The moment I was diagnosed as Autistic and the ways I made it a superpower
Chris Riley, a HubSpot manager, shares his adult autism diagnosis at Level 1 after years of misdiagnoses for OCD, bipolar disorder, and ADHD. He describes the four-hour evaluation, sensory sensitivities, and how masking strained his marriage, then walks through practical tools like a feelings wheel and mentoring that helped him reframe neurodiversity as strength.
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So thank you for joining my talk today. This is a very personal talk. It is about the moment I found out I was autistic officially, and how I made it a superpower. And all of you are superheroes for joining something like this, because I think that that says a lot about you. It says a lot about your interest in learning whether you want to be an ally, whether you want to. You're exploring aspects of your life and it's a big deal. And that's the reason I do it, by the way, because this is not comfortable. I do a lot of talks. These ones are not comfortable. This is like my fifth time I've done this type of talk and it's always a bit rough. I wanted to start out just showing two childhood photos of myself. And I'm not going to say much about these photos just yet. All I'm going to tell you is that for the last 20 years, this. These two photos, anytime I come across them, have just. I've been preoccupied with it and I haven't really known why until this year. And part of this story is how I came to understand these photos better and what they meant to me. But I'm not that little boy anymore. I'm a big boy now. My name is Chris Riley. My pronouns are he, himself. I am a senior manager on our developer relations team. Developer relations team leading our six awesome, amazing, talented, brilliant developer advocates. And I feel very privileged to be here at HubSpot. I feel very privileged to be able to lead them. It's always been my goal to become a manager and lead people who are smarter than me. And I've done it. So I'm very happy about that. I put my Myers Briggs disc and anagram numbers up here for a reason. I'm not actually going to focus on. On these at all during this call, but if you watch this recording later or if you like start to process the things that I say and you think about the intersection of these various things to my diagnosis, it becomes very interesting. So, for example, like, the fact that I'm a DI with disc is like totally obvious and that's my work life and that's great. But Enneagram tends to be a bit more personal. And if any. If there's any other intense creatives out there who could give me advice on not how to be my own worst enemy in my personal life, please do. Because once I found out about enneagram4, it was both good and bad. So I just think it's interesting how all of this stuff intersects. Quick disclaimer like this. This is rough. This is hard. It's triggering for me. It will be triggering for me. You will see that. It will become obvious when it is, it might be triggering for you. That's okay. Feel what you feel, all of your feelings. Any possible feeling you have during this talk is fine. If you have to leave, leave. If you want to watch the recording later, do that. I am telling you my story. I can't speak for you, but my hope is that my story, there's. There's things to be learned in my experience, so take it for what it is. I am not a therapist. I do find all this stuff very fascinating, but I'm not a therapist. The reason I give these talks is because I think it's my responsibility too. Being a developer advocate. A big part of my job is speaking at events. Granted they're about software talks and not this, but because there's so much stigma around this sort of stuff, the only way to really make it okay is to be vulnerable in public. And that's part of my job. And it's something. Vulnerability happens to be one of the traits of autism, that it's very easy for me for whatever reason. And so I feel like it's my responsibility to share, to make it more normal for everybody else to share, if that makes sense. So before we start talking about the autism stuff, I have to tell you that, like, for the last 17 years, since the point of those little boy pictures to today, I have gone through or when I was 17, not last 17 years. I'm 42 now. I have been going through a series of mental diagnosis, all starting with ocd. My first misdiagnosis was ocd, which happens to be a very common misdiagnosis with autism. I was also misdiagnosed bipolar. And that one was actually more catastrophic for me because now, even to this day, prevents me from getting life insurance. No longer misdiagnosed bipolar. We've refined this and I've been continuing to refine this my whole life. After OCD came dyslexia and generalized anxiety. And then after that was adhd, but not a full understanding of it, but mostly understanding of it. And then two years ago, my therapist Shannon from Modern Health brought this whole CPTSD thing up to me, which just totally rocked my world, finding out that what I used to joke about, about my parents with jaws out abandonment actually ended up being a very serious thing and a trauma bond with my sister. So I've done a lot, and there's a lot of medication that's baked by all this as well. I haven't shied away from any of it and I'm proud of all of it. The misdiagnosis is. Are unfortunate and happen