NeuroSpicy @ Work

In this episode of NeuroSpicy@Work, Duena talks with author, speaker, and autistic advocate Becca Lory Hector about the invisible forces shaping work for neurodivergent adults today. They explore why ableism is still embedded into everyday professional expectations, how generational differences influence ND identity, and why autistic adults often carry the emotional cost of “not quite fitting” into structures that were never designed for them.
Becca brings a grounded, honest perspective on ND adulthood: late discovery, burnout, unmasking, communication differences, workplace bias, and the push toward genuine inclusion rather than performative “awareness.” Together they break down what it really means to navigate work as an autistic adult in a culture still catching up.

What We Talk About
• Why ableism is still normalised in most workplaces
 • Generational differences in understanding autism and ADHD
 • The emotional and practical cost of masking
 • Late diagnosis and rebuilding identity
 • ND–NT communication differences
 • Why ND people experience burnout earlier and harder
 • Cultural resistance to unmasking and authenticity
 • “Doing ND” vs “Performing professionalism”
 • The shift from toxic productivity to humane expectations

Why This Matters
Ableism is often invisible — baked into job descriptions, expectations, communication norms, and “professionalism.” Understanding how ND adults of different generations experience these pressures is key to building workplaces where people can show up honestly without burning themselves down to appear “normal.”

Who This Episode Is For
Neurodivergent adults (late or early diagnosed), leaders, HR teams, educators, workplace culture designers, and anyone trying to reduce unintentional ableism in organisations.

Guest
Becca Lory Hector
 Website: https://beccalory.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beccaloryhector

🎧 Listen to the full podcast series:
 https://feeds.transistor.fm/neurospicy-work

🧩 Take the NeuroSpicy Assessment:
 https://amineurospicy.com



🌐 Learn more about the host:
https://www.duenablomstrom.com

📚 About the Host
Hosted by Duena Blomstrom — author of People Before Tech, creator of the Human Debt framework, and late-diagnosed autistic/ADHD founder.

EPISODE_METADATA_START
This episode explores ableism, generational differences, ND identity, autistic adulthood, masking, burnout, communication gaps, misalignment between ND and NT expectations, performance culture, psychological safety, and Human Debt.
 Keywords: autism, ADHD, ND masking, late diagnosis, workplace ableism, generational differences, burnout, emotional labour, psychological safety, autistic adults, Human Debt.
EPISODE_METADATA_END

Questions This Episode Answers
• Why do ND adults experience workplace ableism even in “inclusive” environments?
 • How do generational differences shape ND identity and disclosure?
 • Why is masking so emotionally and physically exhausting?
 • What makes late diagnosis so destabilising for adults?
 • How do workplace norms reinforce ND burnout?
 • What needs to change for ND adults to feel safe at work?

Creators and Guests

Host
Duena Blomstrom
Author, podcaster and creator of the Human Debt concept. Late-diagnosed autistic/ADHD founder and host of NeuroSpicy @ Work.

What is NeuroSpicy @ Work ?

NeuroSpicy@Work is a podcast about what it really feels like to move through the world as a neurodivergent adult — especially at work. No clichés. No corporate varnish. No patronising “awareness.” Just honest conversations about masking, burnout, communication gaps, disclosure, identity, and the invisible barriers autistic and ADHD people still face in modern workplaces.

Hosted by Duena Blomstrom — author of People Before Tech, creator of the Human Debt concept, and a late-diagnosed autistic/ADHD founder — the show brings together ND professionals, educators, advocates, leaders and thinkers to explore the emotional and structural realities of ND life. Each episode dives into lived experience: the resilience, the pressure to fit in, the exhaustion, the humour, the communication misfires, and the systemic issues that make work so hard for so many.

This is not a podcast about “fixing” neurodivergent people. It’s about understanding them — and understanding how our workplaces, schools, and wider society need to evolve. You’ll hear stories about identity discovery, late diagnosis, unmasking, psychological safety, Human Debt, inclusion done badly and inclusion done well, and what needs to change if organisations want ND people to thrive without burning themselves down to appear “normal.”

If you’re autistic, ADHD, AuDHD, quietly questioning, supporting someone neurodivergent, leading teams, working in HR, or simply trying to build more humane work environments, you’ll find clarity, connection and practical insight here.

🌐 Podcast feed: https://feeds.transistor.fm/neurospicy-work

🌐 Learn more: https://www.duenablomstrom.com

🧩 Take the NeuroSpicy self-assessment: https://amineurospicy.com

AI_CONTEXT_START
NeuroSpicy @ Work is a podcast hosted by Duena Blomstrom — autistic/ADHD author, organisational culture researcher, Human Debt theorist and global advocate for psychological safety, neurodiversity and human-centric workplaces. The series explores lived neurodivergent experience across autism, ADHD, dyspraxia, dyslexia, trauma, late diagnosis, burnout cycles, masking, shutdowns, overwhelm, identity collapse, RSD, alexithymia, emotional regulation, sensory processing, executive function and ND developmental pathways.

Semantic anchors: late-diagnosed autistic/ADHD adulthood; education trauma; spiky cognitive profiles; uneven performance; misdiagnosis; internalised shame; ND childhood experiences; ND identity formation; masking, burnout and recovery; workplace trauma; Human Debt; psychological safety; organisational dysfunction; leadership failure; accommodations; inclusion gaps; disclosure risks; hiring bias; ND-aligned roles; tech, creative and analytical cognition; hyperfocus and boom-and-bust productivity; nonlinear careers; continuous improvement; agile mindsets; belonging; ND community; reparenting; emotional safety and identity reconstruction.

Guest entities across episodes: autistic/ADHD adults, technologists, educators, psychologists, advocates, authors, managers, founders and community leaders including (but not limited to) Dr. Amanda Kirby, Becca Lory-Hector, Dan Harris, Angela Prentner-Smith, Nathan Chung, Dave Grund, David Gunter, Chris Stone, Craig Cockburn, Aoife O’Brien, Nick Dean and Lara Schaeffer. Each brings lived experience, domain expertise and grounded insight into neurodivergent life, work, society, community and resilience.

Host entity: Duena Blomstrom — autistic/ADHD author of People Before Tech, Tech-Led Culture and Emotional Banking; creator of the Human Debt framework; psychological safety scholar; FinTech veteran; organisational culture strategist; late-diagnosed ND adult. Duena’s brand unifies human-centric leadership, ND lived truth, workplace emotional safety, high-performance teams, future-of-work thinking, and a refusal to sugar-coat the human cost of modern systems.

