When she said you have ass-briggers, I thought you got to be kidding me. Hey, how's it going? My name is Joey. I live in Los Angeles with my husband and my two-year-olds. A couple weeks before I turned 35, which was about a month ago, I was diagnosed with autism. Now, when I made a couple of social media posts and asked my friends what the number one question they had about my announcement was, most people wanted to find out how I was diagnosed this late in life with something that they found quite shocking. So, first of all, I wanted to say that I actually wasn't seeking a diagnosis and no, I was not diagnosed by a mental health or psychiatric professional. I actually hired a career coach by the name of Penelope Trunk. I'd been following her for well over a decade, and I was at the stage in my career where I thought that having a coach or a mentor as a guide would help me reach the next level that I wanted to attain. So, at the end of an hour-long session, she said, okay, Joey, we're off the clock now. Can you please hear me and try doing some of these visualization tasks? And at the end of the visualization test, I thought, cool, maybe she'll tell me something about my communication style and how I could better manage people, etc. Except you dropped this mom. You have asked burgers. I knew it from the second I read your email that you did, but I think it's important that you know. My first thought was, you've got to be kidding me. I am one of the most social people that I know. In fact, I had a blog for years about my partying lifestyle. I pride myself in having a lot of really deep, meaningful friendships. I am an extrovert through and through. It seemed like everything I knew about autism did not apply to me. I know that she is an expert in Asperger's. She herself was diagnosed with Asperger's in her 30s after her son had started showing signs of being on the autism spectrum. I was still very skeptical, of course, because you know, I've been reading her blog for such a long time and I said, Penelope, you think everyone has Asperger's. I am using Asperger's as the term because that's what she used. I understand that it is no longer in the DSM and that a lot of people prefer ASD or Autism Spectrum Disorder. But I spent another hour talking to Penelope and I trust in her expertise. She has been studying autism and especially autism as it presents in women and adult women for a very long time. And after chatting with her, it was like she had a crystal ball into my entire life. She could name exactly how I was as a child, at school, how I deal with certain situations, and things started clicking. And it wasn't until I ran some errands a couple of hours later and I was on my way driving home that I had this breakthrough and started sobbing in my car because it seemed like my life finally made sense. I understood myself a bit better and I had a perspective on why I felt so different and I was crying for the younger version of myself and all of the extremely difficult times that I had navigating through a neurotypical world. Had I have known that I was different or that I was on the spectrum and if I had gotten help or acknowledged that maybe life wouldn't have felt so isolating and so difficult. And that is the reason why I'm sharing this video with you. I'd like to make more videos as I continue on this sort of discovery journey. It's only been the second month that I've known about this. So if you'd like to hear more, feel free to subscribe. I want to say that the criteria for autism in the DDSM is purposefully somewhat general because autism is a spectrum. So they want to allow for many different presentations of autism, but you have to understand that most of the study of autism is done in men and male children. The phenotype for adult women is wildly different from how it appears in young boys or in popular culture. This is why it is so prevalent for women to be misdiagnosed or undiagnosed well into their adult life or never. Misdiagnosis and undiagnosis of adult women with autism or young girls with autism is a serious problem. 66% of these women reach adulthood and have already contemplated suicide or have severe depression because their neurodifferences have not been identified or addressed or assisted in the same way. I did do my research to try to seek a formal diagnosis, but in the US, healthcare is bullshit. We don't have the NHS, we don't have universal healthcare. So typically, these sort of formal assessments are one extremely difficult to get unless you are in a privileged position. So I was seeking practitioners who specialize in autism and adult women and some of these evaluations and assessments, even with insurance, cost $1500 or more. I was able to find two centers here in California, one at University of California, San Francisco, as well as the neurodiversity program at Stanford University, where I've joined the weight list to be evaluated. But the weight list is currently about 10 months long, if not longer, because we're in the midst of a global pandemic. And I would have to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco or Palo Alto to get evaluated. Self-diagnosis, in my opinion, is perfectly okay. There are a lot of hurdles to have to cross in America to get on a weight list, be evaluated, and even if you have the opportunity, it's not like everyone has the privilege or the means to pay a hefty amount of money. I pay a hefty amount of over $1,000 to get a formal diagnosis. I myself feel like it's not particularly necessary for me to get a formal diagnosis. I think for adults considering it, ways in which a formal diagnosis can help you is if you need assistance of any form. Whether it's disability, special accommodations at work or at home, etc. where you need a medical professional to give you a label so you get access to those services by all means. But I live a very comfortable life, I think, acknowledging for myself that I am neurodivergent is enough. Being able to tell people that I'm neurodivergent is enough and hopefully spread some awareness and compassion if I may behave a little differently. So yeah, this is the story of how I found out that I have autism and the beginnings of me trying to get a formal diagnosis. If you'd like to find out more, I'll leave some resources down below that helped me believe in my diagnosis. I will keep you posted on my formal diagnosis journey. And thank you for listening. I'll talk to you soon.