Episode 225-Autism, ADHD, and Adult Life: Danielle Sullivan's Insights

Imagine discovering a new facet of yourself in your 30s. That’s precisely what happened to Danielle Sullivan, an autistic adult who was diagnosed later in life. Having founded neurodiverging.com, she now extends her insights and experiences to help late-identified autistic and ADHD adults and their families navigate their unique journeys.

Danielle's candid recounting of her personal experience with autism and ADHD offers its own unique perspective. With her, we journey through her struggles, exploring the various nuances of neurodivergence and the profound impact it can have on familial relationships. Listen in as she details the liberation of her diagnosis, the challenges of fitting in with societal norms, and her efforts to create a personal space that caters to her and her family's unique needs.

Finally, we dive into Danielle's mission to advocate for neurodivergent individuals. Listen to how she took her personal journey of self-discovery and used it to fuel the creation of her online coaching practice.  Join us on this journey of embracing neurodivergence and creating supportive spaces for growth.

Transcript

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Finding Community and Acceptance in Autism

Speaker 2 0:04

Welcome to the .

Speaker 1 0:06

SJ Child Show , where a little bit of knowledge can turn fear into understanding . Enjoy the show . Hello , my fantastic listeners , so nice to have you here today . I want to give a couple special shout outs today . First of all , in my hometown I had a really fantastic haircut by Ms Teresa this weekend and I just wanted to give her a shout out for being so wonderful . It's been like eight years and I just never treat myself . And we went and I got it done and I feel like I'm the person I'm so excited , so don't ever let me go this long again . Thank you so much , teresa . Shout out to you , gave you my podcast card to hopefully you get this message . I want to give another shout out to Mia and Brenda with Superpower Radio Show on iHeart Radio , an amazing autism show that is about empowering autism . Go take a listen , enjoy the show . Hi , welcome to the SJ Child Show .

Speaker 1 1:34

I'm really excited to get into this conversation today because you know I was just saying to someone I saw this post that was a newly diagnosed well , a mom that just got diagnosed for her child . Let's go there . And the post was you know , I feel so alone . I've told my family like , does it ever get better . And I responded your family is always going to be your family , but your tribe , your autism tribe , community and friends that you will find will be your forever family forever . And I don't know about you , but that's just the journey I've found in creating relationships and kind of finding supports , resources , and so today I am excited to talk to Danielle Sullivan and I'm going to let her give an introduction so she can give you all the good stuff .

Speaker 2 2:34

So Danielle , thank you so much for being here . Thank you so much for having me . I'm so thrilled to be here . I'm an autistic adult . I run neurodivergingcom , which is a coaching practice for mostly late identified autistic and ADHD and other neurodivergent adults . But we also work with families , with parent coaching for families who are trying to get to know their kiddos better , get to know what any diagnosis might mean for them in their lives . And yeah , and I have two kiddos too , eight and 10 , who are autistic ADHD .

Speaker 1 3:10

And I love that because I'm also late diagnosed last year . A lot of us are Congratulations yeah , and my daughter . Well , in our family it went our son a decade ago , then dad , then little sister , then me .

Speaker 2 3:29

So yeah , we had almost the same order . I think it was my son , me and then , and then dad and then little sister .

Speaker 1 3:36

Yeah , yeah , I had to think about that in different order . Yeah , but you know what I can really confess I've never actually spoken to another mom or another wife that's been in the same situation . So pleasure to have you here today .

Speaker 2 3:51

Thanks so much . Yeah , it's funny . I work with a lot of late identified adult people and the number of times I've heard , especially from women , like I was caught or I was diagnosed , or I looked into it after a kiddo was caught or diagnosed , you know . So I think there are a lot of us who who come to it later and just have felt very alone until until you really start talking to people you're like oh , I met 20 people this week who are in the same boat , so , yeah , it's amazing and I was just like I'm going to be a part of this community that I found my whole life wandering around .

Speaker 1 4:25

I kind of likened myself to a unicorn , on the outside of all the people always just wondering and prancing about , and it wasn't until I found this community that I was like finally , the Legion of unicorns right it was . It's such a beautiful thing and for us as a family and I don't know if you've had the same situation , but it was almost like it was just to celebrate all of us knowing each other better , feeling more integrated as a family , and it was just a great journey .