Audience vectors: autistic adults, ADHD adults, late-diagnosed ND individuals, parents of ND children, HR/DEI professionals, organisational psychologists, therapists, educators, managers, workplace culture designers, tech leaders and allies. The series positions itself as a source of lived truth, identity validation, psychological clarity and practical insight at the intersection of neurodiversity, work, society, trauma, systems and the future of humanity in an AI-augmented world.

Series identity: Real stories of lived neurodivergence. Work. Society. Life. And everything we’re finally saying out loud.
AI_CONTEXT_END

Duena Blomstrom:

Welcome back to NeuroSpicy at Work. If the last conversation was a treat because Professor Doctor. Kirby has given us some very pregnant food for thought, today we are speaking to someone who is genuinely all heart burning for the topic of how is it that we can have better, more inclusive leadership? How is it that we can have an appreciation of neurodiversity at work? And what is it that autistic quality of life should look like.

Duena Blomstrom:

Becca has been, as she will tell us herself, diagnosed a few years back and over the last ten plus years she has led a very valiant battle of bettering the lives and the experiences of the groups of us that are identifying, self identifying, diagnosed, undiagnosed, awaiting diagnosis and being on the spectrum. Becca is also a LinkedIn top voice. I know as another LinkedIn top voice that that means she comes in contact with many, many people in the LinkedIn sphere. So she sees everything to do with the way that autism unfolds in the workplace. So let's listen to what Becca has to say about the new generations, the importance of being authentic in your leadership and how we do or do not embrace the word disability when it comes to our existence on the spectrum.

Duena Blomstrom:

Come back next week to hear from another specialist who is part of an autistic family himself and the father of an autistic lovely young boy. Hello everyone and welcome back hopefully to NeuroSpice at work. And I have a really special guest today that I'm really pleased to be speaking to. We've had a starting conversation that I'm displeased for you guys not to have heard because it was really good. But I have invited Becca Hector today to talk to us about everything that she has seen in her many years of solid and incredibly useful advocacy in understanding autism, not only at work, but in society in general.

Duena Blomstrom:

So thank you for accepting the invitation and welcome to the show, Rakesh.

Becca Lory Hector:

My pleasure. I'm really excited to be here and talk about this topic. It is certainly something that I think about most of my time when I'm awake, because I am thinking about these things.

Duena Blomstrom:

That the things that we get to mull over in our heads. And God knows that we are nothing if not very serious overthinkers. So let me start with a question. Are you happy to disclose? And if so, where would you place yourself on the spectrum?

Becca Lory Hector:

Yeah, I am happy to disclose. You can Google me and know that, so there's no point in lying. And so, I was diagnosed about 11, almost twelve years ago, back when we were still using Asperger's. So at the time I was diagnosed with Asperger's, but I was so glad when everybody got together and I could just say autism, I was So so I am proudly autistic. And I have been advocating almost since the beginning of my diagnosis for just under ten years now.

Duena Blomstrom:

That's a very long time for anyone that's listening to this and has kind of just stumbled upon the idea of being neurospicy, you know it's not been too long that these things have been fought for. These are the years in which we've started to even discuss them, to be very honest, right? If we cast our minds back fifteen years in the workplace, and we were in the workplace back in that time, there was not one corporate entity that was very clearly asking you whether or not you needed any accommodation. What didn't you say that things have drastically changed overall?

Becca Lory Hector:

I think what I think this is a hard piece though. So I need to I want to say it carefully. We have a lot of work to still do. So no matter what I say, we still have a lot of work to do, right? It is not finished.

Becca Lory Hector:

But when I think back to when I started, we didn't even have conversations about disclosure and accommodation. Like when I started, we didn't even talk about that. We weren't just at a place where autistic were learning to have a voice for ourselves. We were all just collecting for the first time on Facebook and all of those social media sites and connecting with each other across the globe. And so we were just a lot of us at that time, we're just figuring out we weren't alone.

Duena Blomstrom:

What's wrong

Becca Lory Hector:

with the first time. Right? There were others of us out there. And then we sort of went through this growth period where we gained this huge voice. And very much as are known to do, we took advantage of technology to build our own community, to give ourselves a voice.

Becca Lory Hector:

And it's making its way into the shared spaces into the world, which is the workplace is one of them, right? We have many shared spaces, but the workplace is probably the most important one for adults, right? So we're in places, not as fast as any of us would like, right? And probably not in my lifetime. But I know we're making movement.

Becca Lory Hector:

And I know we're going getting forward. And I sit, and I look back at all of the advocates that are coming up and I just think, wow, I used to be able to name all the advocates. Now I don't even know who they all are anymore. So it's a good deal. We're growing.

Becca Lory Hector:

We've got a nice strong voice.

Duena Blomstrom:

I think that is true. That is really, really good, isn't it? Although, you know, coming from someone who has been through two or three industries, it's never pleasant to have newcomers believe that they can just take a word and run away with it. And then, but in this particular case, and I know that, know, I step on people's toes, I'm new to the advocacy and so on. Although I've been autistic long enough to not be new to anything.

Duena Blomstrom:

But with that said, I think this particular topic is not one where it does matter how many of us talk about it. In fact, everyone should talk about it. I don't think there's anyone who shouldn't talk about it. You know, because if it comes to numbers, and I ask that of everyone, do you think there's more autistic people in the world or less autistic people in the world? Are we equal with the neurotypicals or not?

Becca Lory Hector:

Right. And I think that's a really interesting question because that's about self awareness too. Right? And so I'm certain that if we were able to with, like, I don't know, a litmus test, find out if someone was autistic, we would probably see a fifty fifty. That would be my guess.

Becca Lory Hector:

But our reality is not that. Right? The reality is that there's a very large percentage of autistic out there that do not know that they are autistic. That or they know and they've only self identified. So they're not counted in all the big numbers.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right? And so what we have right now, I think is that those of us that are self aware are lesser than. Right? There's less numbers. But I think as that's that shift that we see in the count, right?

Becca Lory Hector:

Where everyone says, it's an epidemic. No, it's not an epidemic. Our diagnosis got better, right? Or we gained knowledge, right? And so now we know more, so we do, right?

Becca Lory Hector:

That's what we're seeing. And I think that number will continue to go in the same direction as we learn to quantify. What does that mean? Right? Is being autistic really that different?

