 Hi everybody, thank you so much for being here. Seems like a couple of people, a couple of new folks to Brain Club and that's so awesome. I'm Mel Hauser, I use she, they pronouns and I'm an executive director here at All Brains Belong and welcome to our kickoff of the month of Autistic Culture here at Brain Club. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna share screen. That's not even the correct date. Awesome. So anyway, by way of introduction, all forms of participation are okay here. You can have your video on or off and even if it's on, we do not expect anything of you. We certainly do not expect you to look at the camera. My camera's in a different place now because Tracy Rue from the Ruman Assist Technology Program helped me get my computer up on yoga bolsters and like now I can see the screen better. So plug for the Ruman Assist Technology Program. Anyway, you can move or like do what he's doing, however you're most comfortable, we don't expect this at still, walk, moves, fidgets, stim, eat, whatever. And everyone is welcome here at Brain Club. People of all ages are just keep that in mind, especially cause a lot of people do participate with video off and there might be little ears nearby. So just keep that in mind with topics discussed and language and all that. All right, anyway, you can communicate however you want to, unmute and use mouth words, type in the chat, whatever works for you. And a word about language, I think, especially tonight, we're joined by community panelists and I think you'll hear a variety of terminology or language that people are using to describe their own experience. And so we want people to feel comfortable using whatever words they use to refer to their own identity. When I speak about autism, I use identity first language. I am autistic because for me, autism is part of my identity. And though the research shows that the majority of people, in research studies of adults, prefer identity first language that is not universal and everyone is welcome to use the language about their own identity works for them. Speaking of identity, affirming identity, all aspects of identity is really important to us here and related to that, the safety, creating safety, how do we cue safety? I think that comes in a variety of different ways and we'll talk about that next. So first off, just naming the shared understanding that today is about education. It's not medical advice and individual traumatic experiences are best processed in a therapeutic setting of which Brain Club does not. Other aspects of safety, we want to be creating space for people with a broad range of communication access needs. And given how common it is that maybe we don't necessarily perceive time or maybe we aren't necessarily the conflicting access needs of, if I have the kind of brain that communicates in 20 minute monologues, but there's other people who, I'm also one of the people that can't listen to 20 minute monologues. So like we're balancing this, we're constantly navigating the conflicting access needs. And so we just want to normalize that, like we're gonna have conflicting access needs and it's completely part of the norm here to be talking about access needs. My access needs are. And as we, you know, tonight, our panelists, many of whom are here live with us today, but we do have a prerecorded set of interviews that we're gonna play. It's gonna be about 30 minutes and then we'll have plenty of time for discussion. Just keeping in mind the big picture of to make sure that we're creating space for people who want to participate in conversation to be able to do so. That was really long-winded. Speaking of 20 minute monologues, last bit of access needs related topics. Close captioning is enabled. You just have to toggle it on if you'd like to use it. So depending on what version of Zoom you have, look for the lab transcript CC icon. And if you don't see that, find the more dot, dot, dot, and choose show subtitles or hide subtitles if you'd like to turn them off. Okay, so why did we designate this month of April to talk about autistic culture? Well, many people are observing autism awareness month. They're autism acceptance month, like all of it. Anyway, for many people, April is hard, April is awful. And though of course that's not universal by any means, it's just that for many people, it is distressing to see or hear the way that autism is regarded by many people in this world. And so part of what we endeavor to do as we create community here is to provide something that is countering that dominant narrative. I'm gonna play a little bit of the snarky video clip, which I impulsively decided to build into Brain Club. I have to stop and then reshare. Okay, so if you don't follow the All Brains Belong Instagram account, this ran this weekend. I hate about April, 2023 edition. Number one, puzzle pieces. Number two, fundraisers that benefit organizations that use puzzle pieces. Three, any conversation about autism that does not center the perspectives of autistic people. All Brains Belong is a- All right, so that's where today's Brain Club comes from, because we do want to be centering the perspective of autistic voices. And we will be joined tonight by five autistic adults who were identified to be autistic as adults, ranging from being identified in their 20s to their 60s. And all month long, we will be talking about various some ways in which we would like the conversation around autism to be, to be about de-stigmatizing the autism narrative. So before we start our prerecorded interviews, I just wanna huge thank you to our panelists, Kelly Bordeaux, Amy Noyes, Sarah Knudson, Matthew LaFleur and Zeph. Thank you all so much for sharing your stories with us. And with that, David, you ready? All set. Okay, go for it. And we'll have the chat going. I'll have it open and I'll be, and so you're welcome. Welcomeed if you'd like to participate in conversation and the chat as this is going, feel free. All right. All right, here we