The Neurodiversity Voices Podcast

Hello and welcome to the Neurodiversity Voices podcast. I'm your host, Paul Cruz, and I'm thrilled to have you join us on this journey of exploration, advocacy, and celebration of neurodiversity.

I'm Gino Akbari, your volunteer co host. Together, we'll have meaningful conversations, share inspiring stories, and challenge misconceptions about neurodiversity.

This podcast is for neurodiversity.

We're so excited to have you with us as we celebrate the beauty of diverse minds and work toward a more inclusive future.

Sit back, relax, and let's get started. Welcome to the Neurodiversity Voices podcast. Welcome to today's conversation with Becca Laurie Hector, an openly autistic professional, advocate, and a leader in the autism and neurodiversity community. Diagnosed at the age of 36, Becca's journey of self discovery has fueled her passion for advocacy, research, and systemic change. Through her work, she addresses the challenges faced by individuals, including stigma, ableism, and the barriers to leadership opportunities.

Becca is the creator of the Self Defined Living Course, which empowers autistic individuals to design fulfilling lives tailored to their unique needs and strengths. Her groundbreaking research on autistic quality of life challenges traditional neurotypical measures and highlights the importance of including autistic voices in shaping policies and practices. As a consultant, Becca works with organizations to foster truly inclusive cultures that embrace neurodiversity and prioritize belonging. She is a firm believer in the power of community, collaboration, and valuing diverse perspectives to drive societal progress. Today, we'll explore Becca's personal journey, her insights into advocacy and inclusion, and her vision for a future where neurodivergent individuals are celebrated for their differently.

Let's dive into this inspiring conversation. Welcome, Becca, to the show.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Can you share with us and our listeners your journey of receiving your late autism diagnosis?

I was somebody who had various unsundry challenges for most of my early life. I was challenged in school. When I got out of school, I was challenged by work. Somewhere about 33, I was on my fifteenth job in thirteen years, and I'd really had enough. And what I did was I quit my last job.

I went back to the apartment that I grew up in, climbed into the bed that I grew up in, and said, I'm not leaving my house. I became really suicidal, homebound and isolated for the next three years. And simply by chance, I stumbled across autism in a journey to find out what was going on with my migraine headaches. And I found autism, and it was like discovering the missing link in all of the things we'd kind of gone through in my entire life. It made everything make sense.

And after that, I pursued a formal diagnosis. At the time, I was not somebody who was very mentally well, and so I did not trust myself enough to do self identification, and I sought out professional confirmation. And so that was about, yeah, that was going on twelve years ago now.

Thank you, Becca, for sharing that. Can you share how your late autism diagnosis at 36 shaped how you advocate or shaped your advocacy?

Absolutely. So for me, the impact of my diagnosis and my identification is really the way I prefer to say it. The impact of my identification on my life was almost immediate, and it was also like a 180. So I explain it to a lot of people as like walking around in the world with one hand over one of my eyes my whole life, and then all of a sudden somebody just took the hand off my other eye, and I had depth perception, and I had focus, and I had all of these other information that I had been missing out on my whole life. And that experience was very personal, but it was also very impactful in that it genuinely saved my life.

I don't know if I would have been here much longer. And that feeling of knowing that I'm and finding out that I'm one of many people that is having this experience really made me feel compelled to pay it forward, compelled to go back and give back to the organization that helped me, to help other autistics like myself, because I just can't imagine a world in which people are living decades of their lives without this self awareness.

Why is it important to keep advocating in 02/2025?

I would have had a different answer for you for this if you had asked me this in 2024. But in 2025, I feel like, with everything that's going on, especially in The United States politically, it is the most important time for us to be advocating right now. It is time for our voice to be as strong and as loud as it can be. It is important that all of our perspectives be heard and that when the world is spewing lies in our direction, it's not the time to tuck our tails in and run away and hide. It's time to dig in, correct the information, share more data, create more, do more.

And so that's why it's really important to keep advocating in 2020.

How is getting a late diagnosis affected you emotionally and socially? Is it, you find you had more groundedness now, or would it be better if you had that diagnosis in an earlier age?

It's a catch-twenty two. And I say this because my identification came in at a point in my life where it was over for me. I was done. I was out of energy for anything. And so, it created a fork in the road for me where suddenly I had new information and there was the potential for things to be different.

