I Always Knew I Was Autistic - Talia Mar On Late Diagnosis At 24

0:00Good sleep is everything. That's why OLLI's Science Back Support is made with a blend of melatonin and L-theanine for both kiddos and grown-ups. So when your mind won't switch off, you've got something that can help. Erasing thoughts and restless nights won't stand a chance. Find OLLI's sleep solutions for the whole family at OLLI.com. That's O-L-L-Y dot com. Welcome to We're Talking. In honor of Autism Awareness Day, we're joined by Talia Marr to discuss her journey with ASD from early struggles with masking to her diagnosis at 24. This is an honest conversation about breaking down the misconceptions surrounding autism and embracing neurodivergence.

0:57Clearly, you know, children are bullied and adults are also bullied for a variety of reasons. What do you think the reasons were that you were bullied? I think people are, especially kids, they're really unhappy when they don't know what they want to do. And someone else does know what they want to do. I probably came across as having a level of confidence that one I didn't have and two they definitely didn't have because everyone knew I wanted to be a singer I wanted to do this and I think everyone at school was like I don't know what I want to do and it was probably just a way of being like just shut her up like that's enough also I was a little bit weird I definitely didn't present myself in the way that everyone else did I made myself somewhat of an easy target okay how did you present yourself I struggled with like eye contact talking to people like openly I ticked I had tics at school like I had vocal tics and people would be like why stop doing that like why are you making that noise I'm like oh my god they noticed like in my head I was like no one's gonna notice it's under my breath like I did everything I could to control it but I just could not stop um and I think people yeah they just thought oh she's weird okay so these are the children saying this yeah did you have any friends among that that social circle so I had no I had like moments where I had friends or I had someone who like would call me their friend and then it would kind of go downhill for various reasons or whatever and I had a group that was supposed to be my friendship group, but those were the ones that wrote stuff on my yearbook.

2:45So I don't know if I would class them as really good friends. Yeah. So how do you think that that impacted how you showed up at that time? I think I just got better at masking. And like, fake it till you make it has been my favorite saying, phrase, quote, whatever you want to call it, my whole life. And the older I get, the more I believe it and the more I hone in to that like one saying um I think that's probably what really really triggered it so that's why when you just mentioned you showed up uh looking like you were confident yeah I'm like that that was an act oh yeah yeah 100 yeah I definitely have confidence in areas and like I can be really confident but I think it comes from a place of well if I'm not confident this isn't going to go well so I'll fake it and then sometimes it slips into real confidence and you have a moment where you're like okay I think I got this and then you might return to planet earth okay so if you were to give 11 year old Talia advice who's in that environment that she hates what advice would you give her do you know what I don't know if I would I don't know if I would give her advice like because I think and that sounds horrible but I think one I would have listened to it because I was so set on the way that I was doing things and two it worked at the time and I think I came out pretty unscathed considering and I think if I said something to her I might change the course of everything but you're saying she wasn't fine then yeah I don't know what I would say to her sorry no but this is what I find interesting she wasn't fine then yeah what would have made her fine people being nicer I'd speak to them you speak to them I speak to them I'd be like look it's enough she's having a hard day yeah but I don't know if there's anything I could have said to me that would have made it better I really don't know okay this is fair this is fair so at that time despite everything that was happening you still wanted to pursue music yeah that was your north star oh 100 % Yeah.

5:02It seems like a lot of your work comes with a message. Yeah. Because not all, I feel like not all artists have a specific message to what they do. But you have a message around your work. Yeah. I feel like as much as I always say I'm an emotional person and I'm an open book, I'm not. I often don't talk about that kind of thing because, I think because I'm emotional and like, I can't just have um a conversation about something upsetting or sad logically and just have that conversation without being emotionally distraught and wrecked so I just avoid it I just avoid any any conversation like that where I'm going to be super upset which is under the carpet bye bye yes so then okay let's write a song so that it's out there and like I then have told everyone having a bit of a hard time but I've done it with like a chorus instead of actual words Yes.

5:57You just kind of move on real quick. Yeah. Pass it. You know, what's interesting is that you've even used that technique with me here. Oh, really? Yes. Is that whenever there was a topic, so take, for example, the bullying that was happening to you as a young child. Immediately, what I saw you do is you would smile. Yeah. And make a joke of it. Yeah. That's me. Yes. So that you could quickly move on and not feel that impending emotion of sadness or fear. Yeah. Right. So I'm just curious in your day to day life. Right. Even to this day. Do you ever just sit in the emotion? No, I absolutely do not do that.

