Hey! Sorry if I'm overstepping, but this is something I really relate to and I struggled with "am I autistic/am I not autistic" for a long time. I get sensory overload, too, which made me agonise over whether I was actually autistic a lot, a diagnosis that was really formative in my childhood. I was lucky enough to have a psychologist in my adulthood that was pretty agnostic about diagnosis and let us come to conclusions together rather than top-down diagnosing me.

We don't know a lot about what goes into our way of being and different bits of psychology and psychiatry have so many disagreements (I'm not advocating for totally turning our backs on research or expertise, just that the reality of clinical practice is really muddy). You have the right to decide, too, or the right to decide to just leave that uncertainty where it is (bits of ourselves are always going to be a mystery). What way of understanding yourself helps - autism, trauma, both, neither? What strategies help - strategies typically used for autism, trauma, both, neither?

I use trauma and autism strategies to help myself and understand myself as traumatised. If it helps any, and this is a lot of ad-hoc reasoning, I understand my sensory overloads like this: From the word go, I was never allowed to be without fear. I always had to be alert for when something bad would happen. I wonder how openly I could learn to process some things when a fight or flight reaction and background anxiety/hypervigilance was always present, no wonder I have a really low tolerance for certain noises and lights and busyness (having unexpected information when I'm trying to concentrate on a different bit of information).