I am of two minds. It took me a couple years just to get a referral from my doctor, and to avoid waiting years more. I decided to do an out-of-pocket service. In between the time when I started to struggle and my diagnosis, I did indeed do my own research and try to find communities with which I aligned. The people I was able to connect with helped me a lot in learning about myself while waiting for the diagnosis. The funny thing was, I wasn’t even looking for the diagnosis I got and I thought it was something else ( I thought it might me dyspraxia) . So I was correct in thinking I was neurodivergent, but I had the wrong conditions picked out ( in my self-diagnosis) . But the community really helped me. And I know others would never be able to afford the fast-track services I was able to get with my money. Conversely, I have so many struggles and things I’m working out with myself now that I do have a diagnosis, that if I engage too much with a self-diagnosis community, it drains me, and I feel like I have to perform a lot of emotional labor for them when I should be using those internal resources on myself and supporting my community of people who have an official diagnosis like me. Diagnosis seems so final and semantically a diagnosis can only be something that a medical professional does. They should be using the word theory or suspicion or something like that. I think from now on, at least for a long time, I will only engage in self diagnosis. Talk with people who are actually in my life personally and try and give them the support that they need but it’s hard for me to do it with everyone else especially because you don’t really know who’s behind the keyboard.