to be very common. And the reason I put borderline and narcissism on there is because those are two other very common misdiagnosis for autism which are extremely dangerous. And I have been called both of those. I have not officially been diagnosed him, but I haven't been called them. But what we're here to talk about today is the autism diagnosis, which is something that's been suspected in my life for, for, for quite a while. But it's kind of, you know, this thing maybe you, you know, maybe you're autistic. But then I actually went in and I talked to my, both my therapist and my psychiatrist and, and they, they recommend that, you know, you could go and do a full psych about say, which is like that's the official way for neurological disorders to get your official diagnosis on paper. If you're seeking a 504 accommodations, that's how you get that. And so I thought I would participate in this. I found out it was extremely expensive, but extremely. That's me being dramatic. It's expensive, but I thought it would be a tool number one, mostly for my personal life, not so much my work life, mostly my personal life. And I'll say about more about that in a bit. And so it took me six months to get an appointment. So prior to August, I booked six months in advance to get this appointment because it's, it's a, it's a big thing. And finally on August 30, 2023, which is not that long ago at 10am Downtown Denver, show up to this cute old house, looks like a psychiatrist office walked in and I was ready. Like I thought I got this. No problem. This is going to be interesting and it might even be fun because like I said, I do actually kind of enjoy learning about this stuff. Well, I didn't have it and it, it wasn't fun. No, it, and it, it. And at the time it also wasn't even very interesting. As a matter of fact I, in retrospect, sure, maybe it's interesting, but it turns out that it's not like you just show up for an hour and talk to somebody. It's four hours. Four hours in this cute little place in a room, very uncomfortable. The. When they look at neurological disorders, ADHD and autism in particular, they focus on your childhood because the traits are expected to show up in Your childhood. And that's where you spend a lot of your time discussing. Well, it turns out that if you take somebody who has childhood abandonment stuff, sit them down for four hours, ask them a bunch of questions about the childhood, they're probably going to be triggered the whole time. And that was my experience. So. So four hours long, sitting here, very uncomfortable. I had to take multiple breaks. And it became very obvious to the psychologist that that was necessary. Two separate psychologist interviews asking very similar questions. Five written tests. Had no clue I was going to be doing that. I already thought I kind of passed that part of it. And for me, what happened is the last thing that I did was this, this written test. And I had a clipboard, filled out the last question. Like I barely completed that last question. Marched downstairs of my clipboard, thudded it on the desk, the front desk of the nice. And the nice lady was there and I quickly said goodbye and I dashed out the front door because it was not fun at all. It was a very traumatic experience for me. And I was kind of rude when I left. I admit it. I ended up falling on the phone. I drove down the road a little bit and I parked and I'm like, that was really rude. But I had to get out of there. So I called her back and I said, sorry, is that normal? Because that was really intense for me and is that a normal thing? And she reassured me that indeed, it was all good. So I went through the experience without actually having any sort of output from it. I just had that experience and I had to wait. So I waited for two weeks. September 13th at 1pm Scheduled phone call. We had the phone call scheduled. I knew it was coming. I thought, I got this. No problem. I already know what the results are going to be. Because I did. I had a really good sense of what the results were going to be. Prior to this, I had taken the RADS R, which should give it a strong indication towards autism. The ADHD diagnosis I was already given. But in some states, and this is true in the state of Colorado, your psychiatrist, nurse practitioner or psychiatrist cannot. They can diagnose you for your time with them. They cannot diagnose you. When you move to like, if you were to change, you have to be re diagnosed. So to get the like official, official, you have to do the full psych eval. So I knew what the results were going to be. No surprises. We're all good. I have this. So we get the phone call, the original psychologist gets on the phone and she starts to read out the individual results. Because it's more than just you're living with ADHD and you're living with autism. It's more than that. There's a lot of details baked into this and that's really where the lot of the value comes from. So autism level one. If you're not familiar, autism is ranked on a scale and there's three levels that are bracketed and you can be quote unquote, high functioning. Level one, starting at a score of I think 65 into somewhere into level two. And you're scored in various areas. You're scored in communication, your reaction to sensory stimuli, if you're sensory avoidant or sensory seeking, and how you perceive the environment around