Problem with Self Diagnosis

The problem with an undiagnosed condition or state is that even though it remains undiagnosed, it is still in play and effect; you just might interpret it as something else.  I believe that my autism has other associated problems.  Like I grew up thinking that love and relationships were linked and sex should only occur with some one you love deeply and this altered me deeply; it may have been the origin of my Demisexuality.  Some definitions.  Demisexual is the belief that you need to love and trust someone before you can become intimate and prematurely entering a sexual relationship would result in problems.  Autism is a spectrum of issues, actually as best as I can figure out a bunch of spectrums that result in a disorder that is unique for every individual.  

I diagnosed myself with Autism in late 2006 and with Demisexuality in late 2015, both after I was thirty.  I believe that the latter was a result of the former, but it may not be.  Anyways living with both of these conditions has warped my perception of myself greatly.  There was the suicide attempt and the profound depression and the unrealistic expectations about relationships and even my sexuality.  

I would think about peers romantically and I would take a lot of time to become interested and then when I was interested I would be besot with them and that was just high school.  After high school relationships became more important and quick—for others.  I slowly became interested in one woman over a few months and later it developed into something huge for me, but in that time, she had five relationships.  After a time I did get a relationship, but it was rushed, I mean it progressed to sex after three physical dates and twenty long emails and fifty hour long telephone calls and it was too soon and it did not work out. (I was serious when I said at I had to really get to know a person).

Later, I found at I would fall in love with women that I worked with, the only problem was that I was ten years older than the median age in my workplaces, a factor of autism and perpetually starting new entry level positions.  But it was then that things started to go wrong.  No diagnosis made me think that there was something wrong with me.  Why was I only attracted to younger women?  Later when I had a job in e school system when I had almost exclusive contact with young teenagers I decided that I must be a pedophile, because I was only attracted to those students that I spent a lot of time with.  And during that time I would date older, my own age.  Those dates would fail, because I had no connection to the person.  Sex would fail spectacularly and I would see it was proof that I was attracted to children.  That thought process strongly affected my choice of career.  I always wanted to be a teacher.  But I would not be a pedophile teacher; oxymoronic in the extreme.  

I did meet a woman, whom I love.  The only problem was that she had a teenage daughter.  I resisted meeting her.  I was afraid.  I pushed her, my girlfriend away because I feared for her daughter.  How could I, a pedophile, be in the same room as a teenager, alone with a teenage young woman?  But I met Natural20 after my diagnosis of demisexuality, and ten years after my Autism diagnosis, but my internal perceptions of my self had not changed.  I called myself a pedophile after I became intimately involved with a young woman, but never actually intimate.  If she had pursued me I would have caved, because I actually loved her, but I set up blocks to prevent that from happening, but I was constantly afraid.  I was attracted to her because I spent hundreds of hours talking with her and as her sounding board for all her problems, not because I was a pedophile.  But in my head, I was one.  

I just realized that I was not a pedophile, but rather I was only spending time with people not of my age for the past ten years and I was forming very strong bonds with these age groups.  If I had been doing the same with people my own age, I would have fallen in love with them too.  I was now allowed to be a teacher, without fear that I would hurt children, except now that I was twice the age of starting teachers, do I really want to throw myself into that career, knowing that it is filled with people who think that teaching is a young person's game.  Natural20 will tell me I can become a teacher if I want to, but I also don't want to start my tenth entry level position.  So.  Diagnosis needs to be done earlier, before it can alter how you think about yourself.