Speaker 2 4:59

Yeah , it's been really positive for all of us . I I think that there was a lot of , especially for us as parents and I don't want to speak for my partner , but I can say for me as a mother I had a lot of difficulty adjusting to being a parent , even though it was something I really wanted . Then , having children with different neuro types and different needs , and sometimes competing needs , was really challenging , like somebody wants it loud , somebody wants it quiet , somebody wants to move around a lot , somebody's overwhelmed by all the movement . It was really difficult but also really stimulated all the growth for all of us to stop taking all those things personally and to start figuring out like okay , what does everybody need to be okay ? I don't think we would have been able to get there if we hadn't had the labels of these identities . I know some people find labels to be constricting , but for us it's really been liberating to be able to say well , you know , I like that .

Speaker 1 6:00

I say that all the time . Yeah , oh good .

Speaker 2 6:02

Yeah , this is how my brain is . How can we work with it so that everybody can get what they need to do , or get what they need to be happy , yeah .

Speaker 1 6:11

Oh , it's so important . I always say our house looks so different from what society thinks a family should look like , so vastly different . My son is right now asleep . His midnight was about 10 am and he just went to bed , so for us it looks like following each other's biological needs , not following the timeframes that society has put down as necessary to eat breakfast or you have to work this kind of a job that consists of you leaving the house and being gone all the time and coming back . Yeah , we don't function like that . So not to say that that isn't a fantastic journey for whoever it might be , but for us , four individuals in this home , not so yeah .

Speaker 2 7:08

I really think you have to let go , and this is for , maybe , people of any neurotype and not just me as an autistic person , but that for us , a lot of it came down to our routines and our schedules , and the ways we do things should be serving us , we should not be serving them . And so it's like well , if the normal nine to five work schedule serves you , then do that .

Speaker 2 7:33

But if it doesn't serve you and you have other options which I know not everybody has . But if you do , or the sleep schedules , it's like well , if somebody needs to be up at 6 am so that so-and-so can get out of the house on time , ok fine , but if there's no need to do it that way , then why are you stressing yourself ? Doing it out , yeah , or doing it that way . And we've had to really rethink a lot of , especially as a stay-at-home parent and now work from home parent and we homeschool or unschool more clearly , and so it's really been about figuring out , well , what works best for everybody in terms of , like , what we have for lunch when we have lunch .

Speaker 1 8:13

Yes .

Speaker 2 8:13

You know all these sort of basic things . You just rethink everything . You're just like , well , this doesn't work for us , let's not do it anymore .

Speaker 1 8:19

Yeah 100% agree . That's what we've done too . We've gone wild . We're living wild over here , wild and free in our own time frames and our lifestyles . But for those of us , like you said , that show up , I mean , it's natural for me to get tired at 9 o'clock and wake up at 6 o'clock . It's just what my body does and that works , you know . Yeah , but I don't see the need to kind of now control the children in my life to do the same . And you know , it's kind of funny , my 11-year-old . She took her self under her own self discovery journey over the summer . She broke her leg . Unfortunately , I guess this was two summers ago , so she had a lot of time to be at home .

Speaker 1 9:10

Be thinking yes , and so she stayed up . She said I want to stay up all night long , I'm just going to stay up all night . I was like okay , okay , but you know , during the day when we're all going out and doing things or what not , and maybe this wasn't when she broke her leg , because we were going out and doing things and she was going to miss it right .

Speaker 1 9:27

But it was about four days worth or so and she finally was just like I'm lonely , I don't like this , like I don't know what to even do , like what am I ? I'm done watching these movies . You know the movies or whatever . And you know she was little . It's not like she was watching Disney Channel and stuff , you know .

Speaker 1 9:46

So it was great for her to have her own self-discovery to find her own boundaries , and I think that it's important that we as parents look at the space we provide our children and allow them to have control in that space to grow their own individualism .