you or registration. These are really awful simple explanations of all of this. That's about as basic as it gets. And I recommend if you're interested either talking to me or going to research more. So in my verbal communication, turns out I'm mostly normalish. I think for those of you who know me, know that usually when my verbal communication falls apart, it's usually humorous and not catastrophic, sometimes can be off putting for people. It's always humorous for me, but it's, it's okay. Sensory avoidant, no big surprise. Like I, I, which means I tend to avoid, I don't, I don't want to say new, not afraid of new, but I, I tend to avoid a stream of sensations of any sort. Well, that makes sense when you think about the next part, which is sensory sensitivity. How much does the world like sensations impact me? And I'm very high on that scale. So as far as sensitivity to my environment, very, very hard. Also not a huge surprise, but it was good to know this. Like it, it, it helps me for a lot of reasons. That helps me kind of like quantify, you know, my environment in my space and why things impact me in certain ways. But it, it also essentially meant that like from the point of my childhood to my adulthood, I've been overstimulated the whole time. And there were maybe moments where I was able to kind of escape it, but overstimulation was a very common attribute of my life. And then the other one, which is somewhat new to me but not new, was a significant low registration, which seems like a double digit in my. No, like I'm very high in the low registration component. What is low registration? Low registration is like how you recognize changes in your environment. My best examples of this are all kind of funny. One is low registration. I will go and do hours worth of yard work, come inside, complete my work Be very proud of what I did because I love pruning, I love all that stuff. And I will look at my arm and I'll see a cut on my arm and I'll see that I've been bleeding for a bit. And I had no idea, and I have no idea where that cut actually came from. That is low registration. I didn't recognize something that happened to me in my environment, or my most sad example, I'm joking, of course, is the number of hoodies I've left on the airplane, the number of times I've left my wallet on the airplane, the forgetfulness stuff, the missing meetings, things of that sort are all low registration components. And yes, because autism and ADHD both relate heavily to executive function, ADHD was a part of the diagnosis as well. And what I discovered is I have all the ADHDs. There's two types of ADHD. There's hyperactivity and inattentive. And when they say ADHD combined, which is what the diagnosis was, means you have both of them. So those were the details of this. And yeah, not a big surprise. But then she started to explain to me how they came to those details, and that hit a little bit different. And that's where it was a really big surprise. I, again, I didn't have it. And so what, it didn't matter, apparently, that I already had the details. So I was on the. I was on the phone with her and I'm like, pacing over here somewhere. And when she started to get into some of the aspects of, like, how they came to these conclusions, I think the reason it hit me so hard is I, I respond to systems. I respond to things that, like, there's an input and there's an output that makes sense. Like input roles output. Got it. In most things in the world of psychology, it doesn't go like that. A lot of it seems very subjective sometimes and kind of nuanced. And unfortunately, that's why, like, there's some really bad therapists out there and there's a lot of misdiagnosis out there and, and you have to be really careful with, like, how you label things and, and what you talk about and who's the one doing the labeling and all that stuff. And I guess I kind of expected this to be the same thing, but it wasn't. So, I don't know, spoiler alerts in case you go and do this. But they're tricky when they do these tests in, in the written test and in the verbal test, and some of the things that she Explained Suddenly, like, I saw the world from a, like, neurotypical perspective. And I was the experiment. And it felt like an animal in a zoo or something. And there's almost no way not to feel that way. Like, it's, it's not their fault, but it felt weird. And that hit me really hard. And by the time I was done with the call, I was pacing over here, but I was in a ball on the floor over here when I finished the call because, like, I had this instant, overwhelming sensation of all these various feelings. I was confused, I was angry, I was sad, I was scared, I was interested, I was disoriented. It was just intense. How about, like, the most intense time that I've, like, just had a flood of feelings that I didn't even understand all of them. And I quickly turned to this text thread with my partner, my wife, who, she was very kind, but her and I are not in a great spot right now, unfortunately. And the reason I turned to her is because she's been the most experienced in all of my behavior in my life. She's been exposed to it the most. And so I thought she would relate, but it was totally incoherent. Sure, I made up words and it made sense, but I was frantic. I didn't know what the hell was going on, and it was a lot. And I had to sit with all of those feelings. And