That's Me! Autistic Lives. Unfiltered.

Jess Kwerel LPC, LCPC is a psychotherapist who specializes in pet grief and she became the person she needed. When she couldn't find a therapist who truly understood the depth of losing an animal, she built that practice herself. Since 2018, she's been doing the work most therapists won't touch: sitting with people in the most untethered, disorienting, portal-walking grief there is. In this episod...

Lindsey Burd is a psychiatric nurse practitioner who specializes in neurodivergent care. About 70-80% of her caseload is neurodivergent. She came to this work the hard way: a autistic sister with high support needs, two family members lost to suicide, her own misdiagnosis with bipolar disorder, and years of navigating a psychiatric system that didn't have the language for what she was actually exp...

Dr. Emma Smith is a sex therapist, trauma specialist, and host of the Intimate Philosopher podcast. She has a PhD, a practice full of Type A++ overachievers, and a very low threshold for false pretense... which, as she says, might be autism, might be trauma, or might just be that she's from New Jersey. In this episode, Emma breaks down what sex therapy actually looks like, why desire gets squashed...

Jessica Hazard is a therapist in New York City who spent years working in public health before working for her own private practice. She worked at school-based health centers, and community health clinics. She was also the clinical director at an agency serving young people who had been commercially sexually exploited. She got diagnosed with ADHD at 41, after spending years working with ADHD clien...

Livia Sara is writing what she calls her "motherfucker book!" Over 100,000 words on anorexia and autism, complete with the entire history of both conditions and how their storylines are deeply intertwined. It's called Anorexia Autistica, and she wants it in the DSM one day. She writes on this topic from both lived and professional experiences and is changing the world of eating disorders for autis...

Janet McNamara is a professional comedian whose 45-minute special "Not Smart Enough" went viral with over 130,000 views on YouTube. She quit corporate America after 15 years of panic attacks, got passed at the Comedy Cellar (with a little help from Amy Schumer), and is moving to New York to pursue comedy full-time. She's also been assessed for autism THREE times and rejected every time based on ou...

Rabbi Shoshana Meira Friedman came through climate justice, congregational leadership, and a burnt-out autistic body raising a high-needs autistic child who wanted the calendar recited as a bedtime story. Her son's burnout at age five, despite doing everything "right," despite being neurodivergent-affirming, despite zero childhood trauma, led her to PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance or Pervasive...

Jenna Goldstein spent 15 years as a school psychologist watching the system pathologize, punish, and misidentify neurodivergent kids. Eventually, the gap between what she knew was right and what schools were willing to do became impossible to navigate. The schools and Jenna were "going in totally different directions" in their thinking, their worldviews about humans and children, their understandi...

What happens when you're a occupational therapist in special education surrounded by neurodivergence every day...and then realize you're looking in a mirror? For Maggie Latona, it took a phone call with a parent about a student's autism diagnosis to finally see herself clearly. The stories the mom shared? Maggie did those things too. We talk about: Working in special education for years without re...

What happens when you spend your whole life collecting diagnoses like Girl Scout badges: chronic stomach aches at nine, sensory issues with socks, toe walking, IBS, anxiety, depression...and nothing ever quite adds up? For Brittany Siegel, it took having neurodivergent children, hitting a wall in her early thirties, and the algorithm delivering the right videos at the right time. We talk about: •G...

What happens when people-pleasing isn't just a personality trait, it's survival? When over-functioning isn't perfectionism, it's threat management? For Stephanie, it meant cycles of burnout that persisted until her body finally spoke up: a spontaneous coronary artery dissection. A heart attack at 40. We talk about: •Growing up with a volatile father and learning that people-pleasing keeps you safe...

What does it mean to live "in the well"? Gazit Chaya Nkosi, a speech language pathologist and Safe and Sound Protocol practitioner, shares their journey from decades of misdiagnosis to finally understanding themselves as autistic, and what happened when they stopped trying to climb out of the cave. We talk about: •Growing up in an evangelical Christian community and the intersection of queerness a...

Austen Marie spent years as a TK teacher trying to create trauma-informed, neuro-inclusive classrooms - until autistic burnout forced her body to stop. In this conversation, we talk about what it's like to grow up undiagnosed as a first-generation American, how masking as a woman in special education nearly destroyed her, and what it looks like to choose a slower, simpler life in order to heal. We...