Up until that moment, I couldn't imagine it any other way, except for this awful way. That late diagnosis for me meant a couple of things. It meant growing up, I didn't get any of the supports that I needed. It meant that I received a lot of misinformation about myself from the outside world. We didn't understand autism, so a lot of my quirks and behaviors were criticized and critiqued, and my natural instinctive way of being, I was taught to hide it, and I was taught to not show that part of myself to people around, you know, and not be proud of that part of myself.

And so there's a lot of trauma attached to spending all of those years knowing that you're different, feeling like you're the only one by yourself, and feeling like every single person around you is out to get you, right? That's a terrible feeling. However, those of us who got earlier diagnosis or earlier intervention, especially in this kind of same time period, were really over supported. We really kind of did a number on them, too. We decided, Oh, we kept missing these people, so now we're going to over support.

We're going to over support. And what we didn't do for those folks is give them the ability to be functional adults. And so, in some ways, my delayed diagnosis meant that I had to deal with a lot of challenges and figure out my way through them without information and without support, and those lessons are not something I'm so quick to throw away. Those lessons were really important. They made me who I am.

But on the other side of it, I am a much more regulated person. I have the ability to say no now. I know what I like, what I don't like, what triggers me, what doesn't trigger me. And so I'm a much healthier person now. And so it's kind of one of those things.

Can, you know, this was my life. This is the way it went down. But did it have impact on me emotionally and certainly on my self esteem? Absolutely.

How has attaining your late diagnosis changed how you reflect on your childhood? Are there challenges you faced in the past undiagnosed that you reflect on now that you have your late diagnosis and new skills and supports to help support you.

I don't know how else to say this except to say who I am right now is who little me needed desperately. And so I've become the grownup that I would have needed as a kid. And that, to me, is how I reflect back on my childhood. Like, I have grown so much as a person that I could now, with confidence, not only do I trust my future self to take care of whatever comes my way in the future, I also know that I'm caregiving for my inner child because I'm the person right now I would have needed back then and didn't have. My first year out of diagnosis, though, and I feel like this is something that we all tend to have in common when we get a late diagnosis, I spent a lot of time in grief and a lot of time in reflection, looking back on where the autism was all those years.

Was it me or was it the autism? Was it me or was it the autism? Nope, I see it there. Oh, I see it there. And kind of reliving my memories through this new perspective, through this new lens, to understand it all, but also to be able to forgive myself and give myself some grace for all of the difficulties that I'd kind of had and all of the terrible adjectives that I've had thrown in my direction.

And so that's how I look at it, is that there was that first year where I did a lot of grieving and a lot of growth and a lot of forgiveness in that first year, and now I go, Yeah, now I'm the person I would have needed. And I have grown into that person. And I say that with pride because it gives me the strength and confidence to help other autistics who aren't so far along in their journey.

Tell us a little bit about how the stigma, bias, and ableism impact autistic individuals in professional settings? What can be done to address these issues?

Well, our professional settings are rough ones for us. Professional settings have their own set of social rules that are separate from the social rules we live the rest of our life by. We're not taught them. We don't experience them until we're well into adulthood. And so, as autistic people, it hits on all the buttons that are challenge areas for us in employment.

We have struggles with executive function. We have struggles with social communication. And it's not because we're not good at those things or that those are areas where autistics need to improve. It's that we do those things differently. So, we communicate socially differently.

Our executive functioning works a little bit differently. Our regulation works a little differently. Our sensory system works a little differently. And if we have any co occurring conditions, they also show themselves differently. So, what that does in the workplace setting is it makes you stick out.

And in the workplace setting, that's not always great. We've built our workplaces around this idea that a good employee is the employee that can do the same thing as the guy next to him, that wearing the same clothes and the same amount of hours during the day, we can all produce the same amount of work. And that's not fair. That's not how humans work. Autistic or not, it's not how we work.

And so, that's the beginning of those biases. Then, over time, we've kind of collected these myths around autistic professionals. Things like we can't be leaders, we can't carry a full workload, we are expensive, We take up too much time from our managers. We need special treatment. None of which is true, and certainly all of that is never true about one person.