go. Okay. So when did you learn that you are autistic and what has it been like to get to know your brain? I only recently like had somebody else say, hey, you're right, you're autistic. So I don't even think it's been like six months that I've like comfortably said it to other people and feeling confident, like, no, I got someone backing me on this. But I have always questioned my neurology because of the things, because people do the things so easily and it always befuddled me like how, I mean, just in school, how do you just walk in on the first day of school and just do the things and not be freaking out? Like, how does that happen? When I knew I was autistic, I was late diagnosed in January after my physical, which is age 23. And that was when the SSI and SSDI program was to make sure that to continue, I had to go to a psychiatric to continue my benefits. And that was through the healthcare provider and that was by law. And that experience and I found out that I was autistic then. But like I said, I've also had multiple disabilities that ADHD when I was young, then the Slexia within that ADHD form and then cognitive speech issues, subtlery of my own words. That is when I knew I was different, thinking differently and my brain was working very differently and it sees the world in a different spectrum but it sees it in a different place of its own reality and its own kind. And my brain, I actually love my brain the way it thinks because I can see the world around me but also I can see the world in me through other people and see their experiences, discussions, difficulties and conversations through a whole different. I first heard the idea or someone asked me specifically like autism was not on my radar at all for myself and but I had gone to see one of my spouse's college friends who I had never met before. And I wasn't a person who like shared a lot about myself but I found through the weekend of hanging out that I was sharing a lot. I was in a really challenging time in my life and it turns out that two years prior they had been diagnosed with autism and so the last day we were hanging out we were in this really, really large restaurant and in New York City and it was really, really loud and tons of people and but we had gotten to know each other enough that it was like there was this comfortability and in that conversation that's when they had said like how do you ever consider autism? And I had never and I don't, like it didn't even cross my mind. I had very like stereotypical ideas of what it meant to be autistic but they did this thing that like really changed my life. They put noise canceling headphones on my ear on my head and they did it. Like they put it on and so there was something in the act of this connection with this person and when they put them on I think that they could see a shift in me. It was so palpable to have all of the stimulus and in that connection with them in that moment it was like the whole world like went away for a moment and I think it was like really in that moment I knew and even though I didn't know and but I got excited and I got really curious. I had come into contact with a blog or something that was written about the alien on the playground and it was about an adult diagnosed, a signed female at birth person who felt very alienated throughout their childhood and I read this blog and recognized myself in it. At the time I was partnered with somebody who had been diagnosed with Asperger's which is a part of the spectrum but that's what they were calling it when he got diagnosed and I found the RADS RITVO scale online which is a clinically validated assessment tool it's correlated between people who have autism and people who don't and I took it and he took it and my results wound up being even farther off the charts than his were and that started me trying to get attention from my medical care professionals that I suspected that I had autism because it says on the RADS RITVO if you score in this range, take this into your doctor to be assessed. I worked for about a year and then wound up in a space for about four to six weeks where I just couldn't do anything and... And around this time I was, I would consider myself an autistic burnout and I couldn't really leave the house and I was having up to 10 panic attacks a day like it was just my nervous system was just everything was shutting down and that was right when the lockdown happened and so it was like, it saved my life it felt like in a lot of ways because now all of a sudden there's no social interactions I don't have to hug anyone I don't have to set any boundaries for myself I don't have to be anything for anyone and it's when I came out of, I realized I had been an autistic burnout. Fundamentally, it took me another couple of years to actually get diagnosed with the autism but reading that article that enabled me to self-diagnose and really started asking the questions was kind of like this kaleidoscope twisting into focus where everything that never made sense about my life finally started making sense. I've been suspecting that I was autistic for a long time or at least 10 years maybe and I'm 60, a little over 60 so I guess I think the thing that's been the most important to me is really sort of finding a community of people. Right, about a year after that I found ABB going into the Fox market, a little market in East Montpelier and they were donating tips to Albrightville Long for that month and when I saw that this is the place for me and this is like, this is where I get I'll start being able to exist in the outside world because that still wasn't part of my experience and ABB to me has been a way to have community, have social connections, to understand my body, to reframe mental illness and to autism, to take medicines that are simple medicines that have been able to make my mobility and my ability to be in the world different and so I would say like my therapy gave me a space to be myself in a way to myself and ABB has given