Speaker 2 10:07

Yeah , and that's a lot of what we work on . I think a lot of parents especially if you're not neurodivergent yourself as a parent or you're not really familiar with autism , adhd , whatever past the stereotypes parents tend to come in with like a lot of concerns of will my child ever be able to be independent , go to college , have a girlfriend , whatever it is , and it's like those are all valid concerns for some clients . But sometimes it's just like your kiddos are going to be fine , like they're going to be fine , they're just going to take a slightly different path . And I think a lot of parents are just so worried about whether a child won't be able to do that they don't give the kiddo space and even teens space to like learn to skill , build to grow confidence , to like do all these things . And you end up with these kind of like very anxious helicopter parents and these kids and teens who feel stifled because no one will let them try anything .

Speaker 2 10:58

And I just think it's so important I know it's scary , you know as a parent myself to give kids space to make mistakes , but it's also like when you rather have them make a really bad mistake , like when you're home to support them , you know and work through it , like when they're 12 , as opposed to when they're 14 or 18 or off in school . And you know , I think there's ways to provide structure and guidance and support that are not like this kind of controlling . You must do one , two , three in this specific way and the kids need to learn , like your daughter , like you said , they need to learn , they need to be able to experiment and try new things and see what works for them .

Speaker 2 11:37

And yeah , if they're not going to space , they don't get that . So yeah , I'm so glad she she got something out of that experience .

Speaker 1 11:44

It's so cool yeah , she's . So she's really mature she's . It's so interesting how autism presents in everybody individually . Oh my gosh , I'm going to use my husband's quote . He had the most amazing quote the other day . There are 186 million people in the world with autism . This is just one story . You're here and I love that .

Speaker 2 12:07

It was so good job to him . He's so beautiful .

Speaker 1 12:11

He comes up with all the great stuff , and so I think that it's so important that we we start I'm going to start saying that more because I think it's so give such a better perspective of how much there is that is being missed in and not and in that female sense .

Autism Presentation in Females

Speaker 1 12:31

Getting back to where I was trying to get to the word , was that that presence or how it presents itself in females ? How did you find that it presented for you and your kind of self reflection of what that looked like ?

Speaker 2 12:46

Sure . So just for some context , I was identified when I was and I always get this one it was in my early 30s and I want to say 32 . I'm not really particularly good with with numbers , with remembering specific dates in times . Yeah .

Speaker 2 13:02

But my 30s we can go , yeah , early 30s , so my son had been born , we noticed some like kind of traditional stereotyped boy autism behavior and got him identified . And then , the more I researched , like what does autism actually look like ? Because my knowledge wasn't that great I was like , oh , it's me , it's my family , it's like hello . And so I did a lot of reflection and that was right , kind of the way everything happened . I did a lot of my reflection kind of right before the pandemic started and then going into the beginning of it Sorry , something in my eye . So I did a lot of work , like kind of thinking back , and I think what I came to is when I was so I was going to school in like the 90s and I was just kind of the weird kid , so I knew that I was having trouble , but it was just identified as being sort of the weird off , slightly odd girl as opposed to an autistic person . And I think if you looked , if there was somebody , if there was a little clone of me in school today , somebody would be like that is an autistic girl . But at the time it just wasn't really well known that there were different presentations of autism , much less that there were kind of more stereotypically female presentations . So my challenges were really , you know , I was kind of like the what do they call that ? The little professor version of autism where I did great with adults .

Speaker 2 14:27

I could do my schoolwork , I read , a ton I kept . I can keep a lot of information in my head and use it to good , to good effort . But I take longer to process what people are telling me . So I have a longer period of silence than average when I'm trying to figure out how to respond . I miss social cues or don't respond well to people who are like being sarcastic in a non obvious way , like I do better with sarcasm than a lot of other autistic people I've met . But I'm not like the world's best at catching sarcasm , especially if I'm tired or I'm distracted by something , I just won't pick it up . And so you know , when you think about how teenage girls tend to communicate , especially in like the 90s , and you know , reflective listening wasn't being taught and empathetic communication wasn't being taught in schools , and so I just kind of missed a lot of patterns .

