don't think anyone around me would have ever considered that possibility. I have been what
others would call "successful" for the 31 years of my life. In school I was at the
top of my class. I was, what looked like, very social. I was in a lot of leadership positions.
Teachers always called on me to help to lead group projects and I didn't appear
to have any learning disabilities. I excelled in band. I excelled in academics. I excelled in
extracurriculars. I had a lot of friends and I found myself with this diagnosis. What do we do
when a diagnosis doesn't line up with what we feel like our life represents? If you are
also autistic but undiagnosed, you might also feel like I did. I have constantly been searching for
truth. I've been searching for psychological truth. I love studying psychology. I love
reading about the mind, about the brain, and I just naturally gravitate towards that section
anytime I'm in a bookstore since I was in college, probably before then. I've just been fascinated
with how we make decisions and how people think and how people learn, and I think I've just always
known deep down that my brain was very different than anybody else's brain. I think Hannah Gadsby
says it really well when she says she has more knowledge than she'd ever be able to share.
I'm paraphrasing what she said, but that really jumped out to me a lot. There's so much in here
that I never would be able to communicate. It's not that I don't know how, it's like words don't
exist to communicate the knowledge that I have in my head, because that's how different I feel
like my brain is different from everyone else. I feel like I almost think in my own language and
I don't know how to describe it other than that. But let me tell you how I got to this diagnosis.
In elementary school and in high school, I dealt with a lot of anxiety. I dealt with depression.
I was constantly stressed and worried. I remember that very vividly. I got sick with all different
types of sickness, and I've struggled with autoimmune disease since I was in second grade.
My autoimmune disease that I've dealt with is Alopecia and I have other videos about that
and more coming soon, but just in general, anxiety and stress-related issues. In college I sought
counseling because my stress was so intense that I couldn't manage it. It was kind of written off
as like, "Oh, it's just college. You're, you know... you're taking a lot of hours, you're
taking hard classes. Here's how we can manage your stress." And that was kind of the end of it. I got
married to my high school sweetheart. We started dating when I was 16. I think that's maybe been a
crucial part of helping me find so much success is that I have this really stable network...not
only of my husband...my boyfriend, fiance, then husband...but also a close group of friends.
Whenever I was social, I was with the same people all the time, and so I kind of got used to
that and I didn't really seek out new social situations. I got married at a young age,
got my first job and I soon started having this anxiety. And the stress start creeping back up
that I just didn't know what to do with. It was very intense. I felt like I could never quite
adequately describe it to anybody else because it was just being written off as like... "Oh,
this is just normal stress. This is a normal part of life. We just need to figure out how to
slow down." Take it easy, yoga, meditate, all this stuff. I've tried all of it, you guys. I've tried
all of it. Eventually it led me to counseling again where the counselor more or less diagnosed
me with OCD, which seemed to fit at the time, but still felt a little bit off. I sat with that for a
while, went back to therapy a couple of years later, still needed help like, "Can somebody
please help me figure out why my brain is so different?" I still couldn't find the words,
still couldn't figure out a way to explain it. I just was praying for somebody to understand me.
And so through more counseling and more therapy, I learned the term "highly sensitive person" or
HSP. There's a whole wealth of information that you can learn about there. I think the best author
on that subject is Elaine Aaron. I studied all about HSP's. Okay, I'm an HSP, that helps me
make sense of it. This counselor also felt like I had a lot of ADHD symptoms. I researched and that
seemed to fit. At this point the OCD kind of felt like it wasn't fitting as well anymore,
and I was kind of sticking with HSP, ADHD. So I dealt with that, I got on medication, I managed
my ADHD and it seemed to help, although there were drawbacks. That's a whole 'nother video. A couple
years later, I find myself... "Okay, this is still not really where I'm at. It doesn't seem to fit
what's going on in my brain. Maybe a little bit... we're getting closer." I feel like
each step of the process was like one more puzzle piece falling into place. One day when I was 31,
I had a colleague over to my house who, in passing, mentioned that her daughter was
diagnosed with autism. Her daughter was someone that I went to college with - very smart, I saw a
lot of myself in her, and she seemed normal. So I was very intrigued by this as I am with all mental
health issues. I just want to learn everything and try to figure out my brain. She said, "You know,
one of the things that set us off is that she has a lot of copy and paste behaviors." And I said,
"Copy and paste behaviors?!"It was one of those things where, you know, when somebody
says something and you just perk up and you're like, "I am supposed to have this information!"