But that's the bias and stereotypes that when we step into an interview, we're already facing, because the interviewer, chances are, already has bias going. And then those systems that we use to get us into jobs and then function in jobs were created with the neuro majority in mind and not with any one neurodivergent.

What is your advice to others facing these negative stigmas and bias?

My biggest piece of advice is don't take it personally. These are overarching umbrella biases and stigmas and all of these things. They are not about you as a person. These are beliefs that people glean from the world around them because that's what the media shows them. Maybe that's their personal experience.

Maybe someone else has told them a story, and they collect these stigma and biases in their head. Many times, it's unconscious bias. It's bias that they're not even aware that they carry. So, there's really not about blame and intent in there. It's just happening.

Doesn't make it feel any better, but it's not about you. It's not about picking on you as a human being. There's nothing wrong with you. And so, that's my big advice, is every time you run into it, try to remember you're running into someone who has been miseducated and or undereducated. You're not running into somebody who's looking necessarily to offend you, unless it happens online in the comments, and then it's probably a troll.

But if it's happening to you kind of in a real social scenario, what these moments are are a time to educate. These moments are little microaggressions that you can pause, kind of think about, and then take those moments to reflect and reflect back with the person who's using it. Hey, I heard you say blah, blah, blah. What did you mean by that? Could you explain it to me a little bit?

And then they do, and then you get to say something like, Thanks for sharing that with me. I appreciate knowing where you came from, but here's how that feels on the other side. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And our hope is we shift up those stigmas that they're carrying and those unconscious biases, and we start to lift them through those microeducation moments. However, if you do not feel you are up to the task and or you don't like confrontation and or you've had a really crappy day and you just don't have the energy to deal with it, it's okay to walk away from those people.

Just don't take it with you. That's not yours to carry. That's their garbage.

Amongst the ocean of things you've done, you've also created a course to help the community. Could you tell us a little bit more about, as you call it, self defined living? Am I correct?

Absolutely. So really proud of my little tiny course. I came into this community, as you heard, and I really needed help rebuilding my life. I got this new chunk of information, and it came into my life, and I thought, Wow, look how many things in my life I could be doing differently or I could be doing better for myself. Anything from which the first thing that I did was I started online grocery shopping.

I gave myself the reprieve of having to go through the sensory of the store, having to organize all of those things, forgetting something on my list, going back another day. All of those things were part of my norm for grocery shopping, and by giving myself permission to order that stuff online, and yes, it's a little more money, but it saves me gas, which brings back some of the money, and there's ways to justify it. What it is is saying, I need to lighten my load of the things that are exceptionally hard for me so that I can spend more time doing the things I enjoy. And that's where I started. My problem was I didn't have any guidance.

There was no guidance out there from other autistics before me to tell me how to do lifestyle design, essentially. How do I do that through an autistic lens? So, I started looking at what the neuro majority has to look at, and that's personal development or self help. There was lots of information out there, but I just kept seeing the patterns and everything people were teaching. Coloring in the lines with different language and telling different stories, the main messages in all of those books were always the same, and I thought, This is what autistics need.

We need the meat. Stop giving me your potatoes and your vegetables and everything else. Just give me the meat. Give me the action statement. That's what I, as an autistic person, need.

So what I did was created an entire lifestyle design course, personal development course, that's self study, virtual. Once you get it, you have it forever. You can use it over and over again. And its entire purpose is to help you incorporate the information from your diagnosis or identification into the life that you're living so that it becomes a thriving, authentic life, not a life where you're living you're supposed to, the things you should be doing.

How do the courses you created help autistic individuals design fulfilling lives?

Well, so one of the things it's a lot of different things that happen. It's a three unit course. So the first unit of the course is really about stepping forward and about saying, All right, I am gonna commit to myself. I'm gonna commit to make changes. I'm done with my own garbage.

It's not working, and I need to do something else different. I don't like my life and I want it to look different. And there's a lot of reasons in Unit one where I talk about how we got there. How did we get to this place where we're doing things other people want and I'm hanging things on the wall that I don't like and going to dinners I don't want to be at. How did I get here?

