Late diagnosis doesn't just explain the past. It complicates it.

You go back through decades of evidence, the jobs that didn't work out, the relationships that frayed, the projects half-finished, the apologies made for things you still don't fully understand, and you reclassify them.

Not laziness. Not selfishness. Not a character problem you should have worked harder to fix.

But reclassification doesn't automatically produce peace. Sometimes it produces grief. Sometimes anger. Sometimes a very specific exhaustion at having spent so long working around something that has a name.

That part doesn't get talked about enough.