Speaker 2 15:22

And also , just from an like , from a sensory standpoint , a somatic standpoint , I have a lot of sensory challenges . I can't handle a lot of textures . I get overwhelmed by sound pretty easily . I get overwhelmed by certain kinds of visual input very easily . I have executive dysfunction challenges .

Speaker 2 15:43

So I like , could not figure out fashion . I have no visual working memory , could not figure out fashion . I don't like makeup , particularly because now as an adult I found some things that kind of work for me . But I still don't wear a lot of makeup because it's like blatantly uncomfortable , like I can feel it all day . I'm sure many women don't have that experience , right . But there's just like certain things that I can't do to match other , that I couldn't do to match other teenage girls . Now I'm an adult women present in all sorts of ways . Right , like there's lots of reasonable presentations for being a woman in the world . Nobody really looks at you off if you're not wearing lipstick one day , right yeah . Or like your clothes , don't you know you have mom , mom , vibe clothes instead of , like you know , highly tailored , fashionable clothes .

Speaker 2 16:31

But , when you're a teenager and you're in these kind of clicky environments and social acceptance is so important . I really failed all of those tests , you know , just because I couldn't catch all those you know things I was being given . I was so focused on just getting through the day and falling over when I got home and then like getting up the next day and doing it again . So yeah , there's my really long answer , but that's how it presented for me . Weird , awkward girl , a couple of special interests . Like I was nice , I got on with people , but sometimes like I would . I think the typical presentations you hear nowadays , with girls too , is like they make it fine up till middle school and then they start to fall over . And that's kind of what happened to me , as I made it fine through middle school and then I started having even more social challenges because I just , you know , the ante was raised so high in that context . So , yeah , wow .

Speaker 1 17:25

How did your family or you know kind of support systems ? What did that look like ? And did they , you know , were they able to offer you support ? Or I mean , for me it was unknown , obviously , I guess .

Speaker 2 17:42

So I guess that would be kind of a silly question now that I'm reflecting on that I don't think so , like it wasn't identified , as you know , a diagnosis , and so I wasn't offered things like speech or OT or whatever or those kind of therapy models that you would use nowadays .

Navigating Neurodivergence and Parenting Perspectives

Speaker 2 18:01

I had parents who really tried to be supportive and to talk things out and like we're pretty good parents . But also , looking back , it's like very clear that there's some neurodivergence in the family that has not been assessed , and so I'd only bring that up to say that sometimes , especially if you go till your 30s not identified , like you look back and you're like , oh , the reason I wasn't caught is partly because I am just like my other family members and they weren't caught , and they're just like their parents , who weren't caught , and they're just like their parents who were caught , you know , because 50 years ago , if you had a slightly oddball uncle like , who didn't like to talk to people and like had a couple like spent all his time fixing engines or something .

Speaker 2 18:43

That could be an autistic profile but it wouldn't read like for the time period as being you know , as being something you had to diagnose .

Speaker 2 18:51

Institutionalized is a mistake , yeah absolutely , and so the definitions change so much and there's such wider understanding of what it looks like now that I'm just the first person in my family who happens to have gotten that label . But like , that's not to say it came out of nowhere . So I think it was almost harder for them to have noticed it than if I had been born to a like 100% neurotypical family , because they would have been like hey , this is , this is weird . They wouldn't have been like oh no , she's just like Uncle John .

Speaker 1 19:18

Yeah , yeah , totally yeah .

Speaker 2 19:20

I don't know what else happened to you , but that's what . That's what I think happened for us .

Speaker 1 19:24

I haven't really thought about it Now that you say that I do . I mean my , my upbringing was a little different , in that I my parents were divorced early and I move I'm an only child , so that made it a little bit isolating , and so I think that me being withdrawn or quiet which I normally wasn't anyways I was pretty much outgoing and words view more than anything . That's , that's my problem . This is such a good thing for me , but I think that at one point in my teenage years my dad was in the military and so he was going out of town a lot , and so for several months , even maybe a year or two , of late high school , it was house sitters and people that I would never have made relationships with anyway . So it was very I was kind of just on my own . I feel like it was rogue you know , I was literally just doing my things .

