I had no chance to, I literally went from Norwood 1 to diffuse Norwood 5 in a span of a few months. This was during a stressful period during university where I was studying a lot (I finished a difficult engineering major), so many days went by when I didn't even look in the mirror carefully if anything was off with my hair.
It just hit me one day when I was looking in the mirror in the shower that I could see my scalp everywhere, and my hairline was see-through. I didn't have classical recession, it was all just disappearing at once.
Because it happened so fast, I thought it was telogen effluvium due to stress, but when I did more research and found similar cases to mine, I had to accept it was just very aggressive male pattern baldness.
Of course this was a huge shock to me, and I became extremely depressed, and this lasted for a long time.