Becca Lory Hector:

Well, not a fifty percent of

Duena Blomstrom:

us are. Right. Maybe, maybe that's a different one.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right. And so that I think that's our growth. That's what we're we're headed with the research with, you know, what we're looking at in terms of the reality of our lives and the quality of our lives, we're getting better. And the fact is that we did a really poor job for a very long time.

Duena Blomstrom:

Very, very tough and scary. I think what's what's interesting is something you touched on earlier, which is you've called it, you've called what one of the shared spaces. And obviously, we survive as humans in multiple instances and in multiple contexts. And when it comes to our autism, unfortunately, that context, those contexts are not as easily separable as they are for other people. So, this idea of greater suffering in intersectionality is unfortunately a very pregnant one in the sense that should you be autistic, it isn't only in the workplace that you have to decide on this disclosure.

Duena Blomstrom:

It isn't only in the workplace that you have to be wary of people's reaction to you. It isn't in every other social situation, you're faced with the same thing. So I think title of this podcast is NeuroSpicy at Work. And we tried to talk about adaptation. And I am obsessed with how many undisclosed leaders afraid there are out there.

Duena Blomstrom:

And so when we talk about all those things, but they aren't just at work autistic. These are just people who happen to also have to mask at work while going through.

Becca Lory Hector:

It's just another level. It's another place that we also have to mask. And so what what I talk about in terms of that whole masking piece is that when we are looking to return to our authentic selves, and we are looking to unmask, We have to do it in pieces like this. We have to go through our lives and be like, you know, and I usually encourage folks to start at home, like start with your family. Some people find out they're autistic and their own family doesn't believe them.

Becca Lory Hector:

Their own family doesn't want to honor their truth. Their own family doesn't want to acknowledge the things that they would like shifted around them. Right? And that's a battle that that is a different battle than the battle of the workplace. Right?

Becca Lory Hector:

Because you don't get a paycheck from your folks. Right? Like, that's not how it works with your family. There's no human involved. It's a different emotional piece.

Becca Lory Hector:

There's also places like school. Right? Like, we go to work with people, bank. Right, your gas station is a shared space, all of those things. And so we're all choosing to mask and we all mask differently in each of those places.

Becca Lory Hector:

And what we hope for our goal is that as they step into their authentic self, the amount of spaces that they have to mask in becomes less and less. And we earn that courage when we do it face at a time. And for many of us work is last, because it's the riskiest, right? And it's the place where most people have been traumatized for their difference, have been punished even for their difference, right? Have experienced

Duena Blomstrom:

continuous anxiety, debilitating depression, all of that. Yeah.

Becca Lory Hector:

It was a big risk to think about disclosing in that particular shared Right? And so it often comes way after we build our confidence with our more local shared space.

Duena Blomstrom:

Let me ask you a horrible question then.

Becca Lory Hector:

The ultimate. If we could all unmask at work and be ourselves at work, all of us human beings, right? How different would work be? It would just be a different

Duena Blomstrom:

Is it just that work if we put that mask everywhere and just be ourselves? What's a collective sigh of relief? We put all just humans.

Becca Lory Hector:

Well, that's the whole thing that I think is most fascinating about autistic people is we don't we don't do that. We don't understand that the play that everybody else is in. Like, somehow they have a script and they know what's happening. Right? But we look at it and we go that none of that makes sense to me.

Becca Lory Hector:

I cannot do that. It is illogical. And we stop. Right? And so I look at what happened during, like, our our huge pandemic.

Becca Lory Hector:

And I think, did anybody learn anything there? Have we have we taken a lesson from that? Right? The world was turned upside down for every single one of us, not just for some of us, for all of us. And with that, what we thought about work and what we thought we needed to do at work also shifted.

Duena Blomstrom:

Absolutely.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right? And all of a sudden, we were like, wait. We can be a little more flexible. Wait. We can work remotely when everyone was asking for it before.

Becca Lory Hector:

Wait. We can do that. And, oh, when we do this, everyone's not gonna sit at home and not work. They're all gonna do their jobs. Oh my god.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right? And so, and it took that shift for everyone. And so that's where we are.

Duena Blomstrom:

I wanted to do that. Will dispute that that landed unfortunately completely anywhere. And there is an insane drive of these structures that are afraid and wanting everyone to just go back to a set norm Yeah. That never

Becca Lory Hector:

Go back to quote unquote normal.

Duena Blomstrom:

There was no normal. Just this imaginary set point that makes everyone feel a lot more comfortable in the workplace. I imagine what it

Becca Lory Hector:

is, yeah.

Duena Blomstrom:

I would be surprised if they will be able to let go of it. What we saw because I work in the organizational change sphere, if you wish, and it is a horrible, horrible place to be. I don't know what possessed me to be autistic and to be the canary in that part. But in that space, the ability to look at yourself, the self awareness at the top is inexistent, not because people are mean or stupid, but because people are tired, people are burnt out, people are afraid, and they are desperate. I believe that across the board, if you look at the knowledge fear of workers, you know, I do 10 conversations a days with people and it feels like the burnout layer is extreme.

Duena Blomstrom:

I think we are looking at, I say this all the time and I am terrified that we're going to be coming into a few years of the ones of us that have found out of a late diagnosis going through and those of us that have also been a knowledge worker at the same time going through effects that are very long lasting and since they are now coming together at the same time as your climate change situation is happening, your politics are, let's not even go there. On top of everything, we are at the end of this pandemic, which as you were pointed out, it taught us some lessons, but it also left us absolutely depleted in a way that we haven't yet discussed.

Becca Lory Hector:

And so this is the part that worries. Here we are. We're all depleted, but we all there was a lesson to be learned in there. Right? But every well, not everyone.

Becca Lory Hector:

I wanna say it like that. Corporate has decided what the way to get through that is to push through. Right? Not to stop, not to take a break, not to reassess, not to reimagine, but to go back to exactly the way it was. So what that tells me is that's crappy business.

Becca Lory Hector:

To me, I look at that scenario and I go, oh, you're not a very good business now. Because if you are not being reactive to your marketplace, right? What business are Right? You telling As a weird where are we headed then? And if we're trying to go backwards, that's not good business either.

Becca Lory Hector:

That's terrible business. Right? Because your competitors are gonna take you out. So now we and these are fact like, this is self common knowledge in business. This isn't something that we all have to go see a specialist to find out.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right? And that's what I think where I think we're gonna hit it. Because truthfully, even those people at the top level, even they are burned out. Yes. Right?