And thinking about what parts of our lives are comfortable versus which ones are uncomfortable because we want to start with the squeaky wheel. We want to work on the place in our lives where we have the most discomfort and try to work ourselves out of that. So, that's what we kind of do in Unit one. And then in Unit two, we fortify our focus, and we really focus in on the area that we want to do the work, the area in our lives that we want to do the work, and how do we get that focus? What kind of tools do I need to stay aligned, to stay on track with my goals, to get where I wanna go, for it to all look like that?

And then unit three is all about maintenance. It's all about managing the life that you've built. So, you create all these things, you made all these decisions, you're working in Unit two to make all these changes, but we need to keep working in order to sustain it over the long time. And the hitches, we're all always evolving and changing. And so, the things that we need and want evolve and change, so do the circumstances in our lives.

We hear about people divorced or moving states or moving countries. And when we do those big transitions, we need to rethink all of this again. We need to be able to build a lifestyle that, while solidified and comfortable and permanent in all of those ways, isn't built on a cement foundation but built on something that's a little bit more mobile, like the tall buildings they have in Japan, that can withstand the earthquakes, because earthquakes happen, and we have to build that flexibility in in order for our brains to be comfortable. And those are the things we kind of work on. There's lots of individual tools.

I'm gonna be coming out with a seminar series on very specific topics shortly. And I also have a bunch of downloadable one pagers that you can use to support yourself.

It's amazing to actually have someone do that groundwork and sort of like a GPS for them. Obviously, it's had quite a bit of impact on the community, your course, but have you gotten feedback from these courses? Has anybody told you how it has impacted them?

I have actually keep in touch with many of my students. Some of my FIRST students are still doing amazing. I have a lot of folks over internationally that have started their own businesses. I have two clients that have decided to move. It's all about where your life needs to be impacted.

Other things that have happened, I had, the Comic Relief Grant was given to Specialist Earn in Northern Ireland. I taught that as a group to the people at Specialist Earn on a grant. And what it's really done is sort of pushed me to do the research that I'm doing because when I created this course, there was no way You know, you want to be able to say to people, You'll see the difference from when you started the course until the end. You want to give them that tangible proof that it's worth doing other than these testimonials, right? But there's nothing out there that I can use.

There's no tools out there by autistics, for autistics, to measure our quality of life. Nothing. All we have out there are what the neuro majority considers to be categories of quality of life, and they are different for autistic. So I said, I can't really say my course works unless I can prove it. And so I started doing some quality of life research that I'm working on as well.

Did you find research difficult to find and attain, or did you have a couple great go tos for research already?

Well, as somebody without a PhD, getting into research is incredibly difficult. One of the ironies, I think, about research is that it lives within academia, which is its very own little bubble of functioning, and academia doesn't like to function and think outside of the way it functions. So, it's very difficult to be an outsider who's not a part of academia and work within academia. That is hard. The other part is, I don't have a PhD, but we are constantly being bombarded about community engagement in our community, right?

We're constantly meeting people to do the research on, to take the surveys, to do engagement. And our academic community is constantly saying, How? How do we engage? How do we keep long term engagement? Right?

And one of the ways is to stop gatekeeping this research business. Because the truth is that most of the autistic research about autism started out anecdotally. We have known a lot of things in our community, anecdotally, but then the research went out and proved. So, what we need to do is start listening more to the anecdotal. And that's kind of the space that I was coming from.

I'm a disabled person. I do not have the privilege, financially or otherwise, to go get a further degree if I want to pursue research. That's a privilege that some folks have, that they can do that. But what I did was I saw an opportunity where folks were willing to fund early career researchers. And even though I'm not early in my career, I am in my research career, and not having a PhD is part of that.

And I saw that as an opportunity to get some funding behind quality of life research for autistic folks. And that's what I did. I took a chance. It was really basically, I had a fellow researcher say to me, Adaria, basically. Go ahead, do it.

What are they gonna do? Sell you no? Let them tell you no. And I did. I pulled out the whole ground, and I was like, let them do that because then I set precedent.

And so that's how it began.

That's brilliant. So during your research, was there like an moment where you've had a significant finding where it was like, this is going to change the way I'm thinking about this?

So many. I mean, I'm truly amazed by my community so much. My favorite moment from this very first phase of research is kind of a weird one, but I think my fellow autistics will understand. So one of the things that I was really curious about in this early phase of the research was, do how do autistics define quality of life? Like, what do we think that is?

