Autistic Culture News

How Nyck Stopped Forcing a Life That Didn’t Fit After a Late Autism Diagnosis

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:01:09 GMT

In this meeting of The Late Diagnosis Club, Dr Angela Kingdon welcomes Nyck Walsh, writer, therapist, and advocate, who shares their journey to identifying as Autistic and ADHD later in life.

Nyck reflects on growing up feeling fundamentally different — navigating school, relationships, and work without the language to understand why things felt harder than they seemed for others. Like many late-identified adults, they developed ways to cope, adapt, and push through, often at the expense of their own well-being.

It wasn’t until adulthood, through a combination of burnout, reflection, and exposure to neurodivergent experiences, that Nyck began to recognise themselves, leading to a deeper understanding of their needs, identity, and way of being.

This is a conversation about unlearning, self-acceptance, and choosing a different way forward.

🎧 Listen to this episode:

🪑 Attendees

Chair: Dr Angela Kingdon — Author, community-builder, and Autistic advocate
Guest: Nyck Walsh — Writer, therapist, and AuDHD advocate
You: The Listener!

🗒️ Meeting Agenda

Opening remarks from the Chair
Member introduction: Lifelong difference
Discussion: Masking and adaptation
Burnout and turning points
Late identification journey
Self-trust and unlearning
Identity and authenticity
Building a life that fits
Key learnings
Club announcements

🧾 Minutes from the Meeting

1️⃣ Opening Remarks

Angela introduces Nyck Walsh and reflects on the shared experience of reaching adulthood before having the language to understand oneself.

2️⃣ Member Introduction: Nyck’s Story

Nyck describes a lifelong sense of being different, not quite fitting into expected social, academic, or professional norms.

Without a framework for Autism or ADHD, they developed strategies to cope, often masking their natural responses and pushing themselves to meet external expectations.

Over time, this led to burnout and a growing awareness that something deeper needed to be understood.

Through reflection and exposure to neurodivergent experiences, Nyck began to recognise themselves, leading to a process of late identification and self-understanding.

3️⃣ Discussion Highlights

Lifelong difference: Feeling out of sync with others from an early age
Masking: Adapting behaviour to meet expectations
Internal pressure: Pushing through despite difficulty
Burnout: The cost of long-term masking
Late identification: Recognition through reflection and community
Self-trust: Learning to listen to internal needs
Unlearning: Letting go of harmful narratives
Identity shift: Moving toward authenticity
Environment fit: Designing life around needs
Coaching perspective: Supporting others through similar journeys

4️⃣ Key Learnings

You can feel different long before you understand why.
Masking can delay recognition but comes at a cost.
Burnout is often a turning point toward self-understanding.
Late identification can open the door to self-trust.
Unlearning is as important as learning.
Building a life that fits is a process, not a moment.

📌 Notice Board

Neurodivergent Somatics in Therapy: an anti-oppressive model for whole person care - Nyck’s book - For book orders in Europe and Asia
Nyck’s book - For book orders in the US
The discount code is WN357 and offers a 30% discount on both the print and ebook when ordered through our site.
nyckwalsh.com
Nyck Walsh Counselling and Training Centre on Facebook
Nyck Walsh on Instagram
ADHD 2.0 and VAST
Kinetic Cognitive Style (KCS) term for ADHD

📣 Club Announcements

🎧 The Late Diagnosis Club is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all major platforms.
💬 Join our online meetups and community at latediagnosis.club.
📌 Check the LDC Notice Board for Member Contributions
💜 There is a small charge — but no one is turned away for lack of funds.

💌 Want To Be Our Next Guest?

If you’ve been nodding along and thinking, “That could be my story,” we want to hear from you.

We’re always looking for late-diagnosed or self-identified neurodivergent adults who are ready to share their story on The Late Diagnosis Club.
Tell us a little about yourself and your diagnosis journey here:

💜 Whether you’ve just realised you’re Autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, or you’re still figuring it out — your story belongs here. We’ve saved you a seat.

Be Our Guest

💫 Why Your Support Matters

When you join Autistic Culture Plus or pitch a show to the Autistic Culture Podcast Network, you’re doing more than subscribing to a podcast —
You’re investing in Autistic-led media.

Included with Autistic Culture Plus

• Ad-free listening (sensory-friendly)
• Early access to every episode
• Exclusive archive of ~100 classic episodes

Every pound, dollar, or share helps:

🎙️ Fund neurodivergent creators — paying Autistic hosts, editors, and producers for their work
🌍 Amplify Autistic voices and stories that mainstream media too often overlooks
💡 Build an ecosystem of culture, not pathology — where being Autistic is celebrated, not “treated”
🤝 Support accessible, sensory-friendly storytelling made with our community in mind

For less than the price of a coffee, you help sustain a growing network that’s 100% by and for neurodivergent people — ensuring that Autistic stories, creativity, and brilliance reach the audiences they deserve.

Joining isn’t just a subscription.
It’s solidarity. Visibility. Community in action.

Join Autistic Culture +

💜 With Gratitude

A huge thank-you to our founding supporters of Autistic Culture Plus, who believed in this network before it even launched.

Our Executive Producers and Producers make this work possible — funding neurodivergent creators, amplifying Autistic voices, and helping build a media ecosystem rooted in pride, creativity, and community.

These members form the foundation of the Autistic Culture Podcast Network, and you’ll see their names credited at the end of our shows and on our website.

🎙️ Executive Producers
Amy Burns, Anamaria B Call, Andrew Banner, Anna Goodson, Ashley Apelzin, Audrea Volker, Ben Coulson, Brian Churcek, Cappy Hamper, Carley Biblin, Charlene Deva, Chloe Cross, Clay Duhigg, Clayton Oliver, Danny Dunn, Daria Brown, David Garrido, Emily Burgess, Eric Crane, Erik Stenerud, Fiona Baker, Grace Norman, Helen Shaddock, Jaimie Collins, Jason Killian, Jen Unruh, Jennifer Carpenter, Julia Tretter, Kathie Watson-Gray, Kenneth Knowles, Kira Cotter, Kristine Lang, Kyle Raney, Llew P Williams, Laura Alvarado, Laura De Vito, Laura Provonsha, Lily George, Nelly Darmi, Nigel Rogers, Rachel Miller, Tim Scott, Tyler Kunz, Victoria Steed, Yanina Wood.

🎧 Producers

AJ Knight, Bobby Simon, Da Kovac, Eleanor Collins, Emily Griffiths, Hannah Hughes, Jennifer Kemp, Jonas Fløde, Kate F, Katie N Benitez, Kendra Murphy, Lisa Dennys, Logan Wall, Louise Lomas, Melissa Nance, Nicola Owen, Rebecka Johansson, Sam Morris, Sarah Hannah Morris.

Does Autistic Trauma Make It Hard for You to Trust Yourself, Too?

Dr. Angela Kingdon — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:59:54 GMT

There are twelve days until the launch of the Autistic Culture Podcast Network.

I know this because I have checked the calendar four times this morning.

The graphics are done. The trailer is finished. The landing page works. The press release is written. There are nine new shows, with more to come later this summer and in the autumn. People keep emailing me with practical questions, the kind you only ask when a dream is really looking likely to happen.

What time should I post?

Can I use this headshot?

Do you have the final logo files?

I am trying to answer every email and stay positive. If we keep going, I know we will get there.

