Late autism diagnosis: ‘I did not realise it then, but I was masking the entire time’

Saraid Greene says her diagnosis allowed her to learn things about herself and better understand why she had felt ‘different’ for so long

Tue Nov 10 2026 - 05:31 • 4 MIN READ

Nineteen-year-old Saraid Greene began refusing to go to school when she was nine years old.

School was not somewhere the Kilkenny girl felt comfortable, she said; and her earliest memories are of feeling excluded or ridiculed at school. She remembers being aged five or six and playing a game of tag with her peers where she was chosen over and over again to be “it”. “I felt different, but I didn’t really know why people were treating me differently at the same time,” Greene said.

For years, she believed that what she was experiencing was somehow deserved, and happening because there was something fundamentally wrong with her. She remembers lying awake at night racking her brain trying to figure out what it was she was doing wrong.

Greene has a twin sister and an older sister. Both found school a lot easier than her experience. Her twin easily made friends at school with people who then became Greene’s friends. “My twin sister really allowed me to have some of those social experiences when I was younger that I probably wouldn’t have been able to make happen on my own,” Greene said.

As she got older, school became worse. She often felt excluded from playing with her peers and felt that she existed under a microscope at school. “They were noticing every little thing I was doing wrong or that was different and I was being made fun of a lot.”

She developed debilitating social anxiety and stopped speaking in school.

For her, school refusal would often start the evening before she was supposed to go to school. She would panic and tell her parents that she could not go to school the next day, but she struggled to explain why she did not want to be there.

“I think that was very hard for my parents to deal with because they couldn’t really understand what it was that was making me feel that way,” Greene said.

When she started secondary school, Greene thought that in order to avoid having similar experiences to those she had in primary school she would have to act like her sisters and their friends. “I did not realise it at the time, but I was masking the entire time.”

Masking is a term used by people in the autistic community to describe the conscious or unconscious suppression of autistic traits so a person can appear neurotypical and fit into social expectations.

When she was 12 Greene’s parents took her to see a psychiatrist. She described feeling burned out from having to act all the time. From their first session together, the psychiatrist suggested that she might be autistic, as Greene was describing “textbook autism experiences”.

There were other clues. She had collected things from a young age and had special interests. She was also a very fussy eater, as she could not cope with the texture of certain foods, and she had found loud noises overwhelming, so much so that in primary school she had worn earmuffs in class for an entire year.

Still, Greene was not formally diagnosed with autism until she was 16.

When she first went to see the psychiatrist, dealing with the mental health crisis she was experiencing at the time was the priority. The country then went into lockdown for the Covid-19 pandemic, which further delayed adiagnosis.

[ Moving beyond diagnosis and embracing neurodiversityOpens in new window ]

She was initially sceptical that she could be autistic. Growing up, the only representations she saw of autistic people were male and people who had very high support needs. She remembers autism being discussed at school. She asked what it was and was told it is “people who would get very upset if their food was touching on a plate”.

Part of her assessment for an autism diagnosis included talking about her experience at school. When she got the assessment back the clinician had recommended she either move school or take some time out from school.

Going back to school after the Covid-19 lockdowns was hard for Greene. Her year group was small. Aside from her twin, she felt excluded from them. “Suddenly I had no one,” Greene said.

There was also an individual from outside the school who began to send her insulting messages. This caused her immense distress.

Staff from the school attempted to help Greene, she acknowledged. Her twin sister moved school and Greene began to be homeschooled, eventually joining her sister at the new school.

“The atmosphere was really nice and people were really friendly and very kind,” Greene said about her new school.

[ New HSE autism assessments may ‘harm children’ and lengthen wait lists, groups sayOpens in new window ]

In that supportive environment Greene did well in her Leaving Cert and is now attending University College Cork, where she studies biological, environmental and geological sciences. “I got the course that was the first on my CAO. So I was super happy.”

Greene features in a documentary on RTÉ One, Neurodivergence – The Making of Me, that will air this Thursday. Presented by occupational therapist, author and disability advocate Hannah Daly it examines the lived experiences of neurodivergent people in Ireland and the growing recognition that many autistic and ADHD individuals have historically been overlooked or misidentified.

While getting a diagnosis in itself does not magically make your life better, Greene said it allowed her to learn things about herself and access supports that have really helped her.

When asked what she would say to the parents of children who are refusing to go to school, she said: “The best thing you can do is take the pressure off because normally school itself is not the issue and there are other things going on.”

She also emphasises having empathy for the child who is refusing to go to school and understanding that they are not acting in this way to upset or inconvenience their loved ones, but they are experiencing real fears and anxieties.

There is hope, Greene says, as she believes that once a child gets the support they need there is no reason why they can’t find success like she has.

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