6:46um uh do i no not really i think i might have a moment like it definitely gets to me like i i'm a crier the whole internet seen me cry like it's not that i don't feel it but i i hate that feel i mean not that anyone enjoys it but like i hate that feeling so much i feel like as soon as i have a moment where I feel I can get out of it I grab it and I run right but what is it that you that you hate about the feeling you know so for example a lot of us feel distraught when we feel fear right and then I say okay but if you can get a get out of fear card moment yeah so you grab it and you run then that means you never sit in fear yeah and you you don't fully know what fear feels like yeah now is fear a good thing oftentimes it's bad yeah but many times it's good yeah it could save your life yeah you know it could save your life but you have to know how to recognize it yeah so then how are you then teaching yourself to recognize these emotions i think i'm not i think what i do is i go no one else reacts as as heavily as i do which means i'm overreacting so as soon as I can stop overreacting I'm going to do it so that's you just telling yourself yeah or I'll just have a moment where I spiral for a bit and then I get to the end and I go that's enough at what point do you have the ASD diagnosis that was only 3 or 4 years ago 2021 so if we could spend a good moment in this because I think this is one of these areas that even in the research for you coming in I noticed that there's not a lot out there with regard to women yeah with autism or autistic spectrum disorder yeah okay so you were diagnosed at what age with ASD 24 at 24 yeah what led to you even going in for that diagnosis because you had previously been misdiagnosed with dyslexia.

9:05Yeah. So I, for a very long time, had thought that I was autistic for a very long time. Ever since I learned about it at school, I remember I turned to the person next to me and we were learning about it and they were telling us, you know, X, Y, Z is a common symptom, if you want to call it a symptom common whatever and I said to him I was like everyone does that I don't really get it like this is just people and he looked at me and went no they don't I don't do any of that and I remember thinking like that's interesting and I just said oh no I'm joking obviously haha whatever move on and it just from that moment was always a thing in the back of my head of like every single thing they spoke about there I massively relate to but like no one has brought this up with me no one's ever said it no one's ever jested about it because we I was like maybe 10 at this point no like it's not even been a conversation around me so I kind of just had that moment let it go and then when individual incidents happened throughout the years that thought would come back and I'd go huh maybe this is the autism thing that I was originally thinking about presenting itself again can you give an example of one of those like I've really like growing up I never wanted to hug my family I struggled having dirty hands like I didn't want to touch things I was really really over sensitive to sounds to textures to um light to sensations I wasn't good at making friends I was really bad at eye contact I I just struggled with things that are what people would call typically human traits that everyone else would go that's that's not a hard thing and I'd be like this is debilitating what do you mean um and because of that fake it till you make it came in and I just learned to like okay well I hate tugging people it sends a shiver into the deepest core of my soul and it makes you feel blindly uncomfortable but I would just I then was like okay I'm just gonna go into a room and say I'm a hugger I'm a hugger and then I would start the hug I'd initiate the hug I'd give the strongest eye contact I possibly could no matter how horrible it made me feel inside because I was like no one else is struggling with these things I see and in doing so I masked and I covered up all of these little things to new people everyone who knew me could tell and they were like hold on a minute there's something sure um but it i essentially what my psychiatrist said was i did cbt on myself um cognitive behavioral therapy yeah cbt yeah um so when i got the diagnosis he was like there's obviously no cure but like there is you know therapy and there are treatments that can help combat the issues that you might face It's like, but it sounds like you've done this your whole life.

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14:16The stuff you don't typically think about, but actually, when you're traveling, it's really important to keep your data protected. But the part that really pulls me in is that I can change my online location to the UK. So even if I'm somewhere else, any location-blocked content is still accessible. To give it a try, download Saley from the App Store or scan the QR code on the screen. And if you want 15 % off your first purchase, make sure you use my code WNTT at checkout. Details are in the episode description. Was that you were not diagnosed with ASD earlier? I think because of the media. I think how autism is presented in the media is not how I am the things I'm interested in the things that I do the way I look the way I talk like you look at these programs that talk about autism spectrum disorder and they they focus on one specific end of the spectrum which is obviously the more severe end which okay yeah people might struggle to communicate fully like They can't, they don't speak until later in life.

15:24You know, they have a lot more severe symptoms again, if you want to call it that, that I think people forget that it's a spectrum. It presents differently in women. And also you can have different interests. It's not, you don't have to just love trains. People are obsessed with this idea that if you're autistic, you have to love trains or you have to love these really specific niche things. When really you just need a special interest, music. Music. There you go. so with the evidence being there you said the media is the reason why so you were and if you could just unpack that a little bit more specifically what was it about was it because you were so great at masking it or was it something else as to why you were not diagnosed i think it was partly that i was masking it and partly that no one in like even just little things like the amount of makeup that I wore like you never see that presented in autism like people like the the people that play someone who has autism in a movie they they have one specific rigid image of what that person looks like or how they present and that I think my parents and the people around me just thought well you don't look anything like that you don't speak like they do you don't have their interests so like you can't be on the same spectrum as them I see I see um when obviously like it presents itself one again differently in women and two it's a spectrum everyone presents so differently and I was also hyper emotional and I think a lot of people have this idea in their head that people with autism struggle with emotion and don't have any and it's like well actually I do struggle with emotion I have too much okay um okay so to the point of what you're saying with regard to women this is the one that blew me away in the research for you coming in is 80 percent of females with autism are undiagnosed as of age 18 yeah 80 percent that's crazy isn't it that's wild and to your point is a component of this seems to be masking is one component.