But for now I am in this in-between land. There is a part of me that thinks this could be a huge success and another part of me that’s terrified the whole thing is about to fall apart.

It’s so hard to keep going at a time like this. To stay hopeful after burnout and failures have taken dreams away in the past. Maybe it’s easier not to dream at all.

When you are late-diagnosed Autistic, you spend a long time learning that your certainty and everyone else’s certainty are not the same thing. You walk into a room thinking you understand the assignment and then discover you were reading from a different script entirely.

Eventually you stop trusting yourself. Or maybe I should just speak for myself. I know after thinking I was doing everything right, being so thoughtful and careful, planning so hard for so long, and then failing, or being rejected or ignored. I have stopped trusting myself.

Part of me wants to quit. But part of me is a World Builder, a Data Gatherer, and a Rhythmic Communicator. I can’t wait around for the validation of someone more famous than me to tell us what I am building is important. I can see it. I know my business partner Simon can see it. The creators on our network can see it. And I hope with time you will be able to see the vision too.

The 2026 network schedule is robust. Twenty-five podcasts will be live on the network over the course of the year. Podcasts about Film. Football. Menopause. Parenting. Black autistic identity. Books. Religion. Anger. Friendship. Things I care about and things I never would have thought to make.

I was halfway through writing a resignation letter in my head when another message from a creator showed up.

He’s been flirting with burnout and I keep worrying he might quit, but there he was, handsome as ever, smiling picture standing in front of a book shelf with my first book about Autistic Culture on it.

“Hey Angela! Miss connecting with you - things have been so nuts but I wanted to share this with you - one of the first things I’ve done with my space (after painting) was to get some of my go-to books on my shelf. 💚”

He wasn’t asking whether we were really doing this.

He was excited because he had prepped a space that will be perfect for recording one of our upcoming shows for the Autistic Culture Podcast Network.

I must have read that message ten times.

Then another one came in.

Another creator copied me on a message to another podcast host asking whether we could organize crossovers between shows after the launch.

Not if.

After.

Yet another creator put me on her email list, and she sent a notification. “I'm excited to announce that on 22 June 2026 the Autistic Culture Podcast Network will launch my show.” and then messaged me privately to say:

”I’m getting good feedback since sending my Podcast Launch email!”

This. Is. Happening.

I looked back at the schedule on my ACPN Launch Checklist Google doc and checked another box.

For months, Simon and I have been carrying this project the way you carry a secret. Carefully. Quietly. Slogging through each of the unknown steps to starting a podcast network.

And then I realized something.

We are doing it already. So many people are walking toward it with us.

We are not dragging people toward a dream.

Twelve days before the launch, my little victory is this:

We aren’t doing it alone.

You’re here, right?

The world still might not understand what we are building.

The launch could still go wrong.

Technology will probably misbehave.

Somebody will almost certainly meltdown.

I probably will.

But for the first time in my life, I have stopped asking whether I am allowed to imagine a different future.

I am just staying focused on living into it.

Would you please join us at 4pm London Time (11am ET) on the 22nd of June to celebrate our victory?

In our first Neurodivergent Narratives writing prompt for June, editor Genya invites us to use writing to go deeper into reflection. The writing prompt is below. Paid members will see it. If you don’t see it, either you are not a paid member, or you are logged in to the wrong account. If you are not a member, you will need to subscribe to have full access and to see the prompt below. If you would like a free subscription for June, just reply to this email, and we will get you a free trial month.

How Katharine Spent 40 Years in Therapy Before Discovering She Was Autistic

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 04:00:25 GMT

In this meeting of The Late Diagnosis Club, Dr Angela Kingdon welcomes Katharine Gates, a writer, artist, and long-time creative who identified as Autistic and ADHD after a lifetime of questioning herself.

Katharine shares how she spent decades feeling like the “odd one out” — academically gifted, outwardly successful, yet constantly struggling with everyday life, relationships, and a persistent sense that something didn’t quite fit.

After 40 years of therapy, misdiagnoses, and searching for answers, it was a period of autistic burnout that finally led her to recognise her neurodivergence and begin to reframe her life.

This is a conversation about being misunderstood for decades — and what changes when you finally understand yourself.

🎧 Listen to this episode:

🪑 Attendees

Chair: Dr Angela Kingdon — Author, community-builder, and Autistic advocate
Guest: Katharine Gates — writer, artist, and Autistic + ADHD creator
You: The Listener!

🗒️ Meeting Agenda

Opening remarks from the Chair
Member introduction: Gifted child, lifelong difference
Discussion: Masking, achievement, and burnout
Privilege and hidden accommodations
ADHD + Autism dual identification
Alexithymia and emotional processing
Special interests and bottom-up thinking
Family patterns and generational neurodivergence
Self-compassion and dropping shame
Key learnings
Club announcements

🧾 Minutes from the Meeting

1️⃣ Opening Remarks

Angela introduces Katharine Gates, whose story reflects a common Late Diagnosis Club experience — decades of feeling different, capable, and confused all at once.

2️⃣ Member Introduction: Katharine’s Story

Katharine describes herself as an “exceedingly odd child,” growing up academically gifted but struggling to translate that success into everyday life.

She became highly skilled at masking — orienting her life around achievement and external validation — while privately questioning why basic things felt so difficult.

Over time, this led to cycles of burnout, misdiagnosis, and self-blame, with labels such as depression, anxiety, substance use, and personality disorder used to explain her experiences.

It wasn’t until a major burnout in adulthood that Katharine encountered the concept of autistic burnout and began recognising herself in Autistic narratives.

3️⃣ Discussion Highlights

Gifted but struggling: Academic success masking real challenges
Hyper masking: Performing competence at the cost of burnout
Burnout trigger: Brain “stopping” rather than emotional collapse
Therapist dismissal: Being told she “just wanted to feel special”
ADHD alongside Autism: Dual identification later in the process
Alexithymia: Difficulty identifying and processing emotions
Masking as performance: Life experienced as “putting on a show”
Parenting moment: Struggles with empathy prompting deeper reflection
Generational patterns: Neurodivergence, trauma, and coping across family lines
Special interests: Deep dives into systems, patterns, and categorisation

4️⃣ Key Learnings

You can be highly capable and still struggle deeply.
Masking can delay recognition for decades.
Privilege can both hide support needs and meet them.
Burnout can be the turning point toward understanding.
Emotional processing differences are often overlooked.
Special interests can shape identity, career, and meaning.
Self-compassion can be one of the most powerful outcomes of a diagnosis.

📣 Club Announcements

💌 Want To Be Our Next Guest?

💜 Whether you’ve just realised you’re Autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, or you’re still figuring it out — your story belongs here. We’ve saved you a seat.

Be Our Guest

💫 Why Your Support Matters

Included with Autistic Culture Plus

• Ad-free listening (sensory-friendly)
• Early access to every episode
• Exclusive archive of ~100 classic episodes

Every pound, dollar, or share helps:

Joining isn’t just a subscription.
It’s solidarity. Visibility. Community in action.

Join Autistic Culture +

💜 With Gratitude

A huge thank-you to our founding supporters of Autistic Culture Plus, who believed in this network before it even launched.

These members form the foundation of the Autistic Culture Podcast Network, and you’ll see their names credited at the end of our shows and on our website.

