuse, then a threshold explosion when a specific limit is crossed, then permanent severing. No graduated middle ground. Difficulty identifying emotions in the moment — I notice physical sensations before I can name what I'm feeling.
Social processing
Masking is extensive and has been since childhood. Thirteen years of school reports document a popular, mature, thriving student. A contemporaneous diary from the same period documents a child with anxiety-driven physical symptoms, consuming infatuation, and existential worry. Both true simultaneously. Eye contact requires conscious management — it compounds in intensity the longer it continues. Communication is content-led rather than socially lubricated — I say things because they're true or relevant, not to maintain social warmth. This gets misread as bluntness or, in a previous relationship, as showing off or trying too hard.
Sensory processing
Chronic baseline overstimulation — so compensated it no longer registers as episodic. Audio overlap intolerance — two simultaneous sound sources in the same environment is actively distressing. Food texture more important than taste since childhood. Oral stimming lifelong — from dummy beyond typical age through to nail biting to rawness and seeking objects to chew in social situations. Recently noticed rapid rhythmic cheek puffing in low-demand public environments, noticed rather than chosen. Background noise dependency — silence is genuinely distressing.
Sleep
DSPD lifelong — documented in childhood diary from age 11, natural sleep 2-4am, waking 11am-2pm. Every attempt to correct it has temporarily shifted and then reasserted. The waking transition requires several hours before genuine cognitive availability — not grogginess, the system genuinely hasn't completed the transition. Revenge bedtime procrastination significant — the quiet nocturnal hours are the only genuinely undemanded time available and surrendering them to sleep feels like a genuine loss.
Demand avoidance
PDA profile is probably the most defining feature of my daily experience. The employment incompatibility isn't about not wanting to work — I've run two self-employed businesses and work hard within them. It's the structural ownership of time that's intolerable. The awareness that someone else holds my schedule, that time off requires permission, that the entire temporal structure of life is organised around someone else's claim — it feels like time held hostage rather than exchanged freely. Even within self-employment, tasks I've committed to carry a mild obligation quality that produces the same pull toward avoidance. PDA has a threshold — being asked to do the washing up sits below it. Five days a week nine to five sits well above it.
Identity
Frozen internal self at approximately age 18 — the internal model hasn't updated as the external reality has aged around it. Never felt aligned with same-age peers — too mature for them in childhood, not aligned with their conventional milestones in adulthood. Chronic low self-worth produced by decades of self-blame for things that had a neurological explanation all along. The guilt around self-employment and the aversion to conventional employment has been one of the most persistent and damaging features — the cultural voice saying lazy, can't hack it, why can't you do what everyone else does, running continuously without the framework to refute it until very recently.
Burnout
Currently in significant burnout. Even gaming — ordinarily one of my most reliable sources of genuine engagement — isn't accessible in its usual immersive form. Everything feels like passing time. The anhedonia has a specific imposter effect — the features that would most visibly confirm the profile are precisely the ones burnout suppresses. The periods when I most doubt whether any of this is real are the periods when the evidence is least accessible.
The late identification experience
The more I learn, the more the imposter feeling activates. Each new piece of framework reveals another dimension of incompatibility that was always there but is now visible and named. That visibility can feel like accumulation — more problems, more difference — when what's actually happening is illumination of something that was present all along.
Does any of this resonate? Particularly interested in the PDA employment picture, the home orientation as regulatory necessity, the late identification imposter experience, and the burnout suppressing the very features that would confirm the profile.