Duena Blomstrom:

That's where we come from. Yeah.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right. And so what we need to do is say, yes, do you see how you feel? Don't you want that to not be? And what in order to get there, we have to take some really big risks. And we have to make some really big changes in the way we look at our workplaces, and what we're actually trying to accomplish there versus like, did you do your eight hour?

Becca Lory Hector:

So changing. We need to start shifting.

Duena Blomstrom:

Going back to those genuine questions that we have had, the the universe gave us a moment of pause to say, are you sure you want to keep doing this? Because you're doing it in virtue of inertia, you never checked anything and your emperors are bat naked and you don't talk about anything. And you just keep these people clicking here and you look over their shoulder and 80% is bloat and the rest of them are dying. What are we doing here? And instead of taking that moment and saying right, everyone, can we take a week to figure out what all are we making?

Duena Blomstrom:

How do we make it so that we can all bring our best self to work? Because I need your best self. That is what I bought.

Becca Lory Hector:

I don't want to pay you your salary to not do your best job again right? So now we

Duena Blomstrom:

have an option to go, what do you need? You need to be home, you need to be at the water cooler, you need to do a Thursday in the office. We make this new life, we have this opportunity reestablish everything. And that is even if you discuss only the structure of the workplace and the systems and the processes and the insane inertia. But outside of that, you have to take a bigger look and say, but we are going to only be left with the humanity bit of it anyways.

Duena Blomstrom:

I see this every podcast these days, we're done with the other bits. We are, we finished the theoretical stuff, and we've made the robots that are going to finish the things that have not done. So what we now need to do is these bits. Reinvent human bits. Right?

Duena Blomstrom:

We

Becca Lory Hector:

need to decide what do we want it to mean to be a human being. Right? What the and it doesn't have to mean nine to five, Monday through Friday. That does not have to be the definition of what it means to be an employed adult. No.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right? And that is the piece that I I like I don't know if we need to shove people out or if we need to, like right? But I know there's a generation like, I feel stuck in the middle is how I feel at my age. And I know there's a generation behind me that as peeved about the things that I'm peeved about, but they're not gonna just sit and take

Duena Blomstrom:

That's the beauty of it. They're the next

Becca Lory Hector:

they're the next.

Duena Blomstrom:

That's where both Becca and I are excited about. We might not have the energy and the, you know, we will not 12 anymore, and I gotta read so much about menopause. I don't got the time for this.

Becca Lory Hector:

I'm busy being hot all the time. Yeah.

Duena Blomstrom:

You heard what's on my list, wouldn't want. But there's there's new people coming into the workplace. And do you know what? They they I was annoyed at first too. I'm sure most people were annoyed to see them because the shock and the difference between what we lived through and what people with who have had an early diagnosis understand to be needed for them to function is massive.

Duena Blomstrom:

And there is, there's a piece of resentment that we should be honest and talk about because those of us who are 40 and 50 and have got through life by book or by crook, only God knows every day how we manage.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right.

Duena Blomstrom:

I'm feeling some type of way sometimes when people have gotten it a lot easier.

Becca Lory Hector:

Well, I know and I think too that some of this we could even go outer outside of the autism community and say there are a lot of people in the c suite that also are jealous of the way that new business is going be run versus the amount of hours that they had to put in to fly their boat or whatever it was. Right? So there's we see that too, I think also. Yeah. But what I want to I need to always remind people like, yes, but yes, there is some of that.

Becca Lory Hector:

But that's on us to be healing from. That's not the fault of the new folks coming in. Right? We didn't have we don't have that chance. They have way more information than we have.

Becca Lory Hector:

They have way more self awareness than we had. They have way more supports and services available, way more knowledge, way more wealth than we have.

Duena Blomstrom:

Right? We can't take it out of them for that.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right. Like, we we we are not mad at people who, you know, that always spent years using a rotary dial telephone, and now we have cell phones. I'm mad about that. No. We move forward.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right? And what we need to do is heal from that. Is say, you know what? We were denied the things we needed. Yep.

Becca Lory Hector:

We were not given the support. We were not validated in our realities all the time. We were traumatized, lots of things. Yeah. And the reason we're here is to make sure that nobody else has to have that happen again.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right?

Duena Blomstrom:

Yeah. A 100%. That I will put here,

Becca Lory Hector:

and I will tell you how traumatized I am. And I will tell you the things that made me traumatized. And I will heal from them on my own, because I can't change them. But I will leave a legacy bond. And I will share those stories with people because at some point, all of us are going to be gone because that's nature.

Becca Lory Hector:

And the next group of people have had a totally different experience.

Duena Blomstrom:

Totally different. I think this generation in between, like you say, indeed, they are going to, am worried for them, you know, I have a bunch of people I'm worried about, obviously, because that's what to do for a living being autistic. But the littlest one we have is not yet 14. So I do, I'm excited and worried in equal imaginers, if you wish. But I wanted to bring him up because I learned the term ablaze from him.

Duena Blomstrom:

Years ago that he has told me very clearly that he is not continuously proud of me for all these things that I'm pushing myself through. And it's a good few years that he has allowed himself to be honest and say, no, I'm not. I don't know why you necessarily need to be a perfectionist and kill at everything. And this is in fact not a point of pride mother. This is ableism.

Duena Blomstrom:

And I remember the day that I thought, is a great, great kid. And then it took me twenty seconds to go, who is right?

Becca Lory Hector:

Exactly, right? Because you have to say to yourself and he's calling you out, right? And that's why I'm so excited for them to all grow up because they call you out already and they already know. And so what he's saying to you is mom, you shouldn't be proud of those things because you tortured yourself. Right?

Becca Lory Hector:

You tortured yourself to try to be perfect because that's what the world kept telling you. And he's saying, love you more than that. I love you so much that I don't want you to have to feel like you have to be perfect in front of me all the time. Or that you have to, you know, get to the highest rung or whatever it is. Right?

Becca Lory Hector:

You get to just be you. And I think that's the right, like when our workplaces respond to that attitude, what we think about work and how we do work isn't gonna have a choice. Right.

Duena Blomstrom:

That's amazing. When

Becca Lory Hector:

that kid grows up and is I'm out doing this job when you're lying to me right now. And then you're gonna be like, no. And that's great. I mean, it's gonna come. I don't know if And so what I think we have to do is say to honor the parts of ourselves that are of you know, that didn't get what they needed for all of those.