then I thought about, I don't know if you've any of you have heard of the book the Elephant that Swallowed the Storm. It's a childhood book. And that's what I was trying to do. I was trying to take it all in. And that is not part of cognitive behavioral therapy whatsoever. You can't do that. You can't take it all in. So a lot of deep breaths, a lot of white screens. Tried to calm myself down and think about, you know, the individual discoveries I had just made. And the big thing that just kept on coming back to me that I just couldn't get over was this idea that, like, I had just seen the world from probably the first time from a neurotypical perspective. Because usually when people experience quirky traits from you, they just have to deal with it. Or, you know, they're like, they don't have a conversation with you, but, like, this is how I, I, you know, this is what you did. This is how I interpreted it, and this is why you did what you did. And, like, it's not that objective, right? They go, they, they give you a weird look and then they leave. But by having this conversation where I was actually getting to experience the neurotypical perspective for a second, I started to think about this idea. Like, I'm in this world where most people are seeing an orange, but I might be seeing an elephant that's purple and doing handstands, something completely, completely different. And while that seemed really scary at first and, like, had this moment where, like, am I ever understood? Do people ever, like, I don't. Am I even here? Like, it just felt like I was in this bizarre planet that. That wasn't built for me. But as I thought about it more, I started to think about how cool that actually is. And I started to think about, like, where in my life has this really impacted me? Because in my career, it's mostly helped me. I would not be where I am today. I would not be on a call with all of you amazing coworkers at a public SaaS company, very well known, if it was not for. For my neurodiversity. It got me where it got. And it's true, in my work life, it's mostly only helped me. I can certainly give you examples where it hasn't, but it's mostly only helped me. It's my personal life where I have the most area of growth. So that was a huge sigh of relief. I moved into the area of acceptance, and that was a really big deal for me because I was able to, like, replay all of these elements of my life and see them completely different. Like all those things that just drive me up the wall, like sandwiches that are messy. Why. Why would. Anyways, burritos that you microwave and they're still cold in the middle. These are things that, like, you. You would be shocked how fast I can throw away a plate and food when I encounter these things. And if. And if you happen to know what sort of sandwich that is, put it in the chat and then let's never talk about it again. But these are all, like, I could see these differently. They were. These are all catastrophic things in my life, but I could view them with a more objective lens and see them for what they were. Also crazy things, like, I'm a worst driver. Yes, yes, it is a sloppy Joe. Let's never talk about that again. I'm a worse driver when I have stuff in my pocket. I'm serious. If I have things in my pocket, I will be a worse driver. So all kind of unique, goofy things. Another one of, like, I was also very critical of myself for wearing headphones in the grocery store. And I realized, no, it doesn't mean I'm a arrogant tech bro who's into his jams. It means that I'm trying to survive and experience and hopefully have a pleasant evening after by pretending I'm in a video game, basically. So I was only going to thrive if I embrace the spicy. Yes, it has caused problems in my life, but for me to be me, for me to be my best self, for me to thrive, I have to embrace it and I have to just treat it differently. So I had a little bit more waiting to do. On October 30th, I got the final report and you get a 25 page thing with this funky graph in it. And yes, EpicWeek was already decided. I actually had to do a lot of begging to get the final report by this time. And all of this information, all it did is really, really help me reframe things in a way that was much more logical, which is essentially like all I needed. I needed the information and I needed a way to look at things differently. So while I already thought I did not mask very much in my life, I discovered I actually was still masking. And sometimes there's reasons to mask. Everybody masks. But I dramatically reduced it. And if you work with me a lot at HubSpot, you may be like, I haven't really noticed any differences. That's because this doesn't impact me so much in my work life as it does in my personal life. I allowed my brain to tell me to stop. Instead of fighting my brain and saying, power through, power through. You're a grown up, you can do this. When it said it was time to stop, I stopped. I turned to my soothing activities, which are Lego and puzzle and a whole bunch of tedious stuff, because I needed it. And that's okay. I started to get more curious about nuance because. Because nuance is the thing that, like, always drove me up the wall. Got a little bit less angry about stuff. I'm getting better at it. But I tried to get more curious. I saw my tantrums for what they were. They were tantrums. They're actually