🎧 Producers

It's June 1 and The Sound of Autistic Culture Is Almost Here. Get ready with us for our Next Chapter

Dr. Angela Kingdon — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 04:00:56 GMT

This month we are celebrating a major milestone: the launch of the Autistic Culture Podcast Network. While our regular Late Diagnosis Club meetings pause for the summer, we are gathering around a new set of voices and stories created by Autistic hosts across our community. Join us on June 22 for the premiere and be there as the network begins.

The Sound of Autistic Culture is Here

On June 22nd, we will officially launch the Autistic Culture Podcast Network, the first global podcast network built by Autistic creators to document and celebrate the full breadth of Autistic life through audio.

We hope you’ll help us spread the word and join us for launch week, because this project arrives at an important moment in the history of Autistic civil rights.

Share the Launch Link

For decades, autism has largely been discussed through medical, educational, and clinical institutions. That work has shaped diagnosis, services, and public awareness. It has also meant that much of the public conversation about autistic people has been filtered through systems focused on need, intervention, behavior, and support.

Those conversations matter. They are part of our lives.

They are not the whole story.

Civil rights movements grow stronger when communities begin telling fuller stories about themselves, in their own voices, across the ordinary and extraordinary parts of life. That shift matters because culture shapes public imagination. Media shapes belonging. The stories a society tells about a group influence how that group is understood by institutions, by neighbors, and often by members of the community themselves.

Autistic people have always had rich and varied lives. We build families. We create art. We care deeply about sport, science, religion, politics, gaming, nature, books, disability justice, friendship, and a thousand niche passions. We experience joy and grief. We navigate illness and recovery. We age. We make meaning. We contribute to culture while also building cultures of our own.

Yet there are still very few places where the full dimension of Autistic life is visible all at once.

That is why ACPN matters.

The Autistic Culture Podcast Network brings together more than 25 creator-led podcasts from across the UK, Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand, covering hobbies and interests, health and wellness, identity and advocacy, and the ordinary rhythms of everyday life.

Taken together, these shows offer something powerful: a wider and more internally consistent public record of who Autistic people are, what we care about, what we create, and how we live.

That matters culturally.

It matters politically.

And it matters personally.

Because when a community is represented only through challenge, the hardest parts of that experience can begin to stand in for the whole. A broader cultural record creates more room for recognition, dignity, belonging, and connection. It helps Autistic people see one another more clearly. It helps families, clinicians, educators, and institutions build deeper cultural literacy. It expands the public imagination around what Autistic life looks and sounds like.

This is one small part of a much larger movement toward Autistic cultural self-definition.

And we would love for you to be part of it.

Please join us on June 22 as we launch the Autistic Culture Podcast Network, help us share it with your communities, and help us welcome more people into this growing conversation.

The sound of Autistic culture is here.

And we’re just getting started.

You can apply to have your own show on the network too. We are especially looking for:

Radio Drama
A Minecraft themed show
A Dungeons and Dragons show
A Taylor Swift Show
Nancy Drew/ Murder She Wrote/ Sherlock Holmes themed show
True Crime review show - what’s the best True Crime content?
An Engineering Show - Tell us how things work!
Rollercoaster Reviews

But we want to hear what is on your mind too. Right now we are not looking for shows about autism, we are looking for shows BY Autistic people created in an Autistic way!

Tell Us Your Idea

Each month we have content exclusively for our paying supporters including Book Club sessions, workshops, member meetups, and our Virtual Writing circle. More exclusive content for paying supports follows. If you are not already a supporting member, just click “upgrade” in the top right-hand corner on the AutisticCulture.substack.com page or get a free 7 day trial here. If you enjoy your paid trial and want to continue but don’t have the funds, just ask for a free pass, no one is ever turned away who wants to join and cannot afford it.

Get a 7 Day Free Trial

If you are already a member, keep reading for the members’ only writing prompts for the month.

How Dale Missed His Autism Diagnosis Despite Working in Special Education

Fri, 29 May 2026 04:01:09 GMT

In this meeting of The Late Diagnosis Club, Dr Angela Kingdon welcomes Dale Pickles — host of Sendcast and Managing Director of B Squared — for a wide-ranging conversation on late diagnosis, education systems, and what it really means to support neurodivergent people.

Dale shares how he grew up surrounded by special education — yet still missed his own Autism and ADHD. It wasn’t until 2023, prompted by supporting his daughter through her diagnosis journey, that everything finally clicked.

This is a conversation about understanding yourself, supporting the next generation, and rethinking systems that weren’t built for neurodivergent minds.

🎧 Listen to this episode:

🪑 Attendees

Chair: Dr Angela Kingdon — Author, community-builder, and Autistic advocate
Guest: Dale Pickles — SEND specialist, podcast host, and Managing Director of B Squared
You: The Listener!

🗒️ Meeting Agenda

Opening remarks from the Chair
Member introduction: Family neurodivergence and missed recognition
Learning social rules and masking
Late diagnosis through parenting
Navigating the UK diagnosis system
Education system challenges and executive function in schools
SEND reform and needs-led support
AI and neurodivergent support tools
Key learnings
Club announcements

🧾 Minutes from the Meeting

1️⃣ Opening Remarks

Angela introduces Dale Pickles and reflects on how someone can grow up immersed in special education and still miss their own neurodivergence.

2️⃣ Member Introduction: Dale’s Story

Dale grew up in a family deeply connected to special education, yet his own Autism and ADHD were not identified.

Although he recognised he was different, he didn’t feel he met diagnostic criteria. Instead, he developed ways to adapt, learning social rules, structuring his environment, and building a life that worked for him.

His path to diagnosis came later, prompted by supporting his daughter through her own challenges and recognition.

3️⃣ Discussion Highlights

Missed in plain sight: Growing up around SEND without recognising himself
Family neurodivergence: Traits present across generations
Long-term relationships: Building connections through learned skills
Diagnosis trigger: Supporting his daughter through school struggles
Self-accommodation: Designing life to reduce friction
Labels vs reality: Diagnosis doesn’t define ability
Fail-first system: Support often comes only after crisis
SEND reform: Moving toward needs-led support
Early intervention: Preventing long-term harm
Executive function gap: A missing focus in schools
AI support: Tools for communication, reflection, and preparation
Environmental impact: Needs to change depending on context

4️⃣ Key Learnings

You can build a life that works without knowing why it works.
Late diagnosis often comes through supporting others.
Self-accommodation is a powerful but often invisible skill.
Diagnosis is personal and not always necessary for everyone.
Education systems often require failure before support.
Early support can prevent long-term harm and trauma.
Executive function is a key area often overlooked in schools.

📌 Notice Board

Dale’s Podcast - https://thesendcast.com/sendcast-episodes/
Dale’s LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/dalepickles
Brain in Hand App

📣 Club Announcements

💌 Want To Be Our Next Guest?

💜 Whether you’ve just realised you’re Autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, or you’re still figuring it out — your story belongs here. We’ve saved you a seat.

Be Our Guest

💫 Why Your Support Matters

Included with Autistic Culture Plus

• Ad-free listening (sensory-friendly)
• Early access to every episode
• Exclusive archive of ~100 classic episodes

Every pound, dollar, or share helps:

Joining isn’t just a subscription.
It’s solidarity. Visibility. Community in action.

Join Autistic Culture +

💜 With Gratitude

A huge thank-you to our founding supporters of Autistic Culture Plus, who believed in this network before it even launched.

These members form the foundation of the Autistic Culture Podcast Network, and you’ll see their names credited at the end of our shows and on our website.