What is our definition of it? And also, kind of what has been your experience with quality of life kind of over the course of your life? And there was a little piece of me inside that said to my team at the time, I guarantee you we're gonna find out that a ton of autistic people have never had the opportunity to think about quality of life, that they've never even been in survival mode so long and for their entire life, they've never even had the privilege to pause and say, Wait, I don't like this. I don't want it to be like this. This part of my life doesn't feel good.

And that is what we found. We're continuously getting, This is what I think quality of life means, but I've never really experienced it, or I've never really had a chance to talk about it or think about it or even work on it in therapy. It's not something, nothing that anybody ever told me was important. And that has been my favorite takeaway and most significant takeaway, because what that does is it shows you how much time and energy autistic folks are putting into pure survival that they can't even consider a life that they might be thriving in. They don't even have the energy to think about what that might look like.

They're just trying to get through every day, one at a time. And that, to me, is huge. You want to know where all of our suicide numbers come from? You want to know where all of our mental health co occurs come from? You want to know where all the trauma comes from?

If you never get to think about your quality of life and how to improve it, that's never an autonomous decision for you. That has been my favorite.

In your own words, how does the quality of life for an autistic individual versus a neurotypical individual compare?

It's like, to me, it's comparing apples and oranges. Literally, the neuro majority processes information one way, and autistic people process information another way. Our actual and real experiences in the world are totally different. And on top of that, autistic folks have to deal with stigma, bias, stereotypes, ableism, all of the other things that we have that are kind of barriers, you know, against us having a thriving life. And so, if you think about how does the quality of life for an autistic individual compare, We have totally different priorities.

Different things are important to us in relationships, in our jobs, how we live our lives, where we live our lives. All of those things are different for us. And so, if you take us and compare us to a person in the neuro majority and their quality of life, it's gonna look insane. First of all, those categories most of the time don't even make sense to us. We're looking for, Where's nature?

Where's time with animals? I don't understand this. We're looking for those categories. I can't find myself in here, first of all, so we don't get a good reading of quality of life from what we've currently got. But also, we can't compare the quality of life of somebody who's privileged to the quality of life to somebody who's been marginalized their entire lives.

They're different things, and so we have to really be careful. There's really no way to compare, and yet, that's exactly what we've been doing this entire time. We've been judging autistics by the neuro majority's standards, and we have our own standard.

Amongst many other things, you also help organizations create, embrace, and prioritize creating a safe space for all neurodiverse individuals. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

We talked a little bit in the beginning about difficulties in employment. Some of the difficulties, some of the ways we can lighten the load for autistic folks out in our workplaces are really similar to the things that we can do in any of our shared spaces. So, I say shared spaces, I mean spaces where everyone goes, congregates, the bank, the gas station, the library. That's the same thing as our workplaces. Those are all shared spaces that we should hope, as human beings, the most amount of people get used out of and the most amount of people feel like they belong.

Those shared spaces. And yet, they weren't built with the most amount of people in mind. They were built for one kind of person in mind, for one set of standards, and that's what's going on. So what we need to do, really, what would be great to do, is to knock it all down and start all over. It would be fantastic to be able to do that, but we're not gonna be able to do that.

So, what we need to do is start thinking about the adjustments we can make in our policies and our systems and the way we function as a group team, essentially, towards the same cause in order for it to work for everyone. So, of expecting the same work from everybody, we want everyone to be working on the thing they're good at because that's how we get the best work from everybody. Making everyone show up at 9AM doesn't make for great workers, especially if someone has to drop off their kid, or they work in the nighttime and they need to start later, or whatever. They need any amount of human flexibility in our lives. Our workplaces do not tolerate that.

We do not tolerate difference. We do not tolerate flexibility. And those are the things that need to be built in. We are seeing that remote work has made a huge impact and lightened the load of a lot of people. We've removed transportation and overhead costs of businesses and all kinds of things by doing that.

And similarly, when we add in other flexible arrangements, we will see that too. The truth is AI is here. It is coming for our jobs, so we better refigure out how we're gonna run our businesses because we don't need someone to answer the phones anymore, and that's the truth.

Have you faced any struggles in creating inclusive leadership, And how do you go about breaking down those struggles?