Speaker 1 20:30

I can remember and it was fearful and I did have a lot of anxiety and a lot of missed . Missed diagnosis is in depression , and I remember one boyfriend saying oh , you must have multiple personality disorder , or what is it not borderline personality .

Speaker 1 20:54

Yeah , yeah , you know those things and now that I look back I think , wow , well , I think what it really came down to was my lack of knowledge of communication and how to do that correctly , yeah . Number two was , yeah , the not being able to identify myself as a part of a narrow tribe that existed and so , therefore , just feeling isolated still and like once a loner , always a loner kind of a thing you know , but I'll tell you .

Speaker 1 21:23

when I met my husband and we were great friends before we dated and then we became this amazing couple and now , almost 20 years later , it has been the most rewarding thing to accept that I have these people that fill my life now . That you know , I am a part of something and it is so special and now it's huge . Now I'm like building a global friendships and relationships and it's like almost made up for all of lost time .

Speaker 2 21:56

Yeah , yeah , I have some similarities in that . I was , I think I read a statistic and I'll have to find the source , but that it's . It's autistic women who are late identified . Autistic women tend to have something like five misdiagnoses before we're finally identified as autistic , which reads as accurate to me just from the clients I've worked with . But I know a lot of us and I'm included in this where misdiagnosis I was misdiagnosed personally with generalized anxiety disorder , depressive disorder .

Speaker 2 22:27

There was one other one what was it , I can't remember now , but one of the one of the psychiatric ones where I kind of took the results and when I really don't think this is what's going on . But okay , you know , because you just didn't , people weren't looking for autism women , so yeah , but then to finally get something and then to start to meet other people and feel like , oh okay , I'm not in a room by myself anymore , there's all these other people in here with me , has been so fantastic and rewarding . And I think that you know , being able to offer my kids a space where they're like supported and not just supported but like allowed and strengthened in their potential neurological differences from whatever the outside world is doing is is kind of very healing and very . You know , not their job to heal me , but they're doing it anyway kind of thing just to have other neurodivergent people around all the time .

Speaker 2 23:21

Yeah , great yeah .

Speaker 1 23:22

I agree it has been so great and to feel that space that you know , at first I felt like , okay , I'm advocating on this powerhouse and I'm going to put the good fight on for my kids and all of these things . And then , when it was for my husband , I was like , okay , I am accommodating this man so much . Like he doesn't eat in restaurants . So it's been 20 years of no restaurant eating . Yeah fantastic , fine , I don't care right .

Speaker 1 23:51

Yeah , you did enough in my life but to understand , okay , now I get that , yeah , put the pieces together . It just is really . It's really helpful and valuable , I think , for other parents and other people to hear . That like it's okay to reevaluate what you've been conditioned to know and do like you had said at the beginning and start a whole new path of your own desires and your own fulfillment and really basing your life on that as much as possible . I think it just it opens up so many opportunities .

Speaker 2 24:30

Yeah , it's a really important piece of the work we do with clients basically every day , whether they're you know any gender , that it's important to know what your values are and kind of start from there , because a lot of the sort of models for how to keep your house , how to parent , how to clean , how to do your yard , how to whatever , are taken wholesale for maybe what our parents did or what our teachers taught us or what you know we see on TV and those might be good models . Some of them work , but some of them won't work for you and you can keep trying to do them and just keep feeling like you're failing , where you can just like say this is not working and kind of accept that and it's not a , it's not a moral failure . If the thing you know , if the way to cook that your parents taught you doesn't work for you , there's lots of other ways to cook . It's just kind of like being able to recognize that it's not your fault . It's just a piece of being a human on the planet and then try something new , you know , and let yourself try something new and let yourself tweak and kind of reevaluate and not kind of put every single thing that doesn't work on you as a personal failing , which I think a lot of us are trained to do because we were so alone growing up .

Speaker 2 25:40

It's like the things didn't work . It must be me , like all those times I failed in middle school . It must have been me because the other girls didn't Like I did something wrong and they started to ostracize . But that's just what happens when you're of a different culture to the people you are next to . But if you find people in your own culture , you start to realize that it's not you , it's just culture clash . It's just like some people do things one way , some people do the other way . There's no moral failure in that .