🎧 Producers

Late Diagnosis Club Meeting - 27 May 2026

Dr. Angela Kingdon — Thu, 28 May 2026 12:29:26 GMT

Quick Recap

This was the final meeting of the Late Diagnosis Club for May 2024, with Dr. Angela welcoming members and announcing the summer hiatus until after Labor Day. Dr. Angela shared major update…

[2026] Neurodivergent Narratives - Writing Prompt #22

Dr. Angela Kingdon — Thu, 28 May 2026 04:02:50 GMT

One of the most underused skills in writing is the permission to go long. Most of us, when we sit down to write about something we love or something we have been turning over in our minds, instinctively compress. We write a paragraph and call it done. We summarize the thing we have been thinking about for weeks into three sentences. We trim the writing to a length we imagine someone else would tolerate, even when no one else is going to read it. This is worth looking at honestly. The compression habit is trained, not natural. Years of being told that our enthusiasms were too detailed, our explanations too long, our interests too specific, taught us to make ourselves smaller before anyone could ask us to. On the page, this habit is working against us. The pieces of writing that move readers, and that move the writer most of all, are almost always the ones where the writer let themselves go further than felt socially acceptable.

A 2025 paper by Aiston, Koteyko, and van Driel in Applied Linguistics argues that Autistic communication has been pathologized in ways that systematically misread our depth, detail, and intensity as problems to be managed rather than as legitimate communicative strengths. The authors trace decades of research that have treated our way of communicating as a deficit, when in fact our communication often carries more information, more accuracy, and more authentic connection than the more compressed neurotypical version. They make the case for what they call neurodiversity-affirmative research, meaning research that stops treating Autistic communication as a less polished version of the standard and starts treating it as its own valid form. For those of us who have spent years editing ourselves down for audiences who were not going to receive us well anyway, the page is a different kind of space. It does not require the edit. It does not flinch at length. It does not get bored. So this week, if a piece of writing wants to keep going, let it. The instinct to wrap up early is usually trained, not earned. The page can hold more than we have been told it can.

In our final Neurodivergent Narratives writing prompt for May, editor Lindsee invites us to take the long, full, unapologetic look at one specific thing in our lives:

The writing prompt is below. Paid members will see it. If you don’t see it, either you are not a paid member, or you are logged in to the wrong account. If you are not a member, you will need to subscribe to have full access and to see the prompt below. If you would like a free subscription for April, just reply to this email, and we will get you a free trial month.

🛎️ Zoom Link for Tomorrow's Live Late Diagnosis Club Meeting 🛎️

Dr. Angela Kingdon — Tue, 26 May 2026 04:58:47 GMT

Tomorrow, Wednesday May 27th, at 8am PT, 11am ET, 4pm UK, and 5pm Europe, we will be getting together on Zoom.

Tomorrow’s meeting will be a Late Diagnosis Club Member Infodump session!

There is something uniquely connective about hearing a neurodivergent person speak in depth about whatever currently has their full attention. Member Infodumps are where the Late Diagnosis Club gets to do that on purpose. Each member who wants to present takes three to five minutes to walk the group through what they are working on and why it matters to them. You can use slides, share your screen, hold up an object, read from notes, or just talk through your thinking. Your topic might be a long-standing special interest or something that lit you up last week. A hobby. A creative project. A game. A historical period. A fandom theory. A craft technique. A scientific deep dive. A spreadsheet you built simply because it brought you satisfaction. If it currently has your attention, it belongs here.

What makes these sessions different from the rest of the internet is the listening. Everyone in the room knows what it feels like to be told they are too much, too detailed, too into one thing. Nobody is going to do that here. The depth is the point. The detail is the point. The genuine, unmasked enthusiasm is the point. If you have ever had a piece of knowledge or a project you wanted to share with people who would actually receive it, this is the room.

If you would like to present, start gathering your notes. If you would rather attend and listen, you are equally welcome. Both ways of showing up make the session work.

We’re saving you a seat.

The link to join the Zoom Meeting is below. Paid members will see it. If you aren’t don’t see it, either you are not a paid member, or you are logged in to the wrong account. If you are not a member, you will need to subscribe to have full access and to see the link below. If you would like a free subscription for April, just reply to this email, and we will get you a free trial month.

Upgrade now for full access and to join us for our live weekly community connection calls.

Upgrade to Paid

Where Are My Flowers?

Dr. Angela Kingdon — Sat, 23 May 2026 15:16:38 GMT

I once spent three hours helping someone understand why their business model was structurally unsound. I drew it out, traced the logic, showed them where the load-bearing wall was and why removing it would eventually bring the whole thing down, and shared precisely what I would do in their position. I was thoughtful, thorough, careful, meticulous, and honest. I was, I genuinely believed, giving them a gift.

I thought they might send flowers. Instead, they never spoke to me again.

I have a version of that story for dozens of close relationships in my life — not just professionally, but personally as well. I do my thing and go intellectually deep, and later learn that I am seen as defensive, argumentative, or difficult, whereas I had imagined myself as communicative, flexible, and thoughtful. It’s so weird to be so unseen and unknown and turned by so many into a villain unfamiliar to me. It’s so destabilizing to be told you are someone you know you are not. Or do you know it for sure? Does everyone else know who you are better than you do?

For most of my life, I understood this as evidence that something was wrong with me. I was too much. Too intense. Too unrelenting. I had been told this so many times, by so many people, in so many different registers, that I had essentially absorbed it as fact, the way you absorb the fact that the sky is blue. In my head, I just saw myself as someone who drew the short straw in the personality lottery.

It took getting an Autistic diagnosis and then a decade of actual work to understand that I wasn’t broken, but rather I was operating in a completely different relational language, an Autistic one.

What I thought I was doing

When I go deep with someone, when I follow a thread to its end, when I push on an assumption and then push on the assumption underneath that assumption, I am not attacking them. I am not competing. I am not performing superiority or trying to win.

I am telling them they matter.

For me, intellectual intensity is intimacy. It is the highest form of care I know how to offer. When I engage rigorously with your idea, I am saying: I take you seriously. I trust you with complexity. I think you can handle the truth, and I respect you enough to offer it. When I bring my full attention to a problem you have, I bring my whole self.

As I’m typing this, I am thinking about the first time I heard the term sapiosexual and instantly knew that was who I was. A sapiosexual is someone who experiences sexual or romantic attraction primarily based on a person’s intelligence rather than their physical appearance. I had a philosophy professor at the time who was not conventionally attractive and 30+ years older than me, but I could not stop thinking about him. Around the same time, I read a magazine interview of Pam Anderson, then a recent Bay Watch alum, talking eruditely about her love of Shakespeare, and it gave me the same feeling as the philosophy professor.

Once, when my husband and I were first dating, I asked him to read a book I loved, and he said, “I will read it, but I have to tell you this isn’t the type of book I normally like and if I read it and I don’t like it, I will tell you. Do you still want me to read it?”

I said no, but that logic was the beginning of my falling in love with him. Recursive thinking (meaning thinking that repeatedly turns back on itself and examines its own structure, assumptions, or outputs) is my kink.

I appreciate it when people interrupt me to inspect the assumptions underneath my ideas. It tells me they are interested and that they care. In grad school, I was taught to reason by definitions and edge cases. Didn’t everyone else learn that, too? How else do you do it? I feel understood and seen when my ideas are probed and when they listen to pressure test me. I feel gaslit or blown off if people hedge their statements or don’t deeply question what I share. It makes me feel distant and not close. What’s the point of talking to someone who is indirect and doesn’t push against my assumptions?

