'At 47, I discovered I am autistic – suddenly so many things made sense'
Until last year I had no idea I was autistic. I knew I was different and I had always been told I was “too sensitive”. But I don’t fit the dated Rain Man stereotype. I’m a CEO, I’m married, I have two children. Autism is often a hidden disability.
Other people made life seem easy and effortless while, before my diagnosis, I always operated with some level of confusion. I was able to achieve a lot and I used to attribute this to the strong work ethic I inherited from my dad but now I have no doubt that he was autistic, too.
I climbed the career ladder very fast. My mind is always going a million miles an hour and I don’t really have an off switch. I need to finish what I start at any cost. Now I understand that is part of being autistic. Einstein, Mozart, Michelangelo, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates – all these overachievers are widely believed to be, or have been, on the spectrum.
I didn’t just work hard, I also played very hard. I used recreational drugs to smooth me through the challenges of social communication. I was always a clubber, not a pubber, because I couldn’t do the chit-chat.
Autism is characterised by a need for repetitive patterns and challenges with communication. With every interaction, verbal or written, I go through a mental checklist: is my response appropriate? Is it relevant? Is this something only I am going to find interesting? Is my tone right? Trying to follow social rules and adapt to an allistic [non-autistic] world is exhausting. No one sees what is going on inside my head.
I have to work really hard at friendships. I’m good at making friends but not so good at keeping them. Misunderstandings in communication can blow up quite quickly. I have very high expectations of myself and others, and my friends tell me that that can feel like pressure. The trade-off is that I am 100% dependable, very loyal and a lot of fun when I am feeling social. Autistic people have a high divorce rate. My husband is a very calm, grounded person, which is a good balance for me.
I burnt out in my late 20s. Originally from England, I spent a year in India looking for answers then I headed south to Australia. It is no coincidence that I moved to the opposite side of the world to try to find out where I belonged, where I would be accepted. My greatest fear has been something I’ve always referred to as “the big alone”. Even when I’ve been in loving relationships, as I am now, there has been a terrible aloneness in not understanding why I am not like other people.
Like many adult women, my diagnosis came through the diagnosis of my child. It’s an increasingly common story. My daughter had behavioural differences and sensory sensitivities from quite a young age and she was diagnosed with autism at age seven. A year ago, I set up Autism Camp Australia, a charity for autistic children and their families. I was studying autism every day, constantly talking to parents, and it became very clear I had many of the symptoms myself. Even before I had my diagnosis confirmed by a specialist, I knew I had found the answer.
Suddenly so many things made sense. I was able to look back at situations and misunderstandings and understand what had happened. I’d been told my communication could be “off” sometimes – a bit intense, a bit abrupt. Having an understanding of my autism, I have been able to take care of myself better. I understand the differences between allistic and autistic communication, and when I need to rest and recoup.
Autism is mostly an inherited condition. The largest study of its kind, which involved 2 million people across five countries, suggests that autism is 80% determined by inherited genes. It’s not caused by bad parenting or by childhood vaccinations. It’s not a mental illness. Autistic children are not unruly kids who choose not to behave.
I started my charity because I recognised that there was a lack of support for young autistic people and their families. Autistic children spend a lot of time “masking”, imitating socalled “normal” behaviour. They need to be able to experience their authentic selves. We run five-night camp programs which help autistic young people build capacity across communication, social interaction, sensory regulation and community participation. It’s also a place where siblings and parents feel supported and get a break. The results have been astonishing.
This is a social justice moment for autistic people. Over the past five or 10 years, the concept of neurodiversity – the idea that these differences in our brains should be celebrated – has become better known. We deserve equality, respect and full social inclusion. Autism isn’t just a medical diagnosis, it is part of our identities, and when autistic people ask you to go the extra mile in learning about and understanding how we think differently, we’re not asking for anything we haven’t done for allistic people all our lives.
We need to start making space for neurodivergent people at school, at work, in life generally. Autistic people bring a whole new set of skills with them. It is time society learnt to embrace our differences rather than requiring us to hide them away.
As told to Ute Junker. This story was republished by permission from Tonic
With every interaction, verbal or written, I go through a mental checklist.
addict, and made the life-altering decision to get sober.
In the years that followed, I used AA meetings and counseling sessions to distance myself from the man I’d once been. I also traveled back and forth between Illinois and Colorado, trying to build a relationship with my daughter. I was committed to seeing it function despite the fact that the relationship I had with her mother never did.
During those years, especially as my daughter entered her teens, our bond was often strained. She was not unlike me at that age – increasingly rebellious, increasingly angry – and life with her mother ultimately became too volatile for them both. Just before her 17th birthday, she came to Chicago to live with me and my wife. But what started out as hopeful began unraveling just months later when my daughter ran away back to Colorado. Within weeks of returning, though, she found life under her mother’s roof was the same as before: untenable. So she ran away once more, and spent the next year or so sleeping on her friends’ sofas, calling me here and there, somehow managing to finish high school despite all the volatility. When she turned 18, she returned to her mother’s house, landed a job at a bank, and mostly leveled out.
I watched her proudly, but with the breaking heart I think all parents must feel as they watch their children navigate the impediments of early adulthood. I watched proudly as she overcame emotional upheaval and rootlessness. I watched proudly as she demonstrated a laudable tenacity to change her circumstances. I watched proudly as she was quickly promoted at the bank.