17:36Another component is the thought is that if you have autism, it doesn't look like her. It looks like him. But then also in the research, what I found is that it looks as if a lot of the studies that determine whether or not someone has autism are predominantly based on boys and men yeah and women were not incorporated into asd studies until recently yeah that's wild it makes no sense but it's i i feel like that's a common a common theme in in medicine yeah yeah how do you think your life would have changed for you if you had received a diagnosis earlier I think I'd have just had that like eureka moment I guess earlier and feeling like a weight lifted and an understanding because the reason I went to get my diagnosis was because I I started therapy and I remember I was talking to her about an instance of me being in a club and having a panic attack and leaving and she kept asking me she was like you know what does that bring up for you why why do you think you felt that and I was like I just I was overstimulated she's like no but what do you think that means and I was like I don't think it means anything I think I have autism and I was just overstimulated she would not drop it well and I was like I think I can't just go around saying I've got autism I'm autistic if I don't have a diagnosis so I was like I'm gonna go and get this confirmed or not confirmed and I'll find out something else about myself um because otherwise I'm just not going to be able to explain myself and sometimes I need to just be able to be like oh that's this by the way we can move on from that like it's it's it's a mute point um so I think my life would have been just a little bit more I'd have felt a little bit better about things yes I'd have forgiven myself a little bit easier yeah yeah not so hard on yourself yeah yeah what how did your parents react once you told them about it they were just like Yeah, makes sense.

19:51I mean, they had to fill out a bunch of forms for it about my childhood. And my mum and I were talking about it the other day and she was like, when you were a kid, I didn't think it. But now I look back and I'm like, how? How did I miss that? How did I not think that? Because all the things that you used to do as a child that other children weren't doing. She was like, I just put down to you just being, you know, extremely interested in rules. And you just loved justice. You just love following the rules. And like, you were just a really good kid. And it's like, no, my brain's just a bit different.

20:22Your brain is a bit different. Yeah. Yeah. When I look at the ASD, I think this is how it's listed in the DSM, right, is that it is a disability. That's wild to me. And that, you know, it's interesting because I think that when I, everyone I know with ASD, right, including family members, I see certain traits and skills as they have super human ability to concentrate and focus and achieve things that I don't think I can. Yeah, I get that. Yeah. I definitely think again with it being a spectrum obviously there's certain points it gets to where life is a lot harder like and things will be harder for people with it especially at the higher end of the spectrum but I think even with that there's moments of of like I guess moments of beauty and moments of like hang on a minute like the way your brain processes that it's actually very interesting and that's got you to a better conclusion than it would have got someone else okay all right it's fair it's fair so for everyone now who is in a space especially for young girls who feels if they have some of these traits these characteristics that you were talking about are not diagnosed your thought is as a parent as that as that young individual to go after the diagnosis i definitely think like it's so hard in the uk like the nhs is so backed up when it comes to anything neurodivergency mental health anything like that it could take years to get a diagnosis years to even get that first consultation but i think there is no harm in trying um because it can just give you answers and like it can explain things and also i think as a parent it can be overwhelming when you're trying to do something with a child that has asd and they're not responding how everyone else's children are responding it's like why is that happening and you start to blame yourself you start like what am i doing wrong as a parent it's like you're not doing anything wrong you just need to do something slightly differently yes yes all right fair enough and how did you feel simon embraced your as spring just slid into your dms grab that boho look for that rooftop dinner those sandals that can keep up with you and hang some string lights to give your patio a glow up spring's calling ross work your magic I think because like what I said before with me not masking from day one it was one of the things he liked about me because he had to if he didn't he'd have known immediately and been like I don't like these traits this isn't going to work cool I'm out so it's the little things like I think he just finds little things funny and it's like oh that's endearing that's cute, whatever.

23:19That's just Talia. And he's good at knowing when to calm me down or when to be like, okay, let's take a moment. Let's just like settle for a second. And when to be like, all right, it's enough. Okay. So he'd read me like a book. All right. This is beautiful. Yeah, it's great. Beautiful. And if you want to hear the full unfiltered stories from today's guest, you can check them out on the We Need to Talk page. Drop a like, leave a comment, and hit subscribe. See you next week.