What they thought was happening

While recursive thinking and this meta-analysis might be my thing, it is very much not a standard communication style. Especially for neuronomative conversation my approach can be seen as aggressive, not loving.

Most human conversation is not optimized for philosophical precision. It is optimized for status negotiation. The goal isn’t to get to the bottom of things; instead, it’s to keep interaction stable, predictable, and emotionally manageable. The exact approach that feels so hollow for me.

I insist on precision. My goal is to make hidden contradictions visible. When I interrogate foundational assumptions directly, especially in real time, several things can happen. I am not merely discussing a topic; I am examining the framework through which the conversation itself is functioning. My style reduces ambiguity faster than many people are comfortable with. Many people find this quite destabilizing. Some people experience that as intellectually exciting. Others experience it as socially threatening.

This is where they start to see me as manipulative or arrogant, rather than loving and generous. I have been told that talking to me is exhausting, overwhelming, exposing, and impossible to navigate safely.

Bottom-up processing, a central feature of Autistic cognition, means we build understanding from data. Details first, synthesis later. I am not asking questions or pressing points to win. I am asking the question behind they question to get the foundation before we can build the structure. I am not being aggressive when I challenge your premise, but because to my mind it’s the most useful, loving, and kind thing I give you.

But to someone who processes top-down, who starts with the social context and then fills in the content, this can feel like being taken apart. The rigor that feels like love from the inside lands as interrogation from the outside. The data hunger that is, for us, a form of care, can read as relentlessness. The follow-through that means “I’m still here, I’m still with you, I haven’t given up on this” can feel like pressure.

And so they say: fine, you win.

Which is the most heartbreaking sentence, because there was never supposed to be a winner. It was supposed to be jazz. It was supposed to be two people riffing, building, following the implications, seeing how far the idea could go. The conversation was not a courtroom. It was an invitation.

What is actually happening

The problem is not that either of us is wrong about what conversation is for. The problem is that we never compared notes on the question, because most people do not know they have an answer to it.

When I enter a conversation, I am processing structurally. I am tracking the architecture of the argument, testing whether the premises hold, mapping where the logic leads. I am doing this in real time, automatically, the same way other people are automatically tracking tone and facial expression and whether the emotional temperature in the room is rising or falling. I am not ignoring those things to be difficult. My processing runs on a different substrate, and it runs fast, and it is doing its work whether I intend it to or not.

The person across from me is usually doing something else entirely. They are processing emotionally and socially while they talk. They are bonding, co-regulating, maintaining the coherence of their own identity within the interaction, monitoring the social equilibrium of the room. Conversation for them is not primarily a truth-seeking exercise. It is a relational one, and the health of the relationship is the thing being built or damaged in real time, not the argument.

Neither of us is wrong. We are just using the same word, conversation, to describe two different activities that happen to require the same furniture.

What I experience as inquiry, they experience as interrogation. What I experience as conceptual excavation, they experience as someone digging up the foundations of a house they are currently living in. What I experience as truth-testing, they experience as an implicit challenge to the competence and coherence of their thinking. The intensity that feels to me like full presence and engagement feels to them like a sustained pressure that has no obvious off switch and no clear social purpose, because social purposes are exactly what my style is not optimizing for.

The Autistic cultural term for what I am doing is Bottom-Up Processing meeting Justice-Seeking in real-time conversation. The neurotypical term for what I am doing, when they are being generous, is exhausting. When they are being less generous, the terms are manipulative, aggressive, and impossible. What is actually happening is a collision between two entirely coherent but mutually unintelligible conversational operating systems, neither of which came with a manual, and only one of which gets treated as the default.

Somehow, I’m Still Waiting for Those Flowers

Somehow, after understanding all of that, after the diagnosis and the years of learning and the vocabulary and the frameworks and the relief of finally having words for what had always felt both intimate and impossible, I am still standing in the same old emotional terrain, surprised every time this cycle repeats itself, and saddened every time I realize that understanding the mechanism has not spared me from the grief.

This cycle never seems to exhaust itself.

There is always a moment, sometimes brief and sometimes lasting months or years, when I feel the unmistakable spark of recognition and think, this time is different, this person sees me clearly, this person can keep pace with me, this person understands that my intensity is not conflict but closeness, and for a while I let myself believe that I have finally found what I have been looking for.

I feel connected. I feel seen. I feel intellectually alive in the company of another person. And then something shifts.

They begin to pull back.

The warmth cools.

The responses shorten.

They tell me, gently or bluntly or sometimes not at all, that being with me is too intense, too much, too exhausting, too difficult to navigate, and often they cannot or will not explain further because they know from experience that if they try to explain, I will ask questions, and then ask questions about the questions, and then try to understand it more deeply, and to them that itself becomes the proof.

And then they disappear.

Poof.

Out of my life.

Somehow, after all of it, after the diagnosis and the years of learning and the vocabulary and the frameworks and the relief of finally having words for what had always felt both intimate and impossible, I am still standing in the same emotional terrain, still surprised when the cycle repeats, still saddened by the discovery that understanding the mechanism has not spared me from the grief of living inside it.

After enough repetitions, I would be arrogant not to ask whether the common denominator is me, and of course it is, and I know that, and I am not trying to escape it. What remains genuinely difficult is that I still cannot fully see what they see.

I can explain bottom-up processing, justice sensitivity, and competing conversational frameworks with enough precision to make the entire system legible, and still, this is the only way I can think of to show I care. I can’t CARE and not do it. It’s just the way I process information. The fact that it feels like manipulation rather than generosity fills me with so much self-hate it can be hard to keep going.

I’m sure you can imagine that if enough people over enough years describe you as exhausting and difficult and too much, you eventually have to sit with the possibility that your private understanding of your own intentions and the impact you are actually having do not line up.

I know I am the one expected to adapt, to slow down and soften, to offer less, to leave more unsaid, and to become easier to be around. I understand the social math behind the conclusion that I am in the wrong. What I do not know, even after all these years, is how to become someone fundamentally different from the person I actually am. How I process information isn’t a habit I can swap. It’s the way I orient, the way I love, the way I know I am fully present with another person.

And so I am still here, still trying to hold compassion for the people who experienced my powerful verbal processing as overwhelming and compassion for myself in the same breath. I am still hoping that somewhere out there are people who hear about my particular language of intensity and recognize it immediately for the gift I know it is. Maybe someday someone will stay in the conversation long enough to answer in the same key.

How Jason Built a Life That Worked for Him After His Late Autism Diagnosis

Fri, 22 May 2026 04:01:04 GMT

In this meeting of The Late Diagnosis Club, Dr Angela Kingdon welcomes Jason Killian, an engineer, hiking instructor, and longtime member of the club, who shares his journey to understanding himself as Autistic in his 40s.

Growing up in a neurodivergent household, Jason was unknowingly accommodated in early childhood. Despite strong academic performance, Jason struggled with social integration, bullying, and later workplace dynamics, experiences that only made sense years later through the lens of Autism.

This is a conversation about understanding your needs, building a life that fits, and what changes when you finally have the right framework.

🎧 Listen to this episode:

🪑 Attendees

Chair: Dr Angela Kingdon — Author, community-builder, and Autistic advocate
Guest: Jason Killian — Engineer, hiking instructor, and Autistic advocate
You: The Listener!

