Thanks so much for sharing your story.

Your case illustrates exactly why people have redefined autism in the form of a spectrum - simply because of the fact that every autistic person has a unique combination of autistic traits (and others that may even be unrelated), some more pervasive than others. It is because of this realization that these changes in understanding of autism have occurred.

Not everyone who is autistic shows ALL of the symptoms ALL of the time. It is possible that your practitioner is still familiar with the way he knew autism - a rigid set of symptoms and qualifiers/criteria, and thus if not met, he rules out autism. Things have changed very much nowadays, but it will still take a lot of time for many professionals to accept it as such. This is an unfortunate, but all too common phenomenon in almost every professional field you encounter in the world. People, especially experts, can get very set in their ways and views.

I know from my own life that I did not display several of the "qualifying" criteria for autism, for example the whole delayed speech thing when you're a child. But, looking back at my life, there is no doubt it now makes a lot of sense, and all it means is that I am sitting somewhere else on the spectrum when compared to someone who did have those characteristics.

All I can say is, it's good you find out now in your adolescence, so that you can process and accept it while you're still quite young. You don't want to find out the hard way like I did at 24, once you totally screwed up your whole life and had no idea why it was happening and why people constantly rejected you - it is thanks to that happening that I had to struggle with depression for over 3 years. There is no doubt, that I may be over it now, but I can literally feel that I will never feel the same again, I have changed. I wish I was diagnosed at your age, or when I was a child, that would've made things so much easier.