I knew that that phrase was very important to me, so she started explaining copy-and-paste
behaviors. Well when she's in social environments, she seems to mirror what other people are doing
as a way of making it through the conversation. And I said, "Okay, that's interesting." And inside
I'm thinking, "I do that! I do that, is that not normal? I do that is that normal?" You know, going
through all the situations in my head that I had felt these similar ways. She goes on to talk about
other characteristics that kind of went under the radar: how she preferred to spend time alone,
she had very deep strong interests in certain subjects, she had some difficulty maintaining
friendships and just seemed to feel kind of "othered" and didn't seem like she had
a place for herself. Because I'm autistic, in that conversation I was half listening to my colleague
friend and half just like, wheels turning in my head, like I cannot wait till you leave my house
so I can research the crap out of this topic, because never before, you know... I had researched
so many other mental health things but never before had I considered autism. She left and I
read the entire internet until I was satisfied and had a description and understanding of what autism
was: how it's less diagnosed in females... I took all of the tests on the internet that there are I
didn't even tell my husband about it for a while. I tell my husband everything. I've kind of got
this feeling before, especially all the therapy that I've gone through, it's like, "hey babe
I'm OCD. Hey babe I'm ADHD. Have you heard of an HSP? Let me tell you about it." And so now I found
myself thinking, "Oh great, I'm gonna say, "hey babe, I think I'm autistic and it's just gonna be
the straw that broke the camel's back where he's like, "oh you're overthinking all of this,"" which
is the last thing that an autistic person wants to hear - you're overthinking." It's true, we are
overthinking because our brains are different. I took all the tests until I was sure that I
was sure that I was sure. Again kind of like a light bulb moment with the copy-and-paste phrase,
I just felt it in my soul that this resonated with me and that this described my place in the world.
And so I told my husband after I had thoroughly researched the topic and we worked through it
together and decided to pursue a professional diagnosis. Once I received my official diagnosis,
it was such a gift. And even before the official diagnosis, just trusting in my gut this was who I
was, it gave me so much freedom to take more time for myself, to say "no" to more social outings,
to stim more ...that was one of the things that kind of surprised me is that stimming doesn't
have to be stereotypical hand flapping or anything like that. My stimming is clacking my teeth where
nobody can see. My stimming is doing this with my fingers or like, I also think that I stim through
dancing. I'm just like constantly moving. So I just feel more freedom to do that. I have fidget
toys everywhere: my purse, in my car, in the kitchen and in the junk drawer. There's a whole
video series coming on the ways that it's changed my life. This is my son Cooper. He decided he
needed some cuddles. Females are under-diagnosed because we are more capable of masking socially.
The resources and research that we have had up to this point in time are primarily directed towards
males. Because it presents differently it can be a little more obvious. I'm trying not to speak in
stereotypes or generalizations, though the tide is turning. It's a very exciting time to be a female
autistic person because there are so many more resources being created. There's so many books,
there's so many podcasts, there's so many Instagram accounts, Tik Tok accounts,
all incredible. I'll try to include links to those resources in the description. Tell me in
the comments if you think you might be on the spectrum and why, and make sure to check out
the resources that I post. I'm going to share my favorite autism quiz online called the Aspie
Quiz. It's very thorough and it's a great way to figure out if pursuing a diagnosis might be worth
it to you. Being an autistic person is definitely a challenge. It's a neurotypical world and it can
be hard to manage our place in it, but overall I feel like there's so many strengths and wonderful
things about it. And I can't wait to share more with y'all. Thanks and make sure you SUBSCRIBE to
my channel. It's the best way for me to continue creating free content for you. And also in the