🗒️ Meeting Agenda

Opening remarks from the Chair
Member introduction: Early environment and hidden accommodations
Discussion: School overwhelm and social expectations
IEPs, missed diagnoses, and academic masking
Workplace challenges and burnout
Late identification and diagnosis journey
Self-accommodation and relationships
Hiking, regulation, and sensory experience
Key learnings
Club announcements

🧾 Minutes from the Meeting

1️⃣ Opening Remarks

Angela introduces Jason Killian, a longtime LDC member whose story explores what it means to grow up supported, but not understood, and to find clarity later in life.

2️⃣ Member Introduction: Jason’s Story

Jason grew up in a neurodivergent family where his needs were naturally accommodated — quiet spaces, independence, and room to explore interests.

But once he entered school, sensory overwhelm, social expectations, and group environments became challenging. Without a framework for Autism, these struggles were interpreted as social difficulties rather than unmet needs.

Although he performed well academically, Jason experienced bullying, isolation, and later workplace challenges, particularly around communication, expectations, and social norms.

It wasn’t until adulthood — after years of reflection, therapy, and recognising patterns — that Jason identified as Autistic and sought a formal diagnosis.

3️⃣ Discussion Highlights

Neurodivergent household: Early needs met without formal recognition
School shock: Sensory overwhelm and social confusion in group settings
IEP limitations: Focus on social skills, not sensory or learning needs
Bullying experience: Social differences targeted in adolescence and work
College turning point: Finding acceptance in the queer community
Pandemic reflection: Patterns recognised through shared experiences online
Relationship clarity: Shared neurodivergence improves understanding
Workplace shift: Smaller company enabling better fit and autonomy
Hiking regulation: Nature as a consistent nervous system support
Sensory joy: Smell, sound, and visual richness in outdoor environments

4️⃣ Key Learnings

Support without understanding can still leave gaps.
Academic success does not mean needs are being met.
Late identification often comes through pattern recognition over time.
Self-accommodation is a critical skill for wellbeing.
Relationships can improve with shared understanding and language.
Environment plays a major role in regulation and success.
Special interests can become both careers and lifelines.

📣 Club Announcements

💌 Want To Be Our Next Guest?

💜 Whether you’ve just realised you’re Autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, or you’re still figuring it out — your story belongs here. We’ve saved you a seat.

Be Our Guest

💫 Why Your Support Matters

Included with Autistic Culture Plus

• Ad-free listening (sensory-friendly)
• Early access to every episode
• Exclusive archive of ~100 classic episodes

Every pound, dollar, or share helps:

Joining isn’t just a subscription.
It’s solidarity. Visibility. Community in action.

Join Autistic Culture +

💜 With Gratitude

A huge thank-you to our founding supporters of Autistic Culture Plus, who believed in this network before it even launched.

These members form the foundation of the Autistic Culture Podcast Network, and you’ll see their names credited at the end of our shows and on our website.

🎧 Producers

Late Diagnosis Club Meeting - 20 May 2026

Dr. Angela Kingdon — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:27:18 GMT

Quick recap

The Late Diagnosis Club held a Workshop Wednesday focused on coercive control and red flags in relationships, featuring a discussion with Sarma about her experiences with manipulation and …

[2026] Neurodivergent Narratives - Writing Prompt #21

Dr. Angela Kingdon — Thu, 21 May 2026 03:49:48 GMT

One small change to a piece of writing tends to do more work than almost anything else. It is the choice of who, or what, we are writing to. Most of us default to writing about something. The trip. The friend. The childhood. The diagnosis. Writing about a topic is the most familiar way to do it, but it is rarely the most useful. The page changes when we write to something instead. To a younger version of ourselves. To a place we miss. To a person we never got to say something to. To a feeling we want to look at more closely. The act of writing directly to something shifts what comes out of us. The subject becomes a recipient, we become someone with something to say, and the words that arrive tend to be much closer to what we actually feel than what we would say in a paragraph describing the same subject from a distance.

A 2003 study by Pennebaker, Mehl, and Neiderhoffer in the Annual Review of Psychology looked at thousands of pieces of expressive writing and found that pieces written in the second person, addressed to a specific recipient, produced deeper cognitive and emotional results than pieces written in detached third person. The act of writing to something appears to engage memory and self-reflection in ways that descriptive writing does not. For late-diagnosed adults whose interior lives often spent years going unaddressed by anyone, including ourselves, this small change can feel surprisingly emotional even when the subject seems small or unimportant. So this week, if you find yourself drawn to address something directly rather than describe it from a distance, follow that pull. The form is doing real work in the background.

This week, Lindsee invites us to put down the distance and write directly to something that matters more than we usually let on.

Below is Lindsee’s third prompt:

The writing prompt is below. Paid members will see it. If you don’t see it, either you are not a paid member, or you are logged in to the wrong account. If you are not a member, you will need to subscribe to have full access and to see the prompt below. If you would like a free subscription for April, just reply to this email, and we will get you a free trial month.

🛎️ Zoom Link for Tomorrow's Live Late Diagnosis Club Red Flag Workshop 🛎️

Dr. Angela Kingdon — Tue, 19 May 2026 04:58:35 GMT

Tomorrow (Wednesday, May 20th) at 8am PT, 11am ET, 4pm UK, and 5pm Europe, we will be getting together on Zoom for our monthly workshop.

Our May workshop is tomorrow at 11am ET. The title is An Autistic Guide to Red Flags: How Cults, Coercive Relationships, and Wellness Grifts All Use the Same Playbook.

A few months ago, I interviewed Sarma Melngailis. You may know her as the founder of Pure Food and Wine, the once-iconic raw vegan restaurant in New York, or as the subject of the Netflix documentary Bad Vegan. What you may not know, if you didn’t listen to the episode, is that Sarma is Autistic. She received her diagnosis in adulthood, and she has been speaking publicly about how her late-identified Autism is part of how she ended up where she ended up.

What surprised me about our conversation was how much of her story I recognized. Our situations looked nothing alike on the surface. Hers played out in headlines, mine did not. But we were both sucked in by the same pattern. Cults, coercive relationships, and wellness grifts all use the same recruitment and control techniques and late-diagnosed Autistic adults are particularly vulnerable to all of them. Love bombing in the early stages. Isolation from existing relationships. The reframing of doubt as disloyalty. Insider language that makes outside criticism feel ignorant. Financial entanglement that makes leaving costly.

That is why tomorrow’s workshop exists.

The workshop is designed to help you spot the red flags and understand why they slip past Autistic perception specifically. You will leave with a vocabulary you can apply immediately to your own life and a set of practical questions to ask when something feels off.

This meeting is for PAID members of the Autistic Culture Substack, but we never turn anyone away. If a paid subscription is not in the budget, just reply to this email.

UPGRADE TO PAID: AutisticCulture.substack.com/subscribe

REQUEST A FREE TRIAL: Email admin@autisticculture.co.uk

How Danielle Reframed Autism Through a Black Feminist Lens After Her Late Diagnosis

Fri, 15 May 2026 04:00:52 GMT

In this meeting of The Late Diagnosis Club, Dr Angela Kingdon welcomes Danielle Procope Bell, PhD, an Autistic Black feminist scholar and Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Danielle shares how she knew from early childhood that she was different, finding other children chaotic, preferring books and structure, and feeling an invisible glass wall between herself and others.

Like many late-identified adults, Danielle’s recognition journey deepened after her son’s Autism diagnosis, when family patterns suddenly came into focus and helped her understand herself in a new way.