tantrums. Doesn't mean I'm a Grown up man, 42 years old. I use grownup man words. Still. Tantrums. They were tantrums. And the source of the tantrums were not always the thing that I was getting, you know, having a tantrum about, but they were tantrums. So I saw them for what they were. It allowed me to. It allowed me to kind of put a pause button and laugh at myself and. And do the things I needed to do to get over it versus doubling down, which wasn't helping me at all. I stopped criticizing some of the tools like the headphones in the grocery store, the always thinking in 15 minute increments so that I was never late for a meeting. I was always early for a meeting, but I was never late for a meeting. Which, yes, the HubSpot 3 is still a thing. I'm not even Safe from the HubSpot 3. We're all, we're all a little bit late. I identified more growth areas which all happen to be personal. And, and like I was saying earlier, my wife and I, you know, we're. We're struggling now. And, and this is not all of it. This is part of it. We're actually at the early stages of a divorce. Very sad. But hopefully some of the things I'm learning are tools that can help me with communication and maybe turn this around. Who knows? Part of that is understanding feelings. Not just other people's feelings, my own feelings. Early days with the autism diagnosis, they said they don't have feelings, they don't have empathy. Well, at least for me. And like the, the understanding is changing quite significantly that actually the feelings are so intense that you shut down. That's what happens to me. And you can't label them, you don't understand them, they're there, they take you over completely. And this is also part of being an enneagram 4, which, wow, I, I didn't know how intense figuring about that was going to be. So I learned all these things and I decided, oh, I'm going to embrace small talk as long as I know that I'm doing small talk for a reason. And I don't, you know, tick off other parents at the park because I'm not socializing with them, which actually happens, by the way. And before I was like, proud of it. Now I'm like, you know, if I want to get some of the things I want to get in my personal life, maybe I should participate in this small talk stuff. Also during this time, I discover Isaac. If anybody knows who Isaac is, say something in the chat, because I'm curious. Isaac is my new best friend. Isaac is a character in Auroville, which is a Disney plus show by Seth MacFarlane. Now, when I started watching this, given that it was a Seth MacFarlane show, I thought it was going to be funny, but there was not going to be any humor, like any meat to the funny at all. Well, after watching it and seeing the story arc of Isaac, I realized that it was brilliant and Isaac started to feel really familiar to me. He's a robot from a robot civilization and he's trying to understand the world. And Isaac felt very comfortable in the way he approached problems, in the way he approach really complex nuance problems was familiar. And apparently I'm not the only one. Oh geez, I have to speed it up. I'm going to be over I think. So I met Isaac and I realized I understand this stuff already. It's just software. I can do this. So if I think about my executive function program and how it is always checking the state machine to see if the state in the state machine matches what's happening out in the real world or the fact in the fact databases matching the fact that I was given, if that all goes great, I'm good. It's software. But when it doesn't go good, it doesn't go good in an extreme way. If the state machine doesn't match reality and the fact does not match the fact, then everything breaks down and oh, it's bad. So being a software person I realized I can update it, I can upgrade it. So that's how I've been thinking about things. I can upgrade my software, I can create a new function that allows me to not just be curious about what's going on in the discrepancy between real world and the state machine, but also update. And that's really cool. And I'm going to continue to do this. I hacked my algorithm. I'm working on version three. It's going to be awesome. And it's hard. It's really hard. And I know we're getting thin, but, but almost done. I do have some tactical things I want to share with you. I will leave this slide here and then the slides will share. There's books, there's terminology. Terminology. Being specific about terminology is really important. Use modern health. Get yourself a feelings wheel. It's actually really cool if you can like fully name your feelings. Become an ally. I'm a even a mentor for disability and have awkward conversations. The one thing I want to leave you with was I started this whole thing showing you childhood photos. The title was about a superpower. I never talked about a superpower until just now. How do I make it a superpower? What I discovered is I did. It didn't make it a superpower because these two little boys already knew they were superheroes. And you all are superheroes just as you are just being your most neurospicy. And there's details about these photos that I can share later. But thank you so much for joining me. Be who you are. Don't let anybody change that. Be authentic. Because that is when you truly will be your best self. Thank you. Thank you for joining. I love the chat. Have a great day. Bye bye.