Yes. I have faced a ton of I think I faced only struggle trying to actually do this crazy thing and and convince people that inclusive leadership is the way to go. But here's the thing. Again, we have these myths that get carried around and are allowed to live in our toxic workplaces around inclusive leadership. It's really not that big a deal.

What we're really saying is give all the marginalized folks a chance to get into that leadership pipeline. Make sure they're having the same chances at mentorship, at networking, or any opportunities to move up, any opportunities for merit raises, all of those things. That is what is missing for disabled folks in general, and especially for autistic and neurodivergent folks. We are just not treated as though we deserve or have a right to move up in our careers and make more money and or be responsible managers for other people. And yet, if we do so undisclosed, we move up just fine.

And that tells me that the bias and the stigma and the stereotypes plays a big role in that. The other things that play a big role is that lack of flexibility. So, what we're doing, again, is setting a set of standards that works great for one kind of person around what leadership should be, when really we should be looking for all the different ways you can do leadership because the more options we have, the better we'll be successful as a group, as a society, rather than us all doing it the same. So a lot of the struggles have to do with running into people who are carrying that unconscious bias, who believe in the stereotypes and myths, and knowing that they haven't had an opportunity to be educated. And so it's my job to take the brunt of those initial trigger words and traumas and then turn that around and educate so that that doesn't happen.

You just pretty much described the autistic glass ceiling, but have you personally come across barriers that have stopped you from taking on leadership roles?

I am somebody who I am not that young anymore, and soon we'll be facing ageism on top of everything else, on top of the misogyny, on top of the ableism, Now and I'm gonna get to deal with that. But the autistic glass ceiling is very real. There's some part, and we have research showing it, that the neuro majority genuinely, when they meet autistic people, do not like autistic people. It's immediate almost because we do things different. We socialize differently.

We introduce ourselves differently. The whole thing. We function differently and that, for some reason, is received very negatively. It's processed very negatively by the other parties. And immediately, they take on the biases and that belief that because you're different, you can't do leadership.

You'll never be able to sit in a funding meeting and pull that off. You'll never be able to get a proposal in on time with all the numbers. You'll never be able to schmooze and network the way that we need you to, so you'll never be able to move up. When the truth is that autistics, anyone who's been highly masked most of their lives, could schmooze the crap out of anybody because we're practiced at it. And so what's happening is people are limiting us by their beliefs of what we can do and what we are capable of simply by giving them this one information.

So for me, I've opted to go this crazy road of being openly neurodivergent and a professional. It is not an option for me to not share that. It's everywhere. If you Google me, that's it. So it's not an option for me.

And so I face it every single time. Every time I get a new client, I have to prove myself to them, to show them I know how to invoice. I have to show them that I will collect my dues. I have to show them that I can negotiate and that I can meet their needs. I have to do it all over again, every single time.

And currently, I'm in a semi decision making role, but there's, you know, a part of it that isn't really just a token role. Is it just a way to say, Yeah, I performed a ballet ship? Because it's not really a leadership role. And so, yeah, I'm still running into it. My career may be stalled at this level for all I know.

I may never get beyond it. I think we need more real information, real authentic information. Like, stop making TV shows about us and making characters that are all stereotypical and that aren't even autistic. Stop doing There are ways that people can do that, that we can start to make those changes, because it's really The compassion comes after the education. So the compassion will get there if we educate first, But the education part is really painful for a lot of people, because dealing with an uneducated person opens up a lot of wounds.

Oftentimes, we have to get defensive or take the blame. And so, there are a lot of people for whom the education piece isn't, you know, it's just not something that's a strength of theirs. And that's why we all advocate differently. People do all different kinds of advocacy. So if that's not your strength, again, it's not your job to take it on for the whole community.

It's your job to take it on for you, or to find someone else that you can ask for help to take that stuff on.

How have you been able to collaborate with other autistic advocates and researchers?

My entire career is built on collaboration. The autistic community wouldn't be here without collaboration. We were separated from each other and isolated intentionally. We continue to try to be separated and isolated with the language that's coming at us today in 2025, but we refuse to be separated. We work better together.

