I met someone autistic, had no clue they were until they mentioned it months later. That got me questioning what autism actually is. Then fast forward a couple weeks after I had a major meltdown which got me to question myself and really dig deep into autism, it became my special interest for a while.

I could not stop reading about it. Eventually, I read Look Me In The Eye by John Elder Robison which made me bawl my eyes out many times because he was me. I had never read anything that I connected with so deeply.

I also started realizing how much energy I spent masking without even knowing I was doing it. The pieces all started falling into place as I looked back at my life as a child. I started asking my mother questions about how I was as a kid and my mind was blown. There’s no way my behaviour as a kid would not have been diagnosed as autism had I been born later but we didn’t really know back then. Autism was way less understood, basically if you weren’t non-verbal, you weren’t autistic. I had seen a therapist as a kid who suspected I had an anxiety disorder because of my tics and stimming but it was much deeper than that.