me a way to be myself and in community with others that hadn't had in so long. What does being autistic mean to you? Honestly, the first thing that comes to mind is trauma. I don't wanna be a downer or anything but being an undiagnosed autistic for most of my life I've had a really hard time with social trauma. I've had death threats as a result of me not understanding either social cues or what people are saying and I have CPTSD that my psychiatrist has identified is as a side effect of having autism. Other than that, it basically means that my brain has differences in the way that it works and processes information. There are some things that it does really well. There are some things that it really sucks at but fundamentally I don't look at my autism as anything that needs to be cured. I look at it as a part of the natural standard deviation in terms of what is normal. If I had to guess I would say from an evolutionary standpoint that most of us are probably really, really wired to be incredibly sensitive to social context and social cues and what the rest of society wants and needs and what other people are doing and in a large way that's great. It helps us to all get along but if a whole society is off base then or going in a direction that isn't so good evolutionarily there probably needs to be at least a healthy minority of people that are able to like not be so wired cued into what the social world thinks. I think that's healthy for society to have that minority and I think it's really hard to be in that minority because that difference is not at all appreciated in the mainstream. Can you talk a little bit about the strengths and the challenges that you feel like go along with being autistic? My biggest brain strength is insight and knowledge, a world around me plus the environment if it's toxic or welcoming. For me that's my biggest strength my brain is thinking fast on its feet and the way it sees the world's perspective view. My brain's weakness is trying to comprehend or doing too much over writing comprehending the situation and trying to analyze it in its own way but there's too much background brain status noises that makes it hard for my brain to comprehend what to focus on. I'm really, really good at things like pattern recognition. I rely upon pattern recognition for survival. I'm also really good at working with things that are really complex. I have an ability to see both the forest and the trees at the same time. I guess what it means to me to be autistic is like to sort of be a moral conscience or sort of an outlier to the rest of society saying, an outlier or an outlaw to the society I'm living in being saying, I just don't see it the same way you do and it doesn't make sense to me and I think you're going in the wrong direction in this way and that way and this other way and that you could be doing it. And so I'm often on the outs of it and yet 20 years later I'm often not wrong. So it's a long time to wait and by the time everybody else has caught up I'm usually on to finding something else that I don't like. We're just people understood things that I just didn't seem to understand and I didn't know where they were getting the information. Like had Google existed as if I was a child like I would have been Googling that all day long. Like why is it so easy for people to do this stuff? Like, you know, all throughout school I was a solid like I loved the middle of the school year. Like you're in your groove, you got your notebook that's already half filled in, you got the rest to go. There's no beginning of the year icebreakers. There's no end of the year zigzags. You're just whoop on your path. And I've always said that about myself and now I can kind of like look back and be like, well, duh, yeah, of course, of course that makes sense. Like it was comfortable. I knew the rules, I knew the expectations. That's when I tended to be more engaged in class because I just, I understood the expectations but beginning and end of anything is just so challenging for me. I can feel like I'm nervous to talk and that's like part of it is like the excitement. It can cue on safety in my system. And so I just wanna like name that for myself. All of the ways that I had felt different or been made to feel different around like pickiness, being overly sensitive, controlling, highly anxious. Even though I had those were all kind of separate points or relationships in my life, all of a sudden it came into this clear view under this one umbrella of this neurobiology or this difference. I think of it differently now, but and so in that exploration of that, so I had always was very sensitive. I was always shy. It was really hard for me, but mainly what I was discovering was I had an inside world and I had an outside world. So I would go into the world and I would try the best. I would study human behavior was a very adept of understanding and really sensitive to energetics within how people were leading, which is often very confusing because I could tell if someone was dysregulated even though they were acting like everything was fine, but in my social environment with my peers it was really difficult because I could sense when someone was challenged but if I pointed that out or I was direct around it, it would often get turned around like something wrong with me or. But I've had to work really, really, really hard to actually care about other people and to actually and to connect with other human beings. The challenges are I often get in the way sometimes of good things and maybe many times of good things that other people are trying to make happen just because it doesn't work for me and just because I don't understand why it works for other people. Yeah, it's sometimes hard to know when it's really important to take a stand and when it's just like I'm being stubborn and I don't like being left out and I wanna do it my way. I'm exhausted all the time of all of the thought and all of the effort that I have to do in advance to be