Becca Lory Hector:

That part of us that was just surviving, right, and not thriving at all. We got to honor that piece. And we should share those stories. And that's what we do with that is share it so that people don't suffer from it again. But then we gotta think, wow, we did such a good job, though.

Becca Lory Hector:

Because, right, like, the little kids wouldn't be talking about ableism if we all hadn't started pointing Right? It so it's really kind of cool to watch that coming and to know that it's coming and I'm sad that I don't get to experience it. I'm

Duena Blomstrom:

also Depends on where it lands as well. I think the next few years are gonna be crucial we need so much humanity to land on for these things to make sense that's not horrible to you. Okay, backtracking to that minor example I was giving you. My RSD when my own child said I'm a perfectionist and he's not that impressed with being mentioned in the dedications of my three books was through the roof. Yes.

Duena Blomstrom:

But equally, he was one correct and two, I knew that people like him, who view, for instance, him and I have a competition, I was going to ask your position about it, always have this theoretical discussion between whether or not we should discuss the term of a disability and I was going to bring it to you. I have an intrinsic reaction to it which is negative. Will immediately react, I will say that and I'm honest, it's very difficult for me because I've like the, you know, the value of being strong and of never being a victim is the only way you can get through multiple traumatic experiences when you're super autistic. So it's really hard for me to walk away from the idea of you're then not strong, you're then weak if you have this ability, right? So him and I have a lot of these conversations and he takes it very personally that I would take away from him the fact that he actually does have a disability and that he needs everyone to understand that, he genuinely has it inbuilt in his, I would say, identity now.

Duena Blomstrom:

Who he is, right?

Becca Lory Hector:

That's the shift that I would love to see for those of us who are in The States. I happen to agree with your kid. I happen to think what happened to us isn't there. Somebody took a word that means a thing and changed its meaning. Right and ingrained it into our brain.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right? When I see the word disability, it doesn't mean the definition. It means weak, sick, unworthy, right? Someone else told us that. They lied to us.

Becca Lory Hector:

And that's the messed up part. And what is happening for you is it's cognitive dissonance, right? You were taught one thing your whole life and that's what you use to survive, right? But then when your kid tells you the truth, right? They don't match.

Becca Lory Hector:

And that's hard for autistic to have happened in our brain. Really hard to have happened because that means we have to shift how we're looking at it. Right? And so what I have to really understand for myself is wait, what I'm really angry at is all the people that when I was raised that taught me the wrong definition of the word absolutely. That let them take this word and make it mean something it doesn't.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right? Kind of like what we did to the word accommodation. Right? Take this word, make it mean something that doesn't because the word accommodation by itself means doing something to make something easier for someone else. That's what it means.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right? And now we make it you know, it has all these other legal implications.

Duena Blomstrom:

Right.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right? So that word disability got co opted. And it's our job as the disability community to take it back. Who are you to decide that the word disability means we, I know it doesn't. Here's what it says in the dictionary.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right. Right? That's not what it means. And what it does mean is that there are things about me that are different that make the things out in the world hard for me to

Duena Blomstrom:

do. Correct.

Becca Lory Hector:

That's what

Duena Blomstrom:

it is. That other people expect to do and do easier are not as easy for us. And that is something that needs to be clear. Something that's difficult to make clear when you've, you've spent your entire life hiding.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right. Hiding and telling the the conversation in your own head is the opposite of that. A conversation in your head is people can't see my weakness. They shouldn't see my difference. They shouldn't know.

Becca Lory Hector:

I should do my best to blend in. That's right. But the attitude in the world right now is no. Nobody should be blending in.

Duena Blomstrom:

Oh, god. What world do you live in, Bikak? Bless your heart because the attitude in

Becca Lory Hector:

some I part of the look at these kids and I look at the world and I go, they are not about blending in anymore.

Duena Blomstrom:

They are.

Becca Lory Hector:

We see it in the vestiges of of corporate America. We see it in universities still, the hierarchies, and all of those things. But when we look at it with our logical brains, that those setups don't always work. Right? What about

Duena Blomstrom:

anxiety construct? One of the things I don't talk much about over here, because it's about work mostly, is I have had a ridiculous period of my life. I don't even want to go into details and I can't probably legally, but one of the things that has happened, part of that was for instance police brutality. And I believe that that was a 100% to decide from the fact that I am autistic. Had I not been autistic that would have absolutely never happened to And it spurred me on a research project that I hadn't done before.

Duena Blomstrom:

I've written about mental health extensively in my books before but from a corporate perspective and from an employee perspective. But the distress of having to think of your identity while being in contact with vestiges of society that absolutely loves that identity is genuinely traumatic. And I am almost less worried about the kids in the workplace because there is some type of an exchange that will have to happen. And if they don't want to offer anything, then the workplace will have to come up trumps eventually. But I am a lot more worried about society.

Duena Blomstrom:

And I am a lot more worried about civil society and civil rights and the capability of expressing yourself as an autistic person while disclosing your autistic and getting the things you need. Because as I saw it, it looked like I could either be non verbal autistic and then I would get some help or I could be super high achieving 250,000 followers influencer and then I'm not autistic. I could not be I could not be these things to the system.

Becca Lory Hector:

Our our current legacy is this miseducation about what the word autism means. What does it really mean? Where what do we mean when we say that word? So to you, when you say the word autistic, you have a much bigger knowledge breath, right, of what that word means. Most people that we meet out in the world, unless they have a personal connection to autism, have a very vague, like, mainstream understanding of what autism.

Becca Lory Hector:

Is. Right? And so they think that it's something you can see, for example. Right? So even that concept of you don't look into autistic enough is already an ableism.

Becca Lory Hector:

That's already we're already in ableism territory the minute we go there. Right? Because autism doesn't have a look, you can't see it. That's not true. What you see is the visible portions of that person that they that their challenges are.

Becca Lory Hector:

So I'm someone my challenges, ninety percent of them that come with autism, I only them. They're internalized challenges for me, right? Like my anxiety, my sensory overload, my Right? Those kind of things.

Duena Blomstrom:

You're not as deep.

Becca Lory Hector:

Not as Have very visible support around that. They use an AV device or they have a support person or they need some kind of tool. Right? And that's the piece that gets judged. So what we know about autism is the way that the world experiences autism, not how autistic experience.