Speaker 1 26:08

Here we are trying to push the idea of we have to be inclusive , we have to have diversity , but we always have . We haven't always been inclusive I'm not , let me not put those in tune but we've always had diversity .

Speaker 2 26:23

Diversity exists , yes , regardless of whether you see it or not . Regardless .

Speaker 1 26:27

It's embracing it . It's that embracing piece and that intention behind wanting that , wanting to be a part of that , or wanting your kids to be a part of that , wanting your clients to be a part of that . Tell us a little bit about neurodiverging and how that came about for you .

Speaker 2 26:45

I'm sure I started the neurodiverging podcast like a month before the pandemic , which in retrospect was like how did that work out ? But I was really at this place in my own development where I'd been diagnosed for a couple of years . My kid had been diagnosed . I was really struggling at the time as a parent and just looking for parenting resources that came from a neurodivergent perspective , Because a lot of the how to parent autistic kids resources are written by neurotypical individuals who are not like autistic themselves and for kids with a more stereotypical presentation , say , of autism or ADHD , and even in the couple of years we've been around has changed a ton , so there are better resources

Advocating for Neurodivergent Individuals

Speaker 2 27:27

now .

Speaker 2 27:27

At the time I could find nothing and so I was like I just want to run , like start this podcast and try to meet some people and build community and also like create some resources that maybe people can , even if they're not like perfect resources , that they are a starting point for people to reflect off of and build their own from . And the podcast grew a lot more than I was expecting and we branched out into coaching a couple of years ago and now we're a coaching practice . We're an online sliding scale practice . We offer virtual services all over the world and we have several neurodivergent coaches on staff who are all trained in neurodiversity and also certified coaches in the US and and are themselves either autistic , ADHD or whatever other neurotype , and so we try to support folks with kind of life coaching , skill building , executive function support , ADHD coaching and then also with parent coaching . If you have a mixed-neurotype family and you're just trying to figure out , well , how do I build these systems so that everybody wins ?

Speaker 1 28:29

You know right .

Speaker 2 28:31

Yeah , so that's what we do now and it's been so fulfilling and fantastic and just it's just really important to me to like give back to community and build community and help other people know that you , like you were saying that no one is alone , like you feel alone because you just can't see the rest of all of us here . And so , yeah , trying to build those communities so that we can see each other and talk to each other and get support from one another is agreed , so important , so yeah , and now we have each other , now we can add to each other's communities .

Speaker 1 29:02

It's one of the reasons I love podcasts .

Speaker 2 29:05

I'm not actually a very chatty person in real life most of the time , but I just like talking to people who have some experience in common with me , which was not the case to most of my people .

Speaker 1 29:15

Right .

Speaker 2 29:16

So next year on the bus or went to college with or whatever . So yeah , yeah .

Speaker 1 29:20

It's so nice now , isn't it ? Just to find all of these amazing people . And last year I had an event called the one in 44 tour and it was I don't know if you heard it or saw it on social media , but it was 34 autistic presenters who were celebrities from Love on the Spectrum to . You know , some people that just were just new on their , you know , the scene of advocacy just really want to have a place to share their story . It was so beautiful , it was a two day event and this year , because of the number change you know we're doing , the one in 36 mix .

Speaker 1 30:01

So that's our new . Our new one Really cute . Yeah , it's gonna be great . I'd love to invite you to be a part of it with us with your podcast , because last year we did put live podcasts to autistic podcasts , so it's so I love it because it's like such a great way to bring everyone together .

Speaker 1 30:22

In fact , this morning I randomly I don't even know how this happened there's a girl , brittany DeAngelo , and she was , she was on Big Brother and then she just does a lot of work on social media and just through a friend , through a friend and we we talked this morning and recorded , and it's so neat to hear the stories of different autistic women who she was diagnosed at 22 months old . I mean her . She said I don't even and she says I don't even know what it's like to not know , to , to have this separate identity from myself . I think that's just so beautiful , like an authentic .

Speaker 2 31:05

I'm so glad that some women are getting diagnosed a little earlier . It's been such a gap in the system for such a long time , so that's really fantastic .