successful in the future. And I didn't see other people doing that. My husband can get up out of bed 10 minutes before he's gonna leave the house. And he's just, and I'm like, are you kidding me? I get up at like 5 a.m. even if I'm not leaving the house just to like prepare myself for the day. I need to ease into my day. I can't just get up and go. Painful, it's like, oh, I'm always good. And it's just the reality of being autistic. It's like, that's just how my brain works. It works differently than the culture that most of the people in the culture I am in. And I believe evolution designed it that way. And what I think that I think I would love to see our culture change is the way that we deal with outliers because I don't think outliers are mistakes. I think outliers are necessary for a society that needs to be self-reflective and the best of humanity is kind of self-reflective. So I think outliers are a good thing, not a mistake of nature, even though they slow down corporate production. How is your life different since learning that you're autistic? All of a sudden, like by saying, by sort of saying I'm autistic and learning about the autism community, all of a sudden there's this whole group of people that's like, oh my God, instant sort of social connection that otherwise I would sort of find piecemeal and case by case. And you still have to make friends, but at least it feels like it's like the community itself has the feel of human community, the kind of human community I've been looking for for an awful long time. I'm glad to know because it gave me more grace with myself and it also just connected my son and I a little bit more, you know, and I told him, he was like, well, of course, mom, that makes so much sense. You know me so much more than anybody else. And I'm like, I guess it does kind of make sense again. I'm the tree, you're my little apple, yeah. But not being diagnosed as a child, like I had to go back through my life and in the grief of that and realizing like, oh, I always cut paper, like I would just cut paper all the time. I realized, oh, this is where's my stims. You know, I watched a ton of TV. It's where I got all my social understanding. I was often like really like physically my face would change. Like if I was hanging out with somebody, I would start speaking like them. I would start, I would take up their interest and, but then I would go home and just be very able to be in my own world listening to songs over and over again. So when I was taking the quizzes, it felt like someone was entering into my world. Like how do they know that about me? How do they know that I have a fascination with running water? How do they know that? Like it was like someone was peering into my soul and I felt known for the first time in my life just from reading the questions. So at the time I was in tremendous amount of internal struggle. And so I think what happened for me was I entered into that world. And so I became very quiet and very curious about myself for the first time cause I realized there was this quality of dissociation when I was going out into the world. And I was really doing a lot of work to try and undo that. But I didn't have any awareness of my body. I didn't have any like ability to like self reflect in the sense of like, I could self reflected like how did my behavior affect the other person? But I had no ability to reflect how am I actually being affected by what's happening? And there's a really big difference in that for me. And so I think that was the first time all of a sudden sounds were coming in. And so I wasn't just getting unconscious pain from it. I was actually getting very conscious pain. In fact, my husband one time said, are you getting, is this getting worse or is this getting better? And I realized for me internally it was getting better but how I was living or how I was acting that out was getting worse for the world. So much of what they're saying is wrong with my kid are ways that I am are ways of my being. And so I bring that up. I'm like, you know, I think he actually does that because I do that. You know, like that would make sense to me. I'm a stay at home mom, he's with me all the time. Of course he's gonna do that. And they're like, well, that isn't a thing that, you know, neurotypical people do. I'm like, oh, that's fascinating, isn't it? And, you know, then I met Mel and things just went from there. And, you know, me receiving my diagnosis was such a difference from when my child received his. We were, and I mean it when I say we were literally handed a box of tissues when they said he's autistic. Well, he's on the autism spectrum. Here's your box of tissues. I'm like, my husband and I are both like, great. Thanks for the answer. Like next step, you know, what do we do? And when Mel told me, she was just like, congratulations, you're autistic. What do you wish parents of autistic children or the broader community knew? Oh, what do I wish parents in the autistic community brought or knew about me? One, I wish they knew that we're all in this together as individuals that, you know, that see things differently, hear things differently and move things differently. To me, the broader public that are, you know, parents and autistic individuals that knew about me that I'm very, very compassionate, supportive. And I do take the leadership role when necessary to support those individuals that may not have a voice. They may not even know how to speak, you know, with their voices or they may not understand what we're talking about because that's not the way our brains in reality work. Everybody's brain thinks differently and acts differently. And for the autistic community, it's about, you know, understanding other people's brains works and how to connect with that brain and having a meaningful conversation and discussion within that brain pattern of an autistic individual, whether it's parents or children, if just having that conversation with them makes them feel like they're welcome and