This is a conversation about identity, lineage, belonging, and what becomes possible when you finally see yourself clearly.

🎧 Listen to this episode:

🪑 Attendees

Chair: Dr Angela Kingdon — Author, community-builder, and Autistic advocate
Guest: Danielle Procope Bell, PhD. — Scholar, professor, and Black feminist thinker
You: The Listener!

🗒️ Meeting Agenda

Opening remarks from the Chair
Member introduction: Early difference, late recognition
Discussion: Hyperlexia, gifted programs, and childhood belonging
Family neurodivergence and being accepted at home
Son’s diagnosis and family pattern recognition
Race, gender, and what gets missed in Autism conversations
Autigendering and Black feminist theory
Key learnings
Club announcements

🧾 Minutes from the Meeting

1️⃣ Opening Remarks

Angela introduces Danielle Procope Bell, PhD, whose work sits at the intersection of Autism, Black feminism, gender, and identity.

2️⃣ Member Introduction: Danielle’s Story

Danielle recognised from kindergarten that she related differently to the world. While other children felt unpredictable and chaotic, she preferred reading, routine, and solitary play.

Her traits were interpreted as shyness and giftedness rather than Autism. She was moved into a gifted program, but the transition also brought racial and class isolation.

Later, after her son was diagnosed as Autistic, Danielle began to recognise familiar patterns in herself, her father, and wider family members — leading to her own formal diagnosis.

3️⃣ Discussion Highlights

Kindergarten awareness: Knowing early that other children felt chaotic
Hyperlexia signs: Reading from age three and a deep love of books
Son’s diagnosis: Recognition through seeing herself reflected in him
Representation gap: Autism narratives dominated by white male stereotypes
Traits misread: Black Autistic traits interpreted as aggression or defiance
ODD pipeline: Black children funnelled into behavioural labels instead of support
Medical privilege: Access to quality adult assessment shaped outcomes
Black feminism as home: Intellectual spaces that affirmed difference before diagnosis

4️⃣ Key Learnings

Many Autistic people know they are different long before they know why.
Diagnosis journeys are shaped by race, gender, and class.
Traits are often interpreted differently depending on who displays them.
Representation changes who gets recognised and supported.
Identity can be built through community as much as through medicine.

📌 Notice Board

📣 Club Announcements

💌 Want To Be Our Next Guest?

💜 Whether you’ve just realised you’re Autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, or you’re still figuring it out — your story belongs here. We’ve saved you a seat.

Be Our Guest

💫 Why Your Support Matters

Included with Autistic Culture Plus

• Ad-free listening (sensory-friendly)
• Early access to every episode
• Exclusive archive of ~100 classic episodes

Every pound, dollar, or share helps:

Joining isn’t just a subscription.
It’s solidarity. Visibility. Community in action.

Join Autistic Culture +

💜 With Gratitude

A huge thank-you to our founding supporters of Autistic Culture Plus, who believed in this network before it even launched.

These members form the foundation of the Autistic Culture Podcast Network, and you’ll see their names credited at the end of our shows and on our website.

🎧 Producers

Late Diagnosis Club Meeting - 13 May 2026

Dr. Angela Kingdon — Thu, 14 May 2026 10:37:34 GMT

Quick Recap

The Late Diagnosis Club met to discuss the book "Cultish" by Amanda Montell and share personal experiences with cult-like groups.
Dr. Angela led a discussion about cult characteristics, in…

[2026] Neurodivergent Narratives - Writing Prompt #20

Dr. Angela Kingdon — Thu, 14 May 2026 03:45:21 GMT

One of the hardest skills to learn in writing is not shrinking. There is a real therapeutic benefit to letting our feelings show up at full size on the page, and it can be cathartic in a way few other things are, but when we have spent a lifetime shrinking to fit other people’s ideas of who we should be, the shrinking habit is hard to switch off. Most of us, by adulthood, have years of practice in scaling our feelings down to a level the room can absorb. The exhaustion becomes “I am a little tired.” The grief becomes “it has been a hard week.” The anger becomes a careful sigh. This is a real social skill, and it has kept us safe in plenty of rooms. It does not serve us on the page. The page is not a person. It does not have feelings about our tone. It will not retreat or get defensive or punish us for being too much.

A 2006 paper by Lyubomirsky, Sousa, and Dickerhoof in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology looked at what happened when people wrote about negative experiences with different levels of emotional honesty. The participants who wrote with full emotional engagement, including feelings they had previously kept to themselves, showed significantly greater improvements in well-being four weeks later than those who wrote in a more careful, distanced style. The benefit was strongest when the writing was emotionally honest, even when the writing itself was rough or unpolished. For late-diagnosed adults who grew up performing emotional regulation as a survival skill, the act of writing without shrinking is a small but meaningful undoing of that training. If a sentence we write feels too intense, that is usually a sign we are getting close to something true. The urge to soften it is the same urge that has been editing our interior life for years. Try, just on the page, leaving it.

This week, Neurodivergent Narratives editor Lindsee invites us to take something we have been carrying at half-volume and let it move at its actual size. Here’s our second prompt for May:

The writing prompt is below. Paid members will see it. If you don’t see it, either you are not a paid member, or you are logged in to the wrong account. If you are not a member, you will need to subscribe to have full access and to see the prompt below. If you would like a free subscription for April, just reply to this email, and we will get you a free trial month.

🛎️ Zoom Link for Wednesday's Live Late Diagnosis - Book Club Meeting 🛎️

Dr. Angela Kingdon — Mon, 11 May 2026 04:32:45 GMT

In case you missed it in the April 1st email, on Wednesday at 8am PT, 11am ET, 4pm UK, and 5pm Europe, we will be getting together on Zoom to discuss the Book of the Month, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell. I’m sending this message early in case you haven’t had a chance to get the book yet. There is still time!

Paid members: Your Zoom link is at the bottom.

Everyone else: Read on.

Our May pick is Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell. It is a sharp, surprisingly funny book about how cult language actually works, why it works on people we tend to think of as smart, and how the same techniques have escaped capital-C cults and now live inside multilevel marketing companies, fitness studios, wellness influencers, coaching programs, and online communities most of us have brushed up against. By the time you finish it, you will have a vocabulary for things you have been clocking but could not name.

This is the meeting to come to if you have ever found yourself in a relationship, a job, a friend group, or a wellness program that felt slightly off and you could not articulate why. Cultish gives you the names. Love bombing. Insider language designed to make outside criticism sound ignorant. The reframing of doubt as disloyalty. The slow rewriting of reality through repeated exposure to a single charismatic frame. Once you have the vocabulary, the patterns become visible everywhere, and they get a lot harder to fall for.

If reading the whole book is not in the cards this week, Amanda Montell’s recent interview on A Little Bit Culty covers the core ideas in two really juicey episodes and is one of the best companion conversations to the book I have heard. The hosts, Sarah Edmondson and Anthony Ames, were both in NXIVM, so they bring the kind of lived-experience questions a more general literary interview would not get to. You can find the episode here or whereever you get your podcasts. It’s season 8 episodes 29 and 30.
A Little Bit Culty Part 1
A Little Bit Culty Part 2

Listen, read, do both, or do neither. I will give enough context on the call that you will be in the conversation either way.

