She Rocks the Spectrum

You're sitting in your therapist's office, or on your bed at 2am scrolling TikTok, or in your car after a particularly brutal day at work. And something clicks. Wait. Am I autistic? You start reading. You take a screener. You take three more. You watch a video where someone describes their childhood and it's almost word-for-word your childhood. You sob. You text your best friend. You sob again. And then comes the question that haunts every late-diagnosed woman: How did nobody

Picture the "classic" person with ADHD. Go ahead, I'll wait. I'm willing to bet you pictured a boy who can't sit still. Bouncing in his chair, blurting out answers, getting in trouble for the hundredth time this week. That image is everywhere–and it's a big part of why so many women spend decades wondering what's wrong with them when the answer was ADHD the whole time. If your symptoms have never quite matched that profile, you're not imagining it. ADHD genuinely looks differ

Let me guess. You've tried therapy before. Maybe more than once. Maybe you sat across from a perfectly nice therapist who nodded and gave you breathing exercises and told you to challenge your negative thoughts–and you walked out feeling like you'd failed a test you didn't even know you were taking. Like you were the problem the therapy couldn't fix. Here's what I need you to hear: you weren't the problem. The fit was the problem. We get missed in the first place–and then mis

How autistic are you? You might have asked yourself that before. Or someone else has. Or you hear about people saying that they have a “touch of the ‘tism” and you may have wondered to yourself: How much autism do I have? From the start, this question is incorrect. When we think of spectrums, we usually think of a line with two polar opposite ends. Most people will fall in between the ends, a gray area that is a combination of both. The spectrum of autism is much more comple