a bigger part of the, not only a bigger part of the picture, but a bigger part of the family together. And that I would like to see more of is that value and welcoming sense of while I'm in this together, we all help each other, let's move forward together. So we can, you know, be the best we can be to educate others about, you know, our special strength. What do you wish parents of autistic children or the broader community would know about what it's like to be autistic? I think I touched on that also. I just think it's like change the perspective on outliers where necessary, where let's embrace the, let's let's, as a humankind, let's embrace the outlier perspective for what we can learn from it and for what we can learn from seeing light through the eyes of the outlier, through the eyes of outliers that we would never see that we would never see because of the natural bias of the majority. And the natural and the perspective of the majority and how the majority is gonna, is wired, literally wired to see things differently. And so as a culture, if we sort of embrace the idea of the social value that people bring is broader than economics and we need to bear the burden or we need to gain the benefits and bear the burden of a diverse culture, then we need to find a way to support everybody emotionally, socially, economically and make space for all of us and truly, and be truly committed to the guests that each person is trying, each person's spirit is trying to have them offer the world they live in. One, I wish people just understood that our brains were different, period. It's not something that we can control, but two, don't pathologize the differences and don't pathologize and or ostracize us because we are non-conforming. But less of a tragedy, because it isn't, like I made it to 46 years old all the while questioning, but I experienced a very classic, when I told certain family members, are you sure you have like college degrees? I'm like, yeah. The thing that I would love people to understand is that, first of all, what I'm speaking about today is my own experience and that I think it's really important to understand that everybody gets to have their own experience and their own access needs and even though there may be traits or characteristics that overlap, that is not actually the experience of being autistic. Being autistic for me means being unto myself, being individual and allowing myself and whatever my needs are or whatever my sensitivities or whatever my extraordinary abilities be and it gets to be a collection of my human experience. And I think the other thing in terms of like what I would want, like the broader community to understand or what I would want my family to understand or parents of autistic people, family members of autistic people is to that it's so important to allow difference to be a wonder and allow yourself to be different within even your relationship to someone who knows themselves to be different and to be curious and to ask questions instead of presume because I could be having a really sensitive sensibility right now to a noise that's happening. And if there's an assumption of what that noise is that was not gonna help me but if there's a curiosity around what does that feel like in your body or could we identify what the sound is? It's such a radically different experience for me. And so I think for me like even like my face is all red I'm really flush I'm super nervous I wanna be here part of that is my excitement but part of it is having the attention on me of like how will I be perceived am I safe but also just like that's not an easy way for me to exist if the attention is directly on me like I've gotta find another way or I get to observe the experience. And so I think it's just really important that folks know and understand that there's no one way but more curiosity you can have less presumption around what people is actually experiencing it could be an opportunity for openness. I just really want to express how much I appreciate the vulnerability that all five of you should and your willingness to share really important aspects of your life narrative. Because I think what is just continues to just I have no words to describe this really but like all of the pain that comes from feeling broken and alone and defective and they are the only one who is so broken like I mean we watched five different people who coming from all different perspectives and experiences who had so much in common just the five of you and as you're talking in the chat everyone's like me too oh wow me too oh wow that's that resonates like just can you imagine what life could have been like if we all knew each other as little children we were laying down the initial story of our lives and who we are and what our value is in society. So it feels you know I though I'm about to say you know we have 15 minutes like it's not just 15 minutes it's like a lifetime of dialogue right so I would just I just wanna open the floor up for anyone who would like to share anything either with mouth words or in the chat. I will read in the chat many people sharing thanking you all your bravery and your stories brought me to tears there's so much that resonates with me from everyone's stories thank you for sharing your amazing thoughts and experiences. Mel I just wanted to say thank you so much for your amazing job I felt really touched by your the way in which you put us all together and when at the very end I was just thinking like oh yeah wouldn't it be amazing if we were all together and Sarah's like the idea of like oh outliers unite you know that we get to be able to share because even within the community everyone has a lot of different experiences but because it's allowed we get to learn more and then start weaving together as a community and so I appreciate everyone listening and I'm really grateful and honored to have been able to share some things that I've never shared before. So I look forward to having more access to