Unlearning the Lie: My Journey with Late-Diagnosed Autism and Internalized Stigma
By Michelle Labine, PhD
August 2025
When my therapist first suggested I might be Autistic, I was caught completely off guard. She named it gently, pointing to patterns she had noticed in how I processed emotion, my sensitivity to sound and light, the depth of my thinking, and my need for clarity and order. For her, it was an invitation to explore. For me, it felt like everything I thought I knew about myself was suddenly up for question.
It landed hard, like something I hadn’t braced for.
Autistic? Me? That didn’t make sense.
I had built a life that was functional but successful. I had degrees, a career, a reputation for being capable and reliable. I was the one people leaned on, the one who organized, fixed, carried, and kept things moving. I had relationships, community, and a full life. Nothing in my understanding of autism reflected who I believed myself to be.
Because what I had been taught to see when I heard that word was narrow and incomplete. I pictured stereotypes that didn’t include women like me, didn’t include someone who was relational, emotionally attuned, and deeply embedded in the lives of others. There was no framework that allowed that identity to exist alongside the one I had spent a lifetime building.
So, I rejected it. And yet, something stayed with me.
It didn’t unfold all at once, but slowly, almost underneath my awareness. A story here, a conversation there, something I read that felt just a little too familiar, something I heard that lingered longer than it should have. I wasn’t actively searching, but things were starting to land in a way they hadn’t before, pointing toward something I wasn’t ready to fully see.
Looking back, I think it was the first time I was beginning to feel truly seen, and I didn’t know what to do with that. It felt validating and destabilizing. Part of me recognized it. Another part pushed hard against it because it didn’t fit with the version of autism I had internalized and it didn’t fit with the person I thought I was supposed to be.
There’s grief in that, and anger too.
Because for a long time, I made it about me. I believed I was the problem, that I just needed to try harder, push more, figure out how to keep up and hold everything together without it costing me so much. I didn’t realize that what I was carrying was the weight of messages I had absorbed over time about what autism is supposed to look like and who gets to belong within that definition.
That is the power of internalized stigma. It takes the outside world’s misunderstandings and turns them inward, shaping the way we see ourselves in ways that are hard to recognize and even harder to question.
For me, it sounded like a constant undercurrent of not being enough in some ways and being too much in some ways in other ways, and of believing that if I could just try harder, I might finally feel like I fit.
Recognizing myself as autistic didn’t change who I am, but it changed how I understand who I’ve always been. It gave me a way to make sense of patterns I had spent years trying to fix without understanding, and it softened something inside me that had been held tight for a very long time.
What helped the most was seeing myself reflected in other Autistic women, in their stories, in the ways they described their inner worlds. That recognition eased something I hadn’t even realized I was carrying, because for the first time, my experiences weren’t isolated or inexplicable, they were shared, valid, and real.
And that, more than anything, is what began to undo the lie.