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What Neurodiversity Means to This Late-Identified Autistic Adult
I lived the first 40 years of my life as an autistic individual who didn’t know it yet. In a sense, lost because I lacked a complete picture of who I was. Confused because I faced too many questions as to why I was contending with challenges that were foreign to just about all of my peers, which...
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Autistic Lived Experience: A Song Request at a High School Dance That Backfired
Had I known then what I know now, the DJ calling the shots at this dance would not have heard this request despite how much I loved the song in question. It comes down to the fact that context matters, as do the hidden rules of the social situations in which we find ourselves. These realities often...
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Autistic Lived Experience: Unable to Be There for a Friend in Need
In hindsight, I view my sophomore year of college as being the most challenging year of my life. Up until then, I was living in the sweet bliss of unawareness. I had no concept of how compromised my self-esteem was or what self-esteem even meant, and I had a flawed sense of how my words and actions...
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An Autistic’s Vision for Neurodiversity-Affirming Therapy
As a neurodiversity community self-advocate, I have come across far too many stories of emotional distress and trauma in connection with neurodivergent individuals' lived behavioral therapy experiences. I understand where they're coming from and I empathize. As a late-identified autistic, I, like...
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Autistic Lived Experience: Life Magazine Labeled Me “A Bright Child Who Can’t Learn”
In April 2023, it was my distinct privilege to be invited to The Center School in Somerset, NJ, the special needs school where it all began for me as a Kindergartener back in the mid '70s, to give an author talk about my book A Long Walk Down a Winding Road. I felt as though I had triumphantly come...
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An Autistic Woman’s Success Story: Kaelynn Partlow, Therapist, Dog Trainer, and Star of the Hit Netflix Series “Love on the Spectrum”
Perhaps because of the stigma we are up against and how misunderstood we know we are, many in the autism spectrum community feel as though the entertainment industry has historically mis- and under-represented us. The autistic character of Raymond Babbitt from the popular Oscar-winning movie Rain...
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Why Didn’t My Pre-Diagnosis Clinicians Bring Up the Possibility of Autism?
So much was lost as a result of not knowing for so long. Lost happiness, because of having to contend with unanswered questions as to why I faced such daunting challenges which none of my peers seemed to be facing. Lost time, during which I lived without a complete picture of who I truly am, during...
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Autistic Lived Experience: When I Learned that Helen Keller Believed in Eugenics
To say that learning about this for the first time felt like a punch in the gut is a gross understatement. Though I heard it from what I consider to be a credible source (the PBS documentary series The U.S. and the Holocaust), I nonetheless could not bring myself to believe the truth because I...
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Autism, Masking, and Sense of Self
In a rightly ordered world, the need to mask, or to hide one’s true self in order to "fit in," would not exist. We all deserve to be who we are without being punished for doing so. But the world in which we live is anything but rightly ordered in this respect. A multitude of autistic individuals...
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Inside Dell Technologies’ Neurodiversity Hiring Program: An Autistic Cybersecurity Analyst’s Success Story
How can a company's neurodiversity hiring program be evaluated? In part, by listening to its participants’ stories. Alex Sobil, Cybersecurity Analyst at Dell Technologies, is a case in point. His is a success story as inspirational as it is indicative of a truly inclusive...