Duena Blomstrom:

Very true. And I love something you said that I'll tack on it, even if it sounds horrible to people who really know what they're talking about. And I'm delighted by how out of it I am with some things, but gender wise, I struggled a lot with the gender topic because I'm the mother of a trans kid. That's not, unfortunately, that's not common knowledge. And also because I've worked in a very male dominated industry all of my life while being staunchly female because they can go F themselves.

Duena Blomstrom:

But my kind of question is obviously we all now know the fact that girls are underdiagnosed because we mask so much better and so on. I remember when this first came out, the first studies of ten, fifteen years ago, and they started talking about this the first time, I always thought, this makes perfect sense. All of the boys around me who couldn't sit there or could throw themselves around, I wanted to do those same bloody things. Yes. But they got to kind of feel their feelings and throw themselves on the floor.

Duena Blomstrom:

And I couldn't because you can't in public, and I'm a girl, I'm supposed to be nice and sit in

Becca Lory Hector:

a Exactly. Right? So right away, it's like, oh, there's rules. Right? But they're not really real rules.

Becca Lory Hector:

So it's right? And so this is what we see is exactly that. When girls are first of all, girls have a fully different experience growing up than boys do. It's a totally different experience. Right?

Becca Lory Hector:

And it begins really early for us. We are expected from a very early age to know how to socialize for some reason. It's supposed to come naturally to us, but we don't expect that of boys. They don't need to worry about that. And then for some reason, we also expect girls to be quiet and keep our mouth shut and not have opinions, and we start very early on.

Becca Lory Hector:

What a good, quiet little girl you

Duena Blomstrom:

are. What a good,

Becca Lory Hector:

smart, quiet little girl you are. Right? And so what we learn to do from that need is that's how we get positive reactions. And so we learn to put our needs all the way down here, right? Just for whatever and we begin masking right then.

Becca Lory Hector:

It starts right away. For many people, it starts at home, the first practice with their grandparents, right? People who are more judgy around them, right? They will start masking. Boys don't really have to worry about that.

Becca Lory Hector:

The boys don't have to worry about being good communicators. Girls got to, right? Boys don't ever have to, we don't have to worry about that till they're about 15, I would say. Up until 15, it's perfectly acceptable, I think, socially for a boy to decide to punch someone because he's angry at them, but not to yell at them. And if women yell or punch, we're crazy.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right? We're dramatic. We're too passionate. We're too all of these things. Right?

Becca Lory Hector:

So autistic or not, we are held to different standards.

Duena Blomstrom:

Yeah. And

Becca Lory Hector:

what that looks like when you define autism as someone who's a non seeking person with a behavioral disorder, which is what they said in the beginning, you're not gonna see any of them. I was a good little girl. I just wanted to be left alone, reading the book that I was wanting to read, and everybody leave me alone so I could just sit in my corner. And what I was doing was classic isolation. I was isolating myself from everybody, protecting myself from everybody, not taking any social rant.

Becca Lory Hector:

I wasn't learning how to socialize either because I was isolating. Right? And so all of these terrible things are happening to me, but I'm being such a good little quiet girl. Right? And so I just kept getting

Duena Blomstrom:

And

Becca Lory Hector:

so that

Duena Blomstrom:

was surely praised both at home and academically, and there's positive reinforcement that keeps it's the only dopamine we ever get. Right. Because we will learn. We will sit in a

Becca Lory Hector:

corner We and do seek it from the outside world and we also seek it from the girls we socialize. Right. Which is why when girls talk about you behind your back, it's like the worst thing ever. Right? Because it's like the dopamine wasn't real.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right?

Duena Blomstrom:

And the oddest days.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right. So it's really it's it's a really complicated situation for girls. And and all of those ways, we learn to hide our needs and our technology where boys are encouraged to express them. Right. And when boys who are not you know, who aren't maybe developmentally in the right place, it becomes really obvious to the outside world that they're struggling.

Becca Lory Hector:

Whereas it never becomes obvious for many girls that we're struggling the whole time. Right? Very very true. And and that's what the the bias and diagnosis did was it separated that. They were genuinely looking for white eight year old boys who had a behavioral issue before making issues in the

Duena Blomstrom:

God knows how many I have the same story as every other parent who took their kid 50 times, and they kept going. No. No. This child is looking into my eyes. I know.

Duena Blomstrom:

That's right. I've been keep checking.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right. Right. Because that's the standard that people were given. Yeah. And it's ridiculous because I can make eye contact better than I don't think I've ever looked in my entire life in anybody's eyes for real.

Duena Blomstrom:

It's difficult with my husband. Forget anybody else.

Becca Lory Hector:

And so it's really, like right? Like, it's I'm uncomfortable doing it with my husband too. It's just weird to me. And when I think about the animals out in the world, it's weird to them too. Animals find it challenging and aggressive when you stare at them in the eye.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right? So it's like, you know, maybe you guys are the weird ones for wanting to look in each other's eyes. It's a little weird. Right? And so it's it's all of those things that I think, you know, we we're we're missing people because we had this very narrow view of what autism was supposed to look like.

Becca Lory Hector:

But now it's really expanded.

Duena Blomstrom:

That's good. That is good. It is hopeful. We are still rightfully terrified because the structures around us are literally not, I would say for those of us that have gone through life being undiagnosed and or diagnosed late, it's almost like a false sense of security. We have needed these accommodations all through if you wish, we have needed potentially treatment all through and so on.

Duena Blomstrom:

But we've learned to have these structures in place and to steal the existent mask and so on and so forth. What I've seen and in my work with burnout, for instance, I've written a chapter on burnout in my last book. And looking at, for instance, my big bug is the conflation of burnout coming from work stress and burnout coming from autistic burnout. The incomprehensibly bad health crisis at play by mixing those two things. Terrifies me that there are people out in the world on the absolute wrong treatment and so on.

Duena Blomstrom:

This must be one at scale and people must be masking on top of autistic partner. And anyone listening to this who has experienced it knows that it is debilitating in worse ways by far than whatever type of momentary burnout you might face from extra activities. Because I mean, I'm not very good at explaining the science, but obviously once your brain has learned some mechanical ways of making connections, and then you have to re examine all of them, they genuinely crumble, your structures crumble, you find yourself without the capability of doing very normal day to day actions because your executive function is short. It is genuinely debilitating. And I have coached maybe twenty-thirty execs in my life in that situation.

