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Most women are diagnosed with autism late in life. The CDC indicates that for every four men with autism, there is one autistic woman. However, a more recent study by McCrossin (2022) shows that this data is biased, and if you take diagnostic bias into consideration, the actual ratio is probably 3 to 4, with 80 percent of females being diagnosed after they are 18. According to Sara Hendrickx’s book Women and Girls With Autism Spectrum Disorder, this is more accurate.
I am one of these late-diagnosed women, and every day, I marvel at how no one noticed I was autistic until I was 40. As a child, I avoided other children and preferred playing alone. I was hyper-fixated on books and snakes. I refused to eat any vegetables and most meat. I could sit at the dinner table for hours staring at food rather than eating it.
I would only wear certain textures. I melted down. I sorted all my stuffed animals by rank and taped them to the wall in their ranked order.
As a teen, I was awkward and unpopular. I was most noted for my hyper-fixations on socially uncomfortable topics like schizophrenia, abortion politics, history, and books. I had read every book in the Dune series by the time I was 13.
People called me “harsh and abrasive.” I had an eating disorder. I struggled with depression, anxiety, and rigidity.
My only friend’s parents banned her from spending time with me because I ate the chicken they cooked for me by peeling it apart and sorting it into piles by texture and color. Apparently, this is very upsetting to normal people. If I had been a boy who liked trains, I would have been in behavioral therapy since I was 4.
Yet, on many days, I find that all of this has been a gift. It is a gift that I wasn’t a boy who liked trains and was diagnosed early or a girl who people wanted to bend into normality without even being diagnosed. My life was allowed to be beyond strange, and that is my greatest asset, and it was only possible because I was never forced to be normal.
My life makes no sense to most people. I am a successful therapist who owns a large private practice. I am a mother of three successful sons. However, my first writing was published in Cthulhu Sex Magazine when I was 23. I wrote my first published novel in my mid-20s. It was a horror novel about a haunted institution.
I was the clinical director of a rape crisis center when I was 24. I went on to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro when I was pregnant, write a series of ghost story books for Arcadia Press, write novels about witches, study polyvagal theory in grad school, publish papers on the autonomic nervous system, and start my own private practice. I have traveled the world, hiked the Appalachian trail, and been married twice.
I am covered in tattoos but am married to a conservative veteran. I have a bone room. I have never followed any social convention because I never understood what social conventions were.
I broke all the rules because I didn’t know I was breaking them and just lived from moment to moment based on my hyper-fixation of the moment, whether that hyper-fixation was bones, ghosts, horror, PTSD, backpacking, yoga, travel, politics, religion, history, or autism itself. In this, I found great joy and gut-wrenching tragedy. I have faced depression so deep I almost lost myself and stood on the tops of mountains that carried me away with their beauty.
This life has only been possible because I never knew enough to chain or repress my autism. My parents were odd themselves, and as the oldest child of two parents who separated and had other children with other people, I was not noticed as much as I should have been. My oddities were written off as trauma or just being a “difficult child.”
As an adult, I married young to a man who was odd and too hyper-focused on his career to see my peculiarities. I kept isolated and made sure I only interacted with normal people for two to three hours because I was very aware that after three hours, I became so odd that people noticed it. I knew how odd I was, but I didn’t fight it. No one told me I should. I hid it because I didn’t want to deal with its social consequences, but I never fought it.
As a therapist, I have learned that this is what makes autism crippling. It is crippling when you fight it. When you try to make yourself normal. If you surrender to your autistic self, you can be amazing, and you can live an amazing life. Not everyone will like you, and some people will hate and avoid you, but you will find that life can be wonderful.
In our autistic adults’ group, I have met some of the most remarkable people I think the world has ever seen. Brilliant physicists and engineers, artists who can make crafts and art that humbles me and reminds me of the capacity of humans, and people who can recite every type of micro bacteria in a sloth’s fur. Some of the people I have met in these groups try to hide who they are, and they are the ones who break. The people from the group and the clients I have that flourish are the ones that embrace their neurodiversity.
I have a book coming out in a month, The Unmasking Autism Workbook for Autistic Adults, and the message in this book is the message I send to all autistic adults and all people who have autistic family members. Autism should never be hidden. It should be something to be worn like a badge of honor.
If you are autistic, you are remarkable, whether you know it or not. If you let yourself explore all of your passion and hyper-fixations, you can become something unspeakably beautiful. I am not saying there won’t be hardship, but I am saying someday you will be able to look back and say that your life has been something that stands out. In an ocean filled with fish, you can be a dolphin.
Embrace your neurodiversity. Love yourself for exactly who you are.
