Before the word, there was just the feeling.
For most of my life I knew something was different. Not different in the way people say as a compliment — but different in the way that costs you things. Jobs. Relationships. Years. Energy you didn't know you were spending until one day you ran out.
The exhaustion that comes from performing neurotypicality is real and it accumulates. I didn't have a name for it. I thought I was fragile, or difficult, or fundamentally incapable of doing the things everyone else seemed to do without noticing they were hard.
The diagnosis didn't change who I was. It explained who I had always been.
Getting the autism diagnosis late — after decades of adult life already lived — is a specific kind of disorientation. You get the word and then you have to go back through your whole history and re-read it with new eyes. Every environment that broke you. Every relationship that confused you. Every job that exhausted you. It wasn't failure. It was an autistic person in spaces that were never designed for them.
The writing came first. Then the book.
I started writing about autism because the existing content wasn't written for me. It was written about people like me — by clinicians who study us, by parents who raise us, by organisations funded to support us. Very little of it sounded like how I actually think or feel.
So I wrote the articles I needed to find. About late diagnosis and what it actually feels like. About masking and what it costs. About burnout — how it's different from tiredness. About the NDIS and how it fails autistic adults. About what sensory regulation means in daily life. Real things, from the inside, without clinical distance.
The book came from the same instinct. The articles were scattered — a piece here on masking, a piece there on burnout, the grief in another. The Unmasking Years gathers the whole arc into one place — the map I wish someone had handed me on the day I got the word. Same voice, same lived experience, no clinical distance. Just held together as a single journey.
Why this audience, and why now.
Late-diagnosed autistic adults are an underserved group in almost every meaningful sense. The clinical system wasn't built for adults who masked for decades. The content ecosystem is dominated by parent voices and awareness narratives. The books that do exist are mostly clinical manuals, or memoirs that stop at the diagnosis and never get to the part that comes after.
HeyASD exists in the gap between what this community actually needs and what currently exists to meet it. Not because that gap is a market opportunity — but because I am in that gap. I am the person this was built for. That's the only qualification that matters here.