that and to be able to share continue to share. Thank you Amy. Kelly saying something similar in the chat it's such a you know to have all been interviewed separately but all speaking together it's like weaving the fabric of the narrative and though of course there's every individual is going to have an individualized experience I think we heard some real threads of commonality but I think it's really powerful. Reading in the chat thank you for saying that diagnosis often results from autistic burnout and that happened to me is the diagnosis oh interesting that's interesting. Okay sorry I'm like commenting to myself while reading I'm like doing that thing where it's anyway brain anyway so the diagnosis experience was for Nietzsche or Lover for the diagnosis experience was so traumatic as well as the written report and it's taken me five years to recover myself and maybe I'm not back to normal my previously functional self. Yeah that's really interesting what I had meant to say in the chat and by the way you are not the only one whose diagnosis experience is traumatic that is a common story. So it's you know both is true. So the diagnosis experience when it's not done in neurodiversity affirming way is traumatic and the other thread of that is that reaching autistic burnout is often the impetus for diagnosis because you know and this we'll talk a lot about this next week at the autistic health brain club but the DSM-5 criteria are autistic stress behaviors. The more dysregulated you are the more likely you are to manifest stereotype and that's why when, because what autistic burnout is and we're gonna we really, really do need to do a burnout I mean a brain club on autistic burnout at some point I just think anyway we figure out how to do that well but then it comes up in every brain club every week but like anyway point is to say that what autistic burnout is is it's when your capacity is exceeded by the demands often for years to reach a state of physical and mental exhaustion where skills are lost. And so just like in like the early developmental period it's talked about like regressions that's autistic burnout. My child got her autism but I mean my child has always been autistic as we all were and we all have been but my child lost the ability to speak when after getting a minor upper respiratory infection when she was two she lost the ability to speak for six weeks and in that context got her diagnosis. I already knew she was autistic it was just that like this was burnout. And I think with adults who I think we heard several times in these interviews of like I couldn't leave the house I couldn't talk for, you know I couldn't do this thing. I delivered, you know I really specifically remember this day that I like I couldn't motor plan brushing my teeth. That's what this is and I would really love to get to a place where we don't have to reach profound levels of dysregulation before people come to understand their narrative and have the Zep experience of the colitis school. But that's in a world where the dominant narrative is deficit based. That's what this is. Ced says I'm gonna be processing and holding space for all who shared today in the week to come. Very powerful. Thank you for using spoons to be so vulnerable. Absolutely. I could not agree more. Nature Gilever says some professionals are trying to tell me I was depressed but it was Quora that cued me into that it was autistic burnout. So well said, right? So I mean, how many people have had the experience of they discovered their true selves because they see themselves mirrored like in an infographic or a forum or a YouTube video or like whatever it is of like how did the people not know? And like just all the people that get misdiagnosed and invalidated Kelly says in schools for a long time you need to be unsuccessful in order to receive support. Exactly. Yes. So Lizzie, thank you for sharing in the chat. So if you are registered for Brain Club for the month like you don't need to do anything extra. It's the same link. But we decided to create a separate listing for next weeks with the idea that like, so I'm gonna be updating the talk but it's a talk I gave last year and we're gonna go through specifically like how did the autism narrative get constructed? Like what's the history on that? What's the backstory? Turns out it's a story of corruption is what it is. And that's the narrative that is in the DSM. It looks for the current autism construction from DSM-5. It looks pretty similar to the 1943 narrative. So anyway, that's next week and then that's, but it's not all like, we'll also get into like, how do we do it differently? How do we move forward as opposed to like being stuck in the current state of affairs? Kim says, autistic burnout has been one of the most defining experiences in my life. Okay, so we've got a lot of interest in talking about autistic burnout. I think what we'll do in May, I think what we'll do is like, maybe we'll just think about like, fine points of the autistic experience and this being like a major one of them. Yeah, I think May, yes. Kelly says, I've never thought of regression as burnout, but whoa, it totally makes sense. Yeah, it aches to think of all the littles when they regress. Yeah, and including your son. See, he says, the motor planning piece is also not talked about much one in burnout or in general. Yeah. Kelly says, and burnout can manifest in subsidies disorder, aid and disorders, more specialty in teens. Yeah, I think that all of these, all of these, while not universal, like more often than not, these commonalities of like entirely predictable. Yeah, it's interesting. So yeah, if May is autistic burnout month, we recover from autism acceptance month. I love it. Yeah, and like, I think that we, in our medical practice, we meet so many people who presented autistic burnout. They of course don't know what that is, but that's the path to clarity is reaching such profound levels of pain. And in a world where, when we think about