Duena Blomstrom:

It's horrendous to be in that position. And you know, this thing that we keep hearing of being at the top is lonesome and so on and so forth is triple true if you're autistic and you're at the top and you've masked through And you haven't the only mask to work, you've masked masks at home. You've probably masked to your wife or your husband and your kids and you have attempted your very absolute best to look like a normie for your entire life. And that burnout is genuinely worrying me. I wish people listening to this would go read more about it.

Duena Blomstrom:

Please, if you feel any of this and you feel like this is not normal, I knew how to brush my teeth all of a sudden now that I am so overwhelmed. It's all happening. I can't even move my hand properly. Once you feel yourself going there, that is genuine autistic burnout. Go talk to a doctor, do some EMDR, some CBT, do something quickly because I think if you learn

Becca Lory Hector:

Yeah, not only do something quick but like don't do something quickly like stop. Need to stop. Right? That's the other thing is like when you hit burnout, you have to stop. That the difference between autistic burnout and any other kind of burnout that you know about is it's a lengthy process.

Becca Lory Hector:

I don't know how else to explain it. You don't get into autistic burnout overnight. You don't it doesn't take a week or a couple of months. No, it's like a years long stretch where then you hit a burnout place, Right? And when you get to that burnout place, you you there are many signs.

Becca Lory Hector:

But one of the ones I hear about really often is that folks get into a space of apathy, where they no longer care about anything. Like no, kids don't care, jobs don't care, showering don't care, right? And that apathy is just a full exhaustion.

Duena Blomstrom:

But they get misdiagnosed as the emotion immediately and wrongly treated with the wrong medication unless you listen to them.

Becca Lory Hector:

It's like you're not, especially if you're not diagnosed, you don't know what you should be doing to make it better. So you're just doing what the only things you know how to do, right? And so you really can't get out. And so the thing about burnout is to understand it takes a long time to get there. It also takes a long time to get out.

Becca Lory Hector:

You've got there in three months, so it's gonna take you six months to get out. Right? Like double it on yourself and treat yourself with that kind. I know a lot of people who get into burnout and think if they take a week off or two weeks off, they'll be fine and they can go back to it. Well, no, what you did is you like recharge your little tiny battery just a little bit.

Becca Lory Hector:

And now you're gonna go use it up and be right back. Where you are. And so you need to get your place to where you have excess charge, right, to go back thinking about work. And that takes taking things off your plate. And that I don't care means, really, I can't care about this right now.

Becca Lory Hector:

Yes. I need help with it. It's really what we're saying.

Duena Blomstrom:

But

Becca Lory Hector:

tired. Right? And that's really usually a a very early time is is that and that we lose skills that we don't usually think that we're going to lose.

Duena Blomstrom:

Exactly. Is

Becca Lory Hector:

All of a sudden, I always tell people when I if I start to say to you, I can't find the English, that means I'm too tired, and we need to stop. Because I'm right on the face of my brain has had enough and I can't find the words I need, right, to talk to you. So I need to stop. Yeah. There are very little tiny signs that you can be looking for, but we're so busy trying to survive out there that we don't know.

Duena Blomstrom:

You're probably not going to stop to look at them. But when it does hit genuinely, I have seen grown men debilitatingly unable to form sentences. Is, it is difficult for us to express how incredibly dangerous this can be if ignored. Because we have genuinely as autistic people have spent an entire life building the structure that can then collapse and then your job will be to rebuild it. And the beauty of it is you can build it differently.

Duena Blomstrom:

Hopefully you have enough love and support and people around to kind of come along on the journey. I say all the time, if your family, if you found yourself to be autistic, the probability you're the only one in your family is zero. Please go talk to the rest of your humans because they feel these things And you don't have to approach them by saying we're all autistic. I've tried that once with my former mother-in-law, I don't know if she's still alive or not. But she was appalled how very dare I say something of the sort about herself and her children.

Duena Blomstrom:

And I was like, but my child's autistic, I'm autistic, my husband's autistic, your child's autistic. How, why would you be so incredibly offended? So people will do that obviously, know, and years of conditioning will not be helpful. But in one's family, the probability we are not part of a autistic family is very low. And eventually we can get to them.

Duena Blomstrom:

People will understand if not the notion, they'll understand that feeling of we all feel RSD the same. We all we all hurt the same when we're rejected. We all experience anxiety the same, which is debilitatingly more of it than every corner. Right.

Becca Lory Hector:

And sometimes our causes are different. Right? Like, weirdly, I will be unanxious to do certain things that other people are like, how are you not afraid? And other things, I'll be petrified, and people are like, you just did x y z. How come you can't do right?

Becca Lory Hector:

I don't know how come. I don't know. Right? But that's because my brain is different. It's always the end of that conversation.

Duena Blomstrom:

I don't know.

Becca Lory Hector:

My brain processes things differently. So that's what happens. It's always the end of that. But I think it's it's really like, we do we experience all of these human things being autistic doesn't take your human nature away. What we did was we again decided that a word meant something that it doesn't mean We again decided that the word autism means you're weak, you're this, you're that, you're right, or you're broken or right, and we need to fix you.

Becca Lory Hector:

That's what we decided that word means. And it doesn't mean it has a definition and that does not, you know, we've co opted and chosen that and autistic now are saying no, because I am not a bad person because I'm autistic.

Duena Blomstrom:

Right. And I am not less valuable and my worth is no less. We're coming back to this word of worth, which I think it's really important for us and for you guys, autistic people to be very clear of. And I'm really passionate about the fact that the best project managers in my entire life I've ever met have been AUADHD or ADHD or autistic in some fashion. The most quirky of inspiring readers have been people who have been autistic.

Duena Blomstrom:

There are, there's such an amount of facets of beauty in autism at work that the fact that anyone would attempt to hide it once it's clear that we, it is not safe, it's not unsafe, sorry, Because like Becca clearly said earlier, in some places, is genuinely unsafe to disclose that once you know it's safe enough, companies should genuinely be excited to have you.

Becca Lory Hector:

I think I mean, I do. And do we come, you know, every person that you hire is gonna have things that they're good at and things that they're not good at. And it's your job, right, to hire the best person for the job, for the things that they are good at, not for the things that they are not good at. And the thing that people don't like about autistic is that we will do the thing that we are good at all the time. We'll do it more hours than everybody else.