And in fact, for many autistics, there's a preference for working with other autistics rather than the neuro majority. I know many autistic professionals will not work with the neuro majority and only work with other autistics. I really find that the autistic community is collaborative as a whole. We enjoy working together. We'd prefer to work together.

We seek each other out and really, you know, I don't know of any one of us, of all the advocates I've known for a very long time, that has ever wanted to be like the voice of the community. That's not how we function. Together, we are the voice. Everybody counts. And it really comes from the pain of how separated we were, how divided the world has tried to make our community by separating us by how much autismness we have or giving us levels or deciding someone with profound autism, as they're calling it these days, is different from someone else.

But autism is autism is autism, and I'd rather be in a room with another autistic than in a room with a neuro majority. And so, yeah, I collaborate on projects. I collaborate by reviewing their documents. I collaborate by cheering them on and sharing their stuff on social media. I collaborate every which way.

Come in on podcasts for people. I do all kinds of stuff because we need to be lifting each other up. The fact is there's enough. We've been sold a bill of goods that there's not enough for everyone. It's a capitalist lie, and there is enough for everyone, and that means there's plenty of space for us to collaborate and work together.

Thank you for emphasizing the importance of that collaboration. So let me ask you, what advice would you give to someone newly diagnosed as autistic and looking to build a fulfilling life?

I would say that first year, be selfish. That is always my first piece of advice. Year one is be selfish. Chances are you've never been selfish a day in your life. You've probably always concerned yourself with all the other people around you and their comfort.

So you're gonna stop that immediately once we have identification on board, and we're gonna be selfish for a year, and we're gonna go do a deep dive, go info dumping into yourself is what we wanna do. We wanna become our own special interest, and go through it. Ride the emotional roller coaster. Be angry at the adults that didn't care for you until you got your diagnosis. Be sad for little you who suffered for such a long time.

Go through, figure out where, you know, relive those memories, find the autism, find because your early triggers are there. The early things that you've long forgotten are there, including your joys. Your joys are all the way back there too, before somebody told you no flappy hands and you have a weird interest. So, they're back there, and that's what we need to do in that first year, is go back and reclaim. Reclaim our memories through a different lens and give ourselves grace.

Reclaim the things that have happened to us and understand them in a new way. And then, reclaim ourselves and our triggers and the things that we want out of our life. Once you get to that space, you're ready to redesign. Once you're like, Okay, I did the emotional work. I get it.

I'm autistic. And now I'm ready to make some changes in my life so that it all makes sense together, so that I'm not doing things that make me crazy, that I'm not overexerting myself. And taking the time to ask yourself, What is quality of life? What is my quality of life? Do I want it to get better?

What part of my life do I hate the most? My relationships, my work, where I'm living, right? Figuring that stuff out is the next phase and allowing yourself the freedom to think big, to think, Well, what if? Just what if? And think really big because you've never most of us have never had that privilege.

We're too busy trying to survive all the time. So, one of the things that people have to learn is that there are some of us who will need care for the rest of our lives. Disabled folks will always need a support person in some way or another. But that is our truth for our lives. That doesn't make it the truth for our siblings, for our parents, all of those things.

There is a time in our lives where those people fill that void, but it does not have to be forever. In other words, if you want your mom to just be your mom, and you wanna take away her caregiving duties and hire somebody to do those caregiving duties for you so mom can be just mom and stop nagging you, that's a fair thing to do. Also, for parents, right? Autistics learn the best by doing and by seeing. So, model what you want us to be learning.

Model it for us. If you don't want us to need you forever, stop teaching us to need you forever. You need to start walking away. You need to start teaching us skills that are the ones that we'll actually need. So, we're always gonna need help.

But what we need to learn is how do you ask for help and who do you ask for help from? So, those are the things that we can be doing when we're supporting neurodivergent folks. The other piece, I think, is again, that education piece. Get to know your person. Each person with autism is different because every human being is different.

We have different personalities, different challenges, all of those things. If you truly love and you're not just supporting a neurodivergent person, but you love your neurodivergent person, get to know their special interests. Try to get in on it with them. Try to find a shared special interest, even better. Get to know what our triggers are.

Get to know what our safe foods are. That's how you buy us presents. That's how you get in with us. You show up to visit me after a long day with my favorite iced tea in a can. We are besties.

