Angela Kingdon uses her story to try and help

Post Reply New Topic

A woman from Bristol has spoken of how she had no friends, had been sacked from every job she had and had even started planning how she was going to take her own life, until her life turned around for the better when she was diagnosed as being neuro-divergent and having Asperger’s Syndrome at the age of 39.

Now 52, Angela Kingdon said discovering she was neurodivergent and on the autism spectrum changed her life, and has dedicated her life to advocating for people with autism and helping others who are discovering later in life that they are neurodivergent.

The American author and podcaster who now lives in Bristol, has explained how her life before her diagnosis was troubled - she was considered ‘weird’, and known as ‘the purple-haired theatre girl’. She said her diagnosis didn't change anything about who she was, but meant she was suddenly able to understand why she was like the way she is.

“I got fired from every job I ever had,” she said. “This was because of my direct communication style - people found me blunt, rude, or abrasive. This is common for autistic people. We are often misunderstood. Now I know that if I hang out with autistic people, there’s one communication standard, and if I hang out with neurotypical people, there’s another. It needs to be discussed. This is called the Double Empathy Problem.

Autistics have trouble understanding neurotypicals and vice versa, so we have to work hard to communicate across neurotypes. It was a struggle to maintain friendships too, but theatre was a great escape because as an actor, stage manager, or director, I had very specific roles and jobs, and clear rules. I knew exactly what I had to do and could do it better than anyone else. That gave me value, and that would sort of prove my worth,” she added.

“The ‘purple-haired eccentric theatre girl’ was a cover story,” Angela explained. “I was weird, but fat theatre chicks are supposed to be weird, so it all made sense. It fit. We didn’t have the diagnosis we have today for autism; we just had weird theatre chicks and punks. We thought of autism as a form of developmental delay and intellectual deficit.

The truth is these are two different conditions. Autism is when your brain is hyper-connected. You may or may not have an intellectual disability as well - about 27% of us do - and you may or may not be intellectually gifted or a genius. But despite media portrayals and autism moms, this is not the majority,” she added.

Throughout her childhood and most of her adult life, Angela said she struggled to fit in and to be herself - she faced rejection in every job, struggled to form lasting friendships and battled intense self-doubt. She said she was left questioning what was wrong with her and planned suicide.

“I sought therapy, spirituality, and philosophy because I had no job and no friends, and the one consistent variable was me. I was broken. Something was wrong with me,” she said. “Everyone else seemed to know how to ‘human,’ and I didn’t.

I had friends and bosses have difficult talks with me, saying ‘something is wrong with you’ but still, I wasn’t diagnosed or identified. So, I turned to religion, and they told me to ask God for forgiveness. I was a catechism teacher in a Catholic church and went to church every week, but that didn’t fix it. I asked God to save me, and He didn’t.

“I was still getting fired from jobs and losing friends. I ended up working with a life coach who taught me about the law of attraction. That’s when I learned that if I acted neurotypical, I would get better results. I started wearing a mask, trying to fit into this world I didn’t understand. I got great results - I made money, kept friends, stopped fighting with my family - but masking all day made me exhausted. I lost my voice, had stomach issues, and eventually got so anxious and depressed that I started planning my suicide,” she explained.

Angela only discovered she was autistic at the age of 39. She had been fired from a job and was taking legal advice about whether she could sue for unfair dismissal. It was the lawyer who sent her to a psychiatrist who diagnosed her with Asperger’s. “I saw my Asperger’s diagnosis as a sign that I had a medical condition I was going to have to work hard to overcome. I wasn’t prepared to face it, but it helped me understand why I’d struggled so much in my life.

“Everything is different now. I don’t have meltdowns anymore, so I’m not going to get fired,” she explained. “Let’s say I go to dinner with my sister-in-law, and she picks a place with music on and a TV. In the past, this would have made me dysregulated, and I would’ve had a meltdown. I would have said something inappropriate and stormed out.

“She’d think I was a jerk, and I’d be trying to explain to my husband why I’d acted that way. I didn’t realise what set me off - the music, temperature, or the smell of truffle in the restaurant. But now, I walk into a place, and if I smell truffle, I think, ‘Okay, I have a scarf to block the smell.’ If it’s cold, I’ve got my extra sweater. And then, if they seat us in a room with a TV and music, I know exactly how to handle it. I just say, ‘We need to go somewhere else.’ I’m able to regulate myself and keep everything calm,” she explained.

Now the author of seven best-selling books on autism, Angela is already a few episodes into a new podcast, called the Autistic Culture podcast, which aims to highlight and celebrate the contributions made by neurodivergent people.

“I started the podcast to save lives because people like me are out there dying from treatments trying to ‘fix’ autism,” she said. “We know that autistic people are more likely to have IBS, but we don’t blame their autism for it. We don’t need to fix autism; we need to address the medical issues that come with it, like IBS, fibromyalgia, or other co-occurring conditions. But autism itself is a culture that needs to be embraced, not fixed.”