Speaker 1 31:18

What do you think we need to do ? What are maybe some ideas you have ? How do we bridge that gap ? How do we fix this ? Not catching it in enough time ?

Speaker 2 31:28

I think a lot of it . I mean , there's a couple of layers to it , right . I mean , first step is just educating people as to what autism looks like , because so many people are working from , you know , Rain man , which isn't even based on an autistic person . So it's like you know and no fault to those creators , but like they didn't know when they made that movie . And then that's just what gets perpetuated right Through the culture .

Speaker 2 31:49

So , like stuff like we're doing , I hope , is helping people learn more about , and just people writing on their blogs and doing their articles on Medium and this kind of any advocacy work , even if it's posting on Instagram about your experience , helps other people know , like that autistic people like us exist , right , and if everybody does that a little bit , then we get a lot more diverse representation of autism and then neurotypical people can learn more about what it looks like and we can too , right , Cause there's so many different presentations and then from that , hopefully , parents can recognize it a little earlier , doctors can recognize it a little earlier , get more education about it .

Speaker 2 32:27

And then I know on the research front , a lot of folks are working on developing questionnaires and assessment tools that are more , that are less stereotypically oriented , right Cause the original tools are really developed for white American boys under five , and so if you use those tools in anyone who's not a white American boy under five , the results aren't as good , and so that excludes a lot of population . And so now that we're developing more knowledge about the variation in the spectrum , more tools will be developed , and hopefully that will help too . So it's just about like I think starting from the bottom with the education piece and then working up is really always the way to do it . It just takes a long time but it's getting better , Like it's . There's a lot of evidence that it's getting better .

Speaker 1 33:12

So you know my husband and his great quotes . Another one he came up with for us is a little bit of knowledge turns fear into understanding .

Speaker 2 33:22

Yes .

Speaker 1 33:23

And that's just exactly what it is Is . We need to turn that understanding around and give people the right education and the right representation of what women , girls and boys there's different ideas of what that looks like too , so I think that we're really doing the right work for the betterment of society .

Speaker 2 33:48

I hope so and I really do think that , like I know , a lot of people feel like you have to throw 100% of your energy into advocacy to make a difference , and if you have that energy , you can do it , but also just like occasionally talking to people in your neighborhood about it , right ?

Speaker 2 34:06

Or occasionally going to a PTA meeting or whatever , like these little things can make a huge difference for everybody in the whole world community , and so it's just like just pitch in a little bit as your energy allows , like take care of yourself first , you know , but we don't all have to be like the next Greta Thunberg or somebody to make a huge difference 100% .

Speaker 1 34:31

So yeah , Absolutely . It's been so nice getting to know you today . I'm really glad we got to have this discussion and thank you so much for inviting me .

Speaker 2 34:40

It's been really awesome . I appreciate it . I want to stay in contact .

Speaker 1 34:43

So , yeah , you're stuck with me now . Yay , it's been great . Tell everybody where we can go to support you websites , social medias , all of that good stuff .

Speaker 2 34:57

Thank you . So you can listen to the Nerd Diverging Podcast . Wherever you get your podcasts , it's just under Nerd Diverging . And then we're also at Nerd Diverging on all the social medias Instagram , facebook , youtube , and then the website is nerddivergingcom , and we have a blog with articles to help , the podcast transcripts and then obviously , the coaching services and we do offer some courses too on parenting and on being a newly diagnosed person , just getting your feet on the ground , getting ready with that kind of stuff . So check it out . Always feel free to email me if I can help you with anything . I won't try to sell you stuff , I'll just direct you to resources and that's at contact at nerddivergingcom so yeah , happy to help you .

Speaker 1 35:41

I love that . You said that . I loved the same thing . My husband's always after me . Are you helping somebody else ? Yes , I am . Yes , I am yeah , as much as I can . Because , why not ? Why not ? It's not hurting me in any way and I love- .

Speaker 1 35:57

It's love for everybody yeah it's it's enough for everybody , that's for sure . Thank you so so much for your time today and taking the chance to get to know you and discovering your family thanks to them for allowing you to tell their story . So yeah , and we'll definitely be in touch . Beautiful thank you .