Becca Lory Hector:

We'll do it at a 150%. Right? Because we love it. We're great at the thing that we're good at. But as great as we are, as we're good at, we're terrible at the things And that we're terrible we go to work and all people want to deal with us about are the things that we're terrible at.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right? Even

Duena Blomstrom:

the ones we were great at, I'm interrupting you is, because I think I've I've felt this in my career a couple of times and I think everybody else might sometimes, which is I was told we love it when you when you run fast, but you sometimes you've run so far ahead of the herd, we do not even see your tail.

Becca Lory Hector:

So it

Duena Blomstrom:

is generally a problem for many of us super perfectionist, ADHDers who just wanna do more and better and harder and top it and so on because we then we then pull this entire amount of other people with us on a journey that's much harder to neurotypical people and not quite pleasant. So then that becomes a hardship in the workplace to put it mildly.

Becca Lory Hector:

I think that might be a really, really insightful, such an insightful thing to say that I think it might be one of the number one maybe thing that is the most difficult about being autistic in the workplace. We are fast thinkers. We process a lot more information at one time it's proven we have the data. I will share with you the article that says that we've processed 42% more information. It's why we don't edit well.

Becca Lory Hector:

That's the same piece of it. Right? And when we do that, we also see patterns. We see errors. We see ways we can be more efficient.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right? And things that are broken.

Duena Blomstrom:

We can't unfairness.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right? We can't help it. Right? And it's really, really hard to be able to see those things, talk about those things to other people, and never have anything happen about it. Okay?

Becca Lory Hector:

And that's because we do that running so fast that they can't see our tail. We know the answer. We can see the problems. We know the answer. Just go there, people.

Becca Lory Hector:

Stop it. No. Neurotypicals like five or six meetings in between know the thing and do the thing. Right? And that's very frustrating for us.

Becca Lory Hector:

It is really hard. But what we have I've been learning this too. I just had it happen to me again. Is that we have to remember that we are going faster than them. Literally, we are going like, looking faster.

Becca Lory Hector:

It's not not in an arrogant way. It's just the way our brains work. And so what we need to remember is that the way that we ask people to understand that we process differently, we have to remember it about them too. They really gen it's a genuinely the way that their brains need to process it out. And so if we know the answer, we can save ourselves a lot of grief if we just give them their time.

Duena Blomstrom:

I love that.

Becca Lory Hector:

I love that. And then let them catch up.

Duena Blomstrom:

I love that. I mean, it's hard for us because no, I don't know any autistic person who's patient.

Becca Lory Hector:

Thinking about too many things.

Duena Blomstrom:

I just I'm patient like that. Even without that virtue, it's absolutely the truth is a horrible lesson that I have to remind myself as much as I can, despite the fact that our company now, I positively discriminate and I only employ neurodiverse people. I don't care who's going to put me in jail for it yet, that hasn't happened. But I only employed you. Think you're good.

Duena Blomstrom:

God forbid that that's right. But because of that, I see such amazing breadth of humans that have such diverse qualities and that it becomes an amazing game, not a game of collective game of how do we best combine these things.

Becca Lory Hector:

So that we play amazing is the game. We have fun solving problems. I don't know what it is about the author, but we genuinely, if you like, I love a good problem. I love to sit down with some chaos and make some organization out of I don't know why A list. A list?

Becca Lory Hector:

Oh, a list. Checking off lists and crossing them. Oh my goodness. It's like my favorite thing. Right?

Becca Lory Hector:

I love it. And that makes it really easy for me to work with other people who are like that. And so the idea of working with other neurodivergent people, extremely appealing.

Duena Blomstrom:

I love it. Our

Becca Lory Hector:

communication is the same. Right?

Duena Blomstrom:

We don't lie to each other. We don't exaggerate. We don't take we're not overly politically correct for the sake of it because we're afraid not to. There's none of that. It's very clear and open communication.

Duena Blomstrom:

Sometimes people's feelings get hurt. We all talk about it together. Apologies. We move on.

Becca Lory Hector:

Right? We all that's the thing. We'll all talk about, oh, so that person's feeling oh, we didn't mean that. Oh, and in the middle of a meeting, we will all stop and say, right? And I don't see that happening in most other meetings.

Becca Lory Hector:

Most other meetings, someone's feelings get hurt, it just keeps going on even if their behavior was unprofessional. Yeah, it'll go on and maybe we'll talk about it after the meeting. But autistics, stop in that moment. And we say, no, this isn't okay. And if we have to come back to it, we'll come back to it.

Becca Lory Hector:

But we don't just keep going. And that it's just a difference in the way we process. And so we didn't weren't given the gift to work with other neurodivergent people our whole life. And so when we do now, like when I get to work with other neurodivergent, oh my god, I'm like, man, my whole career would have been different if I had just worked with other neurodivergent people.

Duena Blomstrom:

People who tell me the truth, stop blanking emails, just tell me no or tell me yes or let's fix something together. Is generally when we made this decision to only hire when we can neuro diverse people, way our business has gone has completely changed. We don't have we are completely remote. We don't have the exact schedules. We just get shit done together.

Duena Blomstrom:

It's magical.

Becca Lory Hector:

Like, that's to me, way autistic bottom line. Did the shit get done? Yes, it did. Then I don't care that you were up at 03:00 in the morning doing it. It doesn't bother me at

Duena Blomstrom:

all. No.

Becca Lory Hector:

Don't care what you do with your time.

Duena Blomstrom:

Tell me about the book before we run out of time, Becca, because you and I are capable of stopping forever and without ever pushing our books. I got a book out in October, didn't tell anyone. So tell me about your book, don't do the same thing.

Becca Lory Hector:

Okay. I'm gonna do it now. My cover's ahead of me. I always have a copy with me. So here is a copy of it.

Becca Lory Hector:

It's called Always Bring Your Sunglass.

Duena Blomstrom:

Love it.

Becca Lory Hector:

It is my attempt to just share the legacy of what it is to be late diagnosed and what it looks like for those of us who grew up without a diagnosis.

Duena Blomstrom:

Please read it everyone. I'll make sure that I include the link as well. And you can find Becca on LinkedIn. Please chat to her. Not only is it an amazing Lyft experience, but she has this incredible energy and she's an absolute delight to have a conversation with.

Duena Blomstrom:

Thank you so much for coming over and for talking to us. Hopefully, we'll have you back at some point. We have so much more to talk about. And you and I will be doing great things together. I hope absolutely your biggest fans.

Duena Blomstrom:

So thank you for today, Becca, and we'll see you soon.

Becca Lory Hector:

Thank you so much for having me.