I've been contemplating the overlap between autism and schizophrenia a lot lately. I've been contributing certain symptoms to schizophrenia but they kinda have little or nothing to do with it i realized

My entire life I have been very different (and I realized this around 10 but I knew always something was off) in basically every way. This was long long before I had any psychotic symptoms or even negative mental illness symptoms at all like depression .

On basically any of the online tests I get a VERY high score but I also think you get high scores of those tests if you have any sort of disorder or neurodivergency .. I've been told by people they think Im autistic (some in a helpful or neutral way but mostly to be rude)  including by my autistic friends 

I won't bother listing symptoms because it's basically all the huge ones and basically all of the ones ive found from researching

I'm scared because hypothetically I'd like to see a psych about this but I'm a woman and feel like I'm too old to get diagnosed and scared they will invalidate my thoughts because of that. Plus I already have lots of bad experiences with psychs invalidating symptoms (including with  schizophrenia)  and im just generally weary of them.

Does anyone else feel like they have this overlap? Or considered they might be autistic as well?? I know no one can tell me whether im autistic here obviously I just want to knowpeoples thoughts on this topic