And then one night when my daughter was 20, she told me through tears how things with her mother had spiraled once again and she felt they couldn’t even be around each other. I couldn’t help her fast enough. I wanted to see her safe and secure in her own apartment, away from drama and distraction. So when I found out a month before I’d planned to visit that she was dating a man 14 years her senior, it didn’t bother me simply because of their age difference. It bothered me because she and I were nearing the end of a long, difficult race, one that had left both of us exhausted. She was finally settled in her own place with a good job, and now everything was at risk again.
I was terrified that this man would upend her world. I was worried that he would influence her, and that she would make some of the same mistakes I had at her age. I was projecting, of course, taking plot lines from my own life and inserting them into hers, and to a degree I understood that. But simply taking stock of my apprehensions didn’t make me feel any better. I wanted to stop their relationship, to spare my daughter what felt like inevitable heartache. I also wanted to stand squarely in front of the man she was dating, look him in the eye, and hold him accountable for her still-tender heart.
•••
The smell of baking blacktop surrounded us as I waited for his answer in the summer heat. I wondered what my daughter thought of all of this, what this scene looked like to her. Did she see me as yet another man trying to assert his dominance, trying to prove his manhood, trying to control her life under the guise of protection? I could see how it might look like that, and it wasn’t entirely untrue. As her father, I did want to protect her from people and situations that might threaten her hard-won stability. But there we were, this man and I, sweating in the parking lot of a greasy spoon, both trying to establish our claims to a person whose independence was, ultimately, not ours to control.
Churning beneath it all were a litany of thoughts I’d yet to share with my daughter. Over the past few years, as I watched her grow, and as my marriage evolved to make space for me to understand and advocate for feminism and equality, I came to question much of what I’d inherited about being a man. I’d come to see that ideas I’d long held – that men need to be decisive leaders and sole decision-makers and majority breadwinners – were not just wrong, but harmful.
I stood shifting between a legitimate concern for my daughter and my regression to an old alpha-male trope. I also felt the needle prick of my own hypocrisy. When I was 30, I briefly dated a 19-year-old.
At the time, I told myself that I was dating her because she was attractive and intriguing, but I knew the real reason was that it was easy. I was months out of a relationship with a woman my own age, one that still hurt to think about, and hanging out with this younger woman helped me feel less lonely. I worried my daughter’s new boyfriend was going to treat his relationship with my daughter the same way I had treated my relationship with the 19-year-old – as an afterthought, a convenience, as something fun between two consenting adults but certainly not something to be taken seriously.
I stood there, a stiff jab’s distance away from this man’s chin, beginning to understand the truth of the matter: I wasn’t simply confronting my daughter’s boyfriend, I was also confronting myself.
As it is for many men, it is easier for me to feel fury than it is to acknowledge fear. Our masculine script tells us that we can be angry, but we cannot express ourselves in other ways lest we come off as weak. We need to “man up” and dismiss our pain. We need to swallow our emotions. We need to always assert our authority.
Even though I can label those ideas as the lies they are, I still sometimes find myself beholden to them. In that moment of confrontation, I chose to focus on him rather than myself. I acknowledged my anger and dismissed my fear. It was so much easier to be upset with him, to be distracted by confrontation, than to share with him the truth: that I loved my daughter to pieces, and I was scared she was making a mistake.
When his answer finally came – that he hadn’t known my daughter’s age when they met, that she looked older, and that he really liked her – it was predictable, and probably not all that different from the answer I would have given. Our conversation continued a few more minutes, my tension and anger slowly dissipating, and I asked him to respect her, to treat her well, to consider her past and all that she’d overcome.
•••
More than two years removed from that moment, I’m uncertain if my decision to confront that man was driven primarily by my love for my daughter, by my own need to feel some sort of control in a situation that felt so completely out of my control, or by some deep notion of how I think a man – or father – should act. Was I wrong to feel angry? Was I wrong to interfere? Perhaps. But my intrusion into my daughter’s dating life didn’t alter anything in the end. I flew back to Chicago. My daughter continued to date him.
What I know for certain is that I’ll keep striving to jettison this gender baggage. More than anything, I want to be a better father, husband, person. I want to coalesce what feel like fractured selves: the impulsive, domineering, toxic man I sometimes am and the consistently kind, loving, temperate man that I aspire to be. Because it’s in this melding of masculinities, in this synthesis of selves, that I can both fashion my future and make peace with my past.
I was worried that he would influence her, and that she would make some of the same mistakes I had at her age
In March 2012, Giulia moved to Rome to be with Mads and the couple travelled around Italy and Brussels for work. They married in Sicily in 2014 and their elder daughter was born later that year. At the start of 2019, they welcomed another daughter to the family.
“We love travelling, going out for dinner and watching good movies together,” says Mads.
When the pandemic hit, the family was based in Brussels. “We’ve come back to Rome again to be close to family. It’s a good place to ride out the storm,” says Giulia. With their family spread across the UK, Belgium, Denmark and Italy, they are finding the lack of travel challenging, but they love the time they get to spend with their daughters. “Marrying someone from a different country enriches your life, but it also requires hard work and mutual understanding,” says Mads.
After six years of marriage, Giulia says the things that keep the relationship strong are the same things that brought them together. “Mads has a lot of patience and puts up with a lot from me,” says Giulia, laughing. “We just see the world in the same way. Now we have children together, we see eye to eye on how they are brought up.” When they first met, Mads was struck by Giulia’s serious nature and consistency. “Our relationship is ever evolving,” he says. “But in moments of crisis we can always go back to that initial energy we had.”
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