Grieving the Years You Lost to Not Knowing You Were Autistic

Bridgette Hamstead

There is a particular kind of grief that many late-diagnosed autistic adults carry. It is not the kind of grief that announces itself all at once. It arrives in waves, sometimes quietly and sometimes with intensity, as we begin to understand how much of our lives were shaped by not knowing who we were. For many of us, the diagnosis or self-identification comes after years, sometimes decades, of confusion, exhaustion, shame, and disconnection. We finally have a word that makes sense of everything, a framework that offers clarity and belonging. But alongside that relief, there is sorrow. Sorrow for what was missed, what was misunderstood, and what was never allowed to grow.

Grieving the lost years is not just about time. It is about relationships that never felt right, but we blamed ourselves for. It is about teachers who punished our differences instead of recognizing our needs. It is about friendships that fell apart because we could not communicate the way others wanted us to. It is about jobs that drained us, environments that overwhelmed us, and expectations we could never meet no matter how hard we tried. So many of us spent our lives feeling like failures when we were never broken. We were simply unsupported and unseen.

For many late-identified autistic people, childhood was marked by constant effort to be what others expected. We masked before we had words for masking. We watched and mimicked. We tried to be good, be quiet, be normal. We learned early that our natural ways of being were not acceptable. Our stimming was discouraged. Our need for routine was called rigidity. Our sensitivities were brushed off as overreactions. Our communication style was framed as rudeness or awkwardness. We were taught to doubt our instincts, ignore our bodies, and perform a version of ourselves that could pass as acceptable. And because we didn’t have the language to name what was happening, we internalized the blame.

By the time we reach adulthood, the weight of this lifelong adaptation often becomes too much. Burnout, mental health crises, chronic exhaustion, and deep loneliness are common among late-diagnosed autistic adults. We look back and see that we were never lazy, never too sensitive, never failing on purpose. We were simply misunderstood. And that recognition can be both liberating and devastating. There is relief in understanding ourselves, but also anger at how long it took. There is pride in who we are, but also grief for the younger versions of ourselves who never got to be fully known.

This grief is layered. It is grief for the child who was punished for needing quiet. It is grief for the teen who thought she was just bad at being human. It is grief for the adult who kept pushing through even when everything hurt. It is grief for the creativity that was stifled, the friendships that never formed, the trust that was broken, and the years spent chasing an ideal that was never meant for us. Some of us feel grief over the educational paths we never got to explore, or the careers we left because they were inaccessible. Others grieve the time spent in relationships where we were not accepted, or the energy we gave to trying to earn love that should have been freely given.

It is also grief for the absence of community. Many of us went through life thinking we were the only ones who felt this way. We didn’t know there were others like us, people who thought and felt and processed the world similarly. We didn’t have access to neurodivergent role models or spaces where our needs were understood without judgment. That isolation can leave deep wounds. Finding community later in life can be healing, but it also highlights how long we went without it. That absence is felt in our bones.

Grieving the lost years is not about wallowing in the past. It is about honoring the truth of our experiences. It is about naming what was hard and why. It is about recognizing that the systems failed us, not the other way around. It is about giving ourselves permission to feel sorrow for what we needed and never received. This grief is not self-pity. It is self-recognition. It is a way of saying to ourselves and to each other, what happened to us mattered.

And yet, even within the grief, there is growth. Knowing we are autistic opens a path toward healing, self-compassion, and redefinition. We begin to reclaim the parts of ourselves we buried to survive. We explore new ways of living, learning, working, and connecting. We unlearn the shame and start to trust our instincts again. We find joy in our rhythms, beauty in our sensitivity, and strength in our divergence. We build community where we can be real, where our needs are not pathologized, and where our differences are not just accepted but celebrated.

The grief may never fully go away, but it softens with time. It transforms into something quieter, something that coexists with joy and connection. It becomes a kind of reverence for our own resilience. A recognition of how hard we have fought to be here, to know ourselves, and to finally feel at home in our own minds.

Grieving the years lost to not knowing you were autistic is not a weakness or a setback. It is a necessary and meaningful part of understanding your life with honesty and care. This grief holds truth; it reflects the very real impact of being misunderstood, unsupported, and unseen. But it also marks the beginning of something new. When we allow ourselves to feel it fully, we create space for self-knowledge, for deeper connection, and for a future that honors who we really are. Naming what was lost is an act of integrity. It is how we begin to reclaim what still remains.