For me it wasn't really about realizing that I had it, it was more about overcoming the idea that autism is "worse" than my struggles and that I could overcome my difficulties if I tried hard enough, because that's what I'd been told all my life. It's only in my mid twenties that friends encouraged me to seek an official diagnosis, and even then I walked in feeling like kind of an impostor. If we talk in a broader sense about my feeling of alienation and knowing that something was wrong with me, that pretty much was for as long as I remembered! Maybe it took over two decades and five therapists to see that I'm autistic but the six year old girls gave their diagnosis in a split second lol. I didn't understand what didn't work socially but I knew I was doing something wrong despite trying very hard. As for all the other symptoms, I did feel them but was told to suck it up and stop crying basically, so I perceived it more as me being weak rather than me having an actual problem.

As for the worst struggle I would say it depends on my age. When I was a child and a teen, it was definitely the social aspect that affected me the most, since it lead to heavy bullying, violence and abuse in all of my personal circles. My inability to act like people around me wanted coupled with the impression that I was the one in the wrong for not meeting their expectations led me to be dangerously vulnerable and taken advantage of in ways I thought I deserved. However, now that I actually developped some social skills AND self respect, I would say that the hardest part is grappling with the fact that my disability will never let me be independant and that I do require people to help me go through my daily life because of my other symptoms. I have systems in place and I'm mostly okay but sometimes thinking about it gets hard, because I need to grieve the life I thought I would eventually be able to have.

I hope it wasn't too heavy lol I think it's important to share about those things since the stigma is so heavy against it, especially for afab people that don't meet the criteria built around autistic boys from the last century and that the ressources online only talk about children.