Chapter 15-- "A Very Late Diagnosis and a Career Change." My name's Charles. I'm 59. I'm originally from New Zealand, but I've been living in Australia since the early '90s. I was diagnosed on February 28, 2014, so I would have been 52 when I was diagnosed. That was a big life-changing event for me, and I'm still coming to terms with the diagnosis and what it means for me.

I wish I would have been diagnosed earlier in life, but things happen the way things happen and you can't change that. Today, I work at a university making videos and taking pictures. I make content for their websites. It's quite a good job, and I'm lucky to have it in this pandemic period because I've had a very interrupted employment history. In my life, I've had long periods of unemployment on top of long periods where I've worked jobs I absolutely hated in call centers, kitchens, bottom-rung kind of stuff.

"Walking Off the Stage." When I finished university, I first started working in a professional theater as a trainee theater director. After that, I was working professionally in New Zealand directing plays. I think that, initially for me, everyone looks for a community to fit into, and theater was that place for me.

There's a lot of people who don't necessarily fit into the world outside, but they fit into theater. I thought that maybe theater was a place where I could fit in, find community, and make a life there. The thing is that theater is like anywhere else. It's a community. And there are certain roles, conventions, and all the things that a community needs to make it work.

While there may be some outside-the-box-type people in it, I still found myself having to mask and act very different when I was with different groups of people. I obviously had no idea that that was something that I was doing because I didn't have the knowledge and explanation of behavior that comes with a diagnosis. Ultimately, a lot of those issues surrounding masking is one of the major reasons I left.

I also noticed that there was a big discrepancy between what I wanted to do in theater and what I was expected to do. My weight always tended to shift towards what I was expected to do, and so the work lacked a kind of fundamental energy which it needed in order for it to be really interesting.

I did learn a lot. I learned a lot about performance and how to put things together, but it wasn't satisfying. There was some element missing that needed to be there, and it didn't help that I felt a bit humiliated personally and professionally. Add that in without a feeling of strong attachment and I had no problem walking away from it.

Anyway, after 19 years of working in the theater, I decided that I wanted to work in film. I had created a kind of persona for myself with all the masking that I just couldn't inhabit any longer, and the easiest way of dealing with that was to go to another country and leave that person behind, which is what I did.

So I moved to Australia and started film school in around 1997. After that, I was doing little jobs on the side, shooting things, editing, other things like that. I never investigated working in theater. I did do some script assessments just to make a few dollars here and there in the later '90s, but I never got on the stage again. I didn't really try to build a career in film because I didn't think it was feasible. There were and are also some problems with executive functioning and organization that got in the way.

I was getting into my late 30s and things started to go downhill. They just kind of got worse and worse. I'd always had a problem with depression, but it really spiraled. I got to the stage where you're not really feeling sad, you're not really feeling anything. You're just dead inside. I was living in very bad circumstances. I was drinking a lot. I was unemployed with no money.

I managed to get a job in a call center, which I hated, because there's calls coming in every few seconds and you're being bombarded with different kinds of stuff. That went on for about five, six, maybe seven years. Of course, when you're having to cope with working a really scummy, low-money job and it's hard to deal with, of course you're going to be depressed.

Then, by chance, at the beginning of 2012, I met someone at a party who worked at a university and she said, why don't you come work where I work? We'll pay you proper money and you'll be treated a lot better. There's some videos we need made and we'll try you out on doing that. If that works out, then maybe you can do more of that stuff for us.

So I went there and I trained for about two weeks, and then I started making videos. It was a perfect storm. The price of gear was dropping and they were looking for a greater online presence and someone to make video content instead of having to employ an outside company to do it. I worked there for a year and then moved to a different university. And that's what I've been doing ever since.

"Getting Diagnosed." I started thinking about getting a diagnosis because I have a very good friend who had been involved with a guy who was a bit of a handful for her. She found out that he had Asperger's and things that he struggled with as a result of that. After telling me a little more about it, she said to me that she thought it might be something that I should check out. I found the idea little strange, but I rolled with it.

There's an online test from Cambridge University with 50 questions. It doesn't tell you whether you have autism or not. But if you do it and you score about 28, it indicates that a diagnosis might be something worth investigating. I took the test three or four times and I answered the questions slightly differently each time.

I still tried to be as truthful as possible, but some of those questions had an aspect of vagueness to them, so I answered them slightly differently. Each time I did, it came out to about 38 or 39-- so, well above 28. Based on that, I went to the doctor at work and got a referral to see a psychologist. I met with the psychologist for about 2.5 hours, and eventually I got my diagnosis.

When I got my diagnosis, it was an extraordinary day. I came down from the lift from the 40th floor in that building feeling very different than when I went up. If you're in your late 40s or early 50s and you've had a really crap employment history, you don't feel very good about yourself. You sort of feel like you're a bit of a failure.

Getting that diagnosis made me realize how lucky I was. I don't know what the percentages are in the United States, but in Australia, only 36% of people on the spectrum are employed in any capacity. Not only did I have a job, but I had a job I actually enjoyed doing and going to every day.

The diagnosis for me was like, beforehand, I had been viewing the world through a particular lens and a lot of things that I saw through that lens didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. But suddenly, the lens was taken off and another lens was put on. The world just looked so different after that. It made so much more sense. You don't realize the sensory overload and exhaustion that things like masking can have on your life if you don't have the diagnosis.

Growing up, there was just something about me that seemed to piss people off, and it was very upsetting to me because I couldn't figure out what it was. When I was about seven, I learned to imitate other people's behavior to fit in. I would pretend to be like them. I would pretend to be normal. I had done that my whole life. It was exhausting. So the diagnosis was freedom.

Without having some of that knowledge in a certain fundamental sense, you don't know exactly who you are. You can't put a name to it. I'm sure that my mother is on the spectrum. She's 94 now and lives in a nursing home. And with also having dementia, she never really got to live life in a way that she was able to have additional knowledge of why she sometimes did the things that she did.

"Rediscovering the Creative." For me post-diagnosis, I have delved back a lot further into my creative side. I've always been interested in doing creative things like making films or writing. Writing is a very important thing to me. So is photography. The need to mask everything really got in the way of me exploring those. But since the diagnosis, I've begun writing again.

I've written little things in notebooks my whole life. When I would write things in my notebooks in the past after three or four years, I would throw them away. I always kept writing. It just felt like dead ends. But now, it just feels like something that's going somewhere. It feels like it's alive, which it didn't feel like before.

I even had a little thing published towards the end of last year, so I'm going to start submitting work to magazines. At the same time, there's always a lot of other photography-related things and filmmaking things that I would like to do. I want to make some little video poem projects. I have plans for things that I want to do. Now I just need to go do them. I'm optimistic for the future and what's next.