like, connection, the co-regulation experience coming together in community, like it's almost like it's pretty hard to emerge from autistic burnout without community. And without a culture of interdependence of like relying on other people, because I mean, part of autistic burnout is you have to figure out what's draining your spoons and eliminate whatever you can and shift the equation so that that balance of capacity and demand can become more net neutral. And then you, part of defining what that paradigm looks like, I think comes from being part of community with other people doing it too. Hell, yes, how do laws around neurodivergent healthcare change, there's so much there, right? So, how, sometimes we think about like, sometimes we think about like, so there's things that are represented as law that are not law, they're just like folklore and myth. So it's like really distinguishing like, do we really understand the law? For example, in the state of Vermont, there is no law around what types of professionals can make an autism diagnosis. It is represented as though that is the case, but that is not the case. There may be regulations around what type of professional making an autism diagnosis then entitles you to adult disability services, although having a diagnosis doesn't necessarily open that door for a person anyway. There may also be regulations around what types of professionals need to make an autism diagnosis in order for insurance to pay for applied behavioral analysis. In my practice, we don't send patients to applied behavioral analysis. And so that is irrelevant. So I think that, I'm just reading in the chat, that Nietzsche Lever says after a trauma resulting from my expression of ethics in a corrupt environment, I was diagnosed as a PTSD, which may have been correct, but now I wonder if that was my first experience with burnout, yeah, yeah. Kelly says, parents can keep a diagnosis from their kids and schools have to respect this. Yeah, and I think that the paradigm, the paradigm that this is something that should be hidden and that's the stigma. So I think this starts with, rather than think about this as laws and regulations, we work from the ground up of paradigm, the way that you see the world ultimately is going to dictate everything that comes next. So Kelly. I just have to, it was so much easier to say it than type it in response to schools keeping a child's diagnosis from them if the parents request it. When my son went to public school, I would give an autism talk every year to his classroom. And one year I gave the talk and the next day, one of his classmates, the little girl came up to me and she went, you know, when you were talking about Phineas, it felt like you were talking about me. So I went home and I talked to my parents and I have Asperger's. And I was just like, oh God, are these parents coming after me now? But I was so secretly like happy for her because that was one less person walking around being like, what is going on right now and how come I don't get it? And now she kind of gets it a little bit. So that's my little, I've ruined a parent's want but I made a kid know themselves a little bit better. Amen. What a beautiful, I've never heard that story before. That's, I love that story. You know, I think that, I forget who said it in the chat earlier is that it may have been Zeph around people feel, I've always known I'm different and then the world has a way of affirming that, right? And so that, I think that is really common. And so when you don't provide a child a lens for understanding themselves, you don't give them a narrative, they make one up. And that narrative is I'm broken, I'm defective, there's something wrong with me. Steve says people in general don't know how to respond productively to the information that someone's autistic. Yes, so, so, so true, right? I mean, it's, yes. And so there's the stereotypes that people are, you know, they have in their mind, there's the, you know, just, yes, there's so many, all of that. I think that, but back to the idea of holding diagnosis. I mean, those simply, you know, that wouldn't happen if there was no stigma about that label, label. Like this is just, it just is what it is. It's like, this is how I'm wired. And so that's where, and as Kelly says, I was diagnosed as a child but wasn't told until late 20s, right? Like just, I'm so sorry that that happened to you. And so I think going forward, it's about an, Lizzie, if you have it at, if you have it anywhere at the ready, otherwise I will look for it. The video we sent out in our newsletter today, I made a couple of years ago about how to talk with kids about neurodiversity. It's not that hard. It's like we all have different brains. Here are some things about brains and you just develop a shared vocabulary around it. And then when people get to know about things like brains, sensory processing, motor coordination, you know, brain sending messages from brain to hands, for example. You just, when we have certain patterns of, you know, things that come easy and things that are harder, sometimes we give those names. This pattern's called autism. Not a big deal. When I have that, oh, thanks Lizzie. You know, when I have conversations with my autistic patients, you know, five, six, seven years old, like it's like high five, like just, you know, nearly immediately after diagnosis. I mean, immediately after diagnosis, it's about like, let's have a conversation about how I can, how I can support a family for having this conversation. But like it's, it's, it's just, it's part of it. It's part of it. Like, thank goodness we have found a way to understand how your brain works. That's amazing. And that's not to say that things aren't really hard. Things can be hard. Things are hard. Things are really hard, like a lot. And one of the reasons they are so hard is because the environment makes them so hard. So there's that. But more on that next week. Thank you all so much for this really important conversation.