I will be your best friend forever. So learn that about this person. We're the same people that show up with a pretty rock and go, Listen, I saw this rock and I just take it. Like, we love it. It's a beautiful rock.

That's what getting a safe food from someone else feels like for us. When someone says, Oh, that's right. Not only do you like this, but this is your safe food. I know it's gonna make you feel better. Those are the things that make the difference between having a caregiver and someone who loves you.

That's what somebody told me when I was raising my daughter, don't protect her so much as prepare her.

Yes, a 100%, because we love we'll learn. We love to learn. We'll memorize what you teach us. We will use it for the rest of our lives, but we need very direct instruction.

What do you think the best future for neurodiversity inclusion in the workplace, society, and school is?

It's bigger than just neurodiversity to solve this problem, because we can't solve neurodiversity without looking at the bigger issue, which is that our entire world has some issue with difference. It's very deep seated. Don't, and are living, because of that, we live through a lot of lives. So I think if there's one thing that could shift the way the future goes for anybody marginalized, but especially for disabled people in terms of inclusion, it's really to understand that our needs are real, but they're different. And so it's not a comparison.

We shouldn't be held to those same standards. That's not how you create equity. That's how you create equality. But it's not how you create equity for people. We need an even playing field.

And so we have to figure out what is that even playing field. How do we create these shared spaces and shared environments with that equity in mind? So not some of us can use the library. All of us can use the library.

If you could erase one myth or misconception about neurodiverse people, what would it be and what fact would you replace it with?

There are so many because if I could replace all the myths, a myth is a lie. And if I could replace the lies with the truth, I would be thorough. But I think the one that is my, close to my heart and the one that I am most passionate about is that myth that autistic people can't be leaders, that we can't be managers, that we can't handle those roles of responsibility where we are the decision makers. I don't know where that comes from. I'm not sure what that's about, but I feel like it came from somebody who's never met an autistic person because I think autistic people are fantastic leaders.

We are logical thinkers. We tend to be able to separate our emotions from a practical decision that we have to make while at the same time being incredibly empathic to the people that are around us, which is in fact a perfect combination for leadership. And so I really, I would like to get rid of that and let people know that actually autistic folks are perfectly suited to leadership.

What is the one key takeaway you want listeners to understand about embracing neurodivergence and living a fulfilling life?

I think I'm gonna stay where I'm at in the thinking around difference, which I really wish that autistic folks could really understand that what people tell us about ourselves is not the truth of what we are. So what we hear a lot is comes from people's fear of difference. A lot of the judgment that we hear, a lot of the stigma, the stereotypes and bias, it all comes from literal fear of difference. People are afraid of that. They've been taught to be afraid of different.

Autistic people need to learn to embrace our difference. It is what makes us epically successful. It is what allows us to thrive. It's what allows us to feel fully human, to experience our full range of emotion, to experience joy to its fullest. And all of those things is really learning to just embrace difference, period.

You will end up surrounding yourself with amazing people who also embrace difference, autistic or not. Also, you stop judging yourself so much. It's enough. The world judges us plenty. We don't need to be judging ourselves too.

And if we can stop judging ourselves, it's easier to kind of blow off the things that other people said because we know inside that's not the truth. And nobody can shake you from your inner truth. And so that's what I would say. It's really a message for other autistic folks out there. We're just, people are going to try to shake the difference out of you, and it is your job to hang on to that difference as, you know, white enough to hold on to it because it is the thing that sets you apart from everybody else.

And we are all meant to be different from the guy next to us.

Thank you for joining us for this insightful conversation with Becca Laurie Hector. From her late autism diagnosis at age 36 to her impactful advocacy work, Becca has shared invaluable perspectives on neurodiversity, inclusion, and the importance of amplifying autistic voices. Her dedication to breaking down barriers, fostering community, and empowering individuals through her self defined living course is truly inspiring. If you'd like to learn more about Becca's work, connect with her, or explore her resources, you can visit her website at wwwbeccalori.com You can also follow her on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook where she actively engages with the neurodivergent community. We will provide all of them in our showroom.

That's all for today's episode of the Neurodiversity Voices podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in and being part of this important conversation. We hope you found today's discussion insightful and inspiring. Remember, every voice matters. And together, we can create a more

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