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

Picture this: You have people coming over soon. You need to prepare food for them. You’re also starving right now. Your house is an absolute mess. And you need to get ready. And you also have a very, very, very important presentation tomorrow that you need to rehearse. Aaaaaand the barista from earlier got your coffee order wrong. What a mess . What do you do? For most people, this might be a bit of a stressful crunch, but they manage to do everything. The coffee? Just

We all hate when someone asks to do something right when we’re about to do it. It’s like, I was going to do it, but now that you’re telling me to do it, I don’t want to.” This is a common experience, to the point that there have been multiple rounds of memes about it. While everyone experiences it, for autistic people, it’s not a joke. Being asked to do something can feel terrible, to the point of even painful at times. As an autist, I personally would always hate when my m