Autism, Unmasking, and Living Authentically, with Taylor Heaton

(gentle music) A lot of times, autistic people kind of mask to appear socially acceptable, and we laugh the more we learn about ourselves. It's like, I don't wanna be like them. I wanna be like me. Like, y'all are weird. There's a misunderstanding that we're trying to get autistic people up to be able to function on everyone else's level. No, we have our own level. We have our own world. We're happy in it. Just help us, you know, make small accommodations. I think when we create more room for that, it becomes like a safer and more accepting environment, I think, for everyone. Hi everyone, it's Rosie here. Welcome back to Radio Headspace. As you know, I'm a student of clinical psychology, and something I've been trying to understand at a deeper level is autism, especially now as it's constantly in the news. In this conversation, I talk with Taylor Heaton, the Founder of Mom On The Spectrum, a YouTube channel and community about what it's like to live with autism. We discuss what it means to live authentically as a neurodivergent person and why community plays a pivotal role in that journey. I learned a ton from this conversation and I hope you do too. Thank you so much for doing this. I-- Absolutely. Have been consuming so much of your content. (participants laugh) Oh my gosh. I love your YouTube. I love your YouTube channel. Oh, thank you so much. And yeah, so we're really excited to have a conversation with you today. So thank you for being here. I would love to just start off with a little bit of background. So if you could talk to me about your autism diagnosis. I know it happened later in your life, and I was just curious like what prompted you to go down this path? Yeah, it's been, it's been about five years now since I got my diagnosis. So I'm 36 and I received my diagnosis when I was 31, kind of amidst the pandemic and everything. So it was a very eye-opening time in many ways. I started pursuing that diagnosis because one of my friends I found out that I went to college with, had been diagnosed with autism. And when I heard that, I was like shocked. I realized that if she was autistic, then maybe I didn't understand what autism was. because we were in the music program together where we went to college and she was very socially skilled and just, it wasn't the picture that I ever had in my mind of autism. And so she was kind enough to meet me for coffee and I picked her brain and it was kind of one of those conversations where my world just kept, like, my mind just kept being blown, Like, wait, but it was kind of the Spider-Man meme, you know, like, wait. Yeah. But like me, I do that too. And so I just started learning and my mind...