Autism Acceptance Month

🗓️ April is #AutismMonth (or Autism Acceptance, Autism Awareness Month, depending who you ask) 🧠♾️🌈

I'm #Autistic. Not everyone knows that about me. I don't really like talking about myself and prefer to keep personal stories high level and vague when I do share. I typically identify as neurodivergent instead of naming the specific labels I identify with.

I was identified as having a learning disability as a teenager, but it was only a few years ago I was identified as Autistic. I initially learned from my own coaching clients. Their stories and challenges resonated with me deeply.

Yes, I got a job coaching #neurodivergent people before I even knew what neurodiversity was or identified as Autistic!😅

It’s the people I’ve had the privilege of working with over the past 5 years who have helped me learn so much and make sense of past experiences I wasn’t able to fully understand before.

The Autistic women I have met have made the biggest difference for me.

One of my first coaching clients was an Autistic woman whose stories felt so familiar to my own. The anxiety as she was struggling to navigate ambiguity, the fluctuating energy that didn’t conform well to the 9-5 work schedule, and the sensory sensitivities adding friction to everything.

In my first career job there were a lot of challenging situations. I think I would have navigated them better if I had known I was Autistic.

There were tight budget constraints and this meant sharing rooms with colleagues when we traveled, which was a big part of the job, and this caused me a lot of anxiety and stress. I need my solitude and privacy to really rest and recharge.

The culture of the team was very social and informal, it was incredibly draining and when team building activities felt arbitrary and mentally taxing, I faced overwhelm and meltdowns. People also hugged often, despite my sharing that I preferred not to hug.

The work we were doing was social justice focused, it wouldn’t be the last workplace where my rigid, black and white thinking (what’s been popularized as “justice sensitivity”) led me to challenge team or organization decisions I felt contradicted the goal of working toward true justice and equity. I just couldn’t reconcile the organization's appeal to donors with what I understood to be the right or just thing to do.

Throughout my career I’ve had meltdowns I thought were just me being bad at handling stress, I’ve spiraled because I couldn’t understand why my work demanded compromise when I felt strongly we could aim for transformation and justice, and I struggled with navigating professionalism, especially with authority and work relationships because it felt the rules were vague and everchanging.

I'm sharing my own story now because it's other peoples' stories that have had such a profound impact for me, and continue to. I'm proud to be Autistic and I'm grateful to be part of such an incredibly supportive community of fellow neurodivergent folks. Happy #AutismMonth! 🥰