Anyway, here's the story
It's taken over 2 years and it's been a weird process overall.
I am in Canada, assessment is free here with a doctors referral.
I've been a courseware developer for over a decade now. Part of the job has been to take documents made by instructional designers and make them into courses in various learning systems. Now I only do this as a side gig as the jobs been nearly automated out of existence.
One day I was building up a course on Nerodiversity and it kind of clicked for me. I didn't actually know much about autism. Growing up it was frequently juxtaposed with down syndrome. So I didn't learn about it until my 30's
But I checked a lot of the boxes and decided I should get it checked out.
Doctor said to try CAMH. So I had to call them and explain. They initially told me it wasn't worth doing and that as long as i am employed then there is no reason for it.
I insisted. I guess you got to really want it to get it. Got told I'd be on a waiting list for 6 months. This is unless I was willing to have it done by a private organization for over $5k. I chose the free option.
6 months later got a call. They wanted to get documents such as all childhood medical documents as well as all my high-school transcripts. I let them know I wasn't able to get any of that.
6 months later they call against asking for all that and that I give contact info for a parent or guardian. I give them my moms info.
About a year later I get called again. I had pretty much assumed it wasn't going to happen so I was a little shocked. But they just wanted all the documentation again. This time they actually called me back to book an assessment. They only asked I bring a few seemingly random items from a list.
I ended up having to go to my mom's house in a differnt city. It was a remote meeting but my mom didn't know how to do one of those. I borrowed my roomates laptop since I only use a big tower.
I got up at 4am to get to my mom's place that day. She had 2 new kittens running around. We figured the dining room was the best place to set up the laptop for this.
First half hour he wanted to ask my mom questions. While she answered I could listen but wasn't allowed to talk. Her two kittens where playing with somthing under the table.
My turn. He asked me a lot of the same questions to confirm my mom's answers.
About 2 hours in the laptop says it's about to die on me despite being plugging in. Turns out the kittens ate the cord. So I asked for a short break.
Being prepared for everything. I had actually brought a spare Webcam. I had to install it on my mom's old pc and install all the right drivers and software in the 15min break.
When the meeting resumes I am a mess, sweaty, exhausted and very tired.
The second part of the assement was even more questions but more subjective then the first half. He also read a child's picture book with me. He had me describe the I images. It was somthing about flying frogs.
The last part was to take some of the random items I'd been told to bring and make a story with them. I had trouble with that, I'm imaginative but not very creative also I was dead tired.
That was it though, they said they'd call me back with results in 2 weeks. My mom sent my roomate $130 to replace the cord cord her cats ate.
3 weeks later I called them because they didn't call me back. But today and they told me I am level 1 autistic. Ironically halfway through the short video call my very reliable pc just shut off for no reason. It hasn't done that before or since. They'll be sending me some resources and an invite to a workshop of some sort.
Not sure what to do with this yet. I'm just enjoying memes for now.
Getting a diagnosis can be extremely difficult for people. In my area you either need to pay about $5k or go through a 2+ year ordeal.
Even with all that, diagnostic methods are murky at best. There is no binary you have it or you don't kind of thing, no physical test that can conclusively say you are autistic.
All that to say as someone who went through the process to get diagnosed. I think self diagnosis is perfectly valid with autism.