The book club is one of the genuine pleasures of being in the Late Diagnosis Club. Every month we read something chosen specifically for the late-diagnosed audience, and the discussion goes places no podcast or Goodreads thread will take you. Best of all, unlike neurotypical book clubs, there is no guilt if you didn’t read or pressure to say something insightful. If you want to contribute, you can, but I run this infodump style which removes any of the PDA pressure, but anyone who want to jump in or even take over is welcome to!

The book runs about 300 pages and reads quickly. You can get Cultish on Libby or buy it almost anywhere. I listened to it on Audiobook (free with Libby!) and loved it!!!
US Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062993151
UK Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0062993151

[Become a member and join us Wednesday]

Note: The link to join the Zoom Meeting is below. Paid members will see it. If you don’t see it, either you are not a paid member, or you are logged in to the wrong account. If you are not a member, you will need to subscribe to have full access and to see the link below. If you would like a free subscription for May, just reply to this email, and we will get you a free trial month.
Upgrade now for full access and to join us for our live book club meeting.

How Scott’s Grief and Burnout Led to His Late Autism Diagnosis

Fri, 08 May 2026 04:01:32 GMT

Warning: This episode includes discussion of terminal cancer, sudden bereavement, grief, burnout, and mental health struggles. Please listen with care.

In this meeting of The Late Diagnosis Club, Dr Angela Kingdon welcomes Scott Simpson, a late-identified Autistic and ADHD creator, former broadcast journalist, and widowed father who has been raising his son solo since 2016.

After decades working in radio, Scott’s life began to unravel through grief, burnout, and the collapse of the structures that had quietly supported him for years. What followed was a search to understand executive functioning, ADHD, and eventually Autism.

Together, Angela and Scott explore hidden support needs, burnout after loss, Autistic shutdown, identity through memoirs and community, and why many late-identified adults only recognise their needs once life’s scaffolding disappears.

This is a conversation about grief, structure, survival, and finally understanding yourself.

🎧 Listen to this episode:

🪑 Attendees

Chair: Dr Angela Kingdon — Author, community-builder, and Autistic advocate
Guest: Scott Simpson — Content creator, former broadcaster, and late-identified AuDHD parent
You: The Listener!

🗒️ Meeting Agenda

Opening remarks from the Chair
Member introduction: Gifted kid, burnout, and late recognition
Discussion: Special education and social confusion
Widowhood, solo parenting, and hidden support needs
Radio career collapse and autistic burnout
ADHD diagnosis and later Autism recognition
Structure, scaffolding, and unmet needs
Key learnings
Club announcements

🧾 Minutes from the Meeting

1️⃣ Opening Remarks

Angela introduces Scott Simpson, a creator and former radio professional whose late identification followed years of grief, burnout, and trying to understand why life had become so much harder.

2️⃣ Member Introduction: Scott’s Story

Scott was identified as “gifted” in childhood and placed into a specialist education program. While his intelligence was recognised early, his social struggles and deeper support needs were not.

As an adult, he built a long career in broadcasting, married, became a father, and later experienced profound loss when his wife died of cancer while their son was still young.

When career structure and family scaffolding fell away, Scott began exploring executive functioning, received an ADHD diagnosis, and later recognised Autism.

3️⃣ Discussion Highlights

Gifted program: Early intelligence recognised, while deeper needs were missed
Smart but struggling: Academic ability masking social confusion
Relationship patterns: Trying hard without understanding the rules
Sudden grief: Becoming a widowed father to a three-year-old
Radio collapse: Career pressure, impossible demands, and burnout
Hidden scaffolding: Job structure and parenting routines quietly sustaining life
ADHD first: Executive functioning becomes the doorway to understanding
Autism later: Shutdowns, overwhelm, and lifelong patterns making sense
Memoirs mattered: Learning through Autistic voices and lived experience
Support needs emerge: Struggles become visible once the structure disappears

4️⃣ Key Learnings

High achievement can hide unmet support needs.
Grief and burnout often expose needs that were once masked.
Executive functioning struggles are often misunderstood as laziness or failure.
Late recognition can come after life changes remove coping systems.
Autistic voices and memoirs can be more powerful than diagnostic checklists.
Support is often invisible until it is gone.

📌 Notice Board
Scott’s Website
Scott’s YouTube Channel

📣 Club Announcements

💌 Want To Be Our Next Guest?

💜 Whether you’ve just realised you’re Autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, or you’re still figuring it out — your story belongs here. We’ve saved you a seat.

Be Our Guest

💫 Why Your Support Matters

Included with Autistic Culture Plus

• Ad-free listening (sensory-friendly)
• Early access to every episode
• Exclusive archive of ~100 classic episodes

Every pound, dollar, or share helps:

Joining isn’t just a subscription.
It’s solidarity. Visibility. Community in action.

Join Autistic Culture +

💜 With Gratitude

A huge thank-you to our founding supporters of Autistic Culture Plus, who believed in this network before it even launched.

These members form the foundation of the Autistic Culture Podcast Network, and you’ll see their names credited at the end of our shows and on our website.

🎧 Producers

Late Diagnosis Club Meeting - 6 May 2026

Dr. Angela Kingdon — Thu, 07 May 2026 12:26:36 GMT

Quick Recap

The Late Diagnosis Club held its first meeting of May, focusing on therapeutic writing with prompts centered around the theme of "comfort of home."

Dr. Angela led the session with editor L…

[2026] Neurodivergent Narratives - Writing Prompt #19

Dr. Angela Kingdon — Thu, 07 May 2026 02:10:46 GMT

When most of us first received our diagnoses or even just figured out we were neurodivergent, we expected the kind of help that follows other medical revelations. There would be a prescription, a procedure, a referral to a specialist who handled this sort of thing. There was, of course, almost none of that. Adult Autism is not a condition modern medicine has tools for because it is an identity, not a disorder. There is no surgery on the schedule, no gene therapy to sign up for, no pill that will rewire the perceptual differences that have shaped our entire lives. We walk in the same world we walked in before we knew, only now we have a name for the way we have been moving through it.

For many of us, that gap between the gravity of the recognition and the absence of any concrete next step is what sends us looking. We sign up for the social media groups. We read or listen to all the books and podcasts. We follow the wellness influencers who promise the right protocol or supplement or framework will finally fix what we have been told is broken about us. The grift economy is built on this gap, and coercive relationships and high-control groups recruit through it, since they offer the one thing the medical system does not, a complete and confident answer to the question of what to do now. The research, though, keeps pointing somewhere else - not to something we can get from the outside, but something we can change from the inside.

The medicine we need is not a wellness protocol or a behavioral change at all. The medicine is exploring our own creativity and finding or building a community where we can be fully expressed as ourselves. Time spent with other neurodivergent people, listening to their stories and telling our own, is where healing can be found. That is what the May prompts are for, and it is also why imagining the Good Place we are trying to get to turns out to be much harder, and much more important, than describing the Bad Place we already know how to survive.

The therapeutic benefits of writing do not depend on craft, polish, audience, or publication. They depend on the writer being honest with themselves on the page, in private if necessary, in any form that holds the truth. Anne Lamott reminds her readers that “perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people,” and that the only way through is to allow oneself to write badly first. The prompts in this community are not a competition. Pieces that never get submitted still count. Pieces that get submitted and need editing still count. Pieces written in fragments on the back of a receipt still count. The writing is the practice. The practice is the path. The Good Place is not somewhere we arrive, fully formed and finished. It is somewhere we build, one honest sentence at a time, in the company of people who recognize what we are doing because they are doing it too. So, without further delay, let’s go!

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