As I got older and social stakes became higher (even more so as a high-masking autistic girl) I felt like the box in which my personal expression existed became smaller and more constricting.

When picking my clothes and hairstyles, I emphasized following trends and wearing what felt most socially acceptable. What brands are popular right now? What looks most flattering on my body? What makes me look cool?

I started approaching dressing through the lens of how others would perceive me rather than how I perceived myself.

I still loved style, clothes, and curation, but it felt like my expression of self could only exist within the confines of societal norms and expectations - largely that I had put on myself in an attempt to be as widely accepted and liked as possible.

This prolonged mimicry of other people’s style and preferences caused me to completely lose touch with my own taste.

We’re living in a copycat culture of the highest degree. Hailey Bieber wears low rise baggy jeans? We’re all wearing low rise baggy jeans. It doesn’t matter that you personally like high rise skinny jeans - those are out! (until Hailey Bieber wears them again)

This may seem like an exaggeration, but if you’ve had the displeasure of spending any time on TikTok in 2026, you know that it isn’t.

When we become mere consumers of trends, we lose the special sauce that makes us, us. Our innate sense of self. Our ability to contribute new ideas to the world. Erased.

The thing that makes a “cool girl” cool isn’t that she was able to buy a pair of Gap jeans with Hailey Bieber’s name slapped on the label before they sold out.

The thing that makes a “cool girl” cool is that she wears and does whatever she feels like, even if she’s the only person who sees the vision.

At almost 25 years old and two kids later, i’m just now beginning to really explore my style in a way that feels authentic and free from the constraints of internalized misogyny. And I feel cooler and hotter than ever.

Get the haircut you’ve been contemplating forever but don’t know if you can pull off. Wear the outfit that feels like “too much” for the occasion just because you like it.

Life is a game, so customize your character and have fun with it.

I’ll be 25 years old in August. And with receiving a fully-developed frontal lobe, I also received a formal diagnosis of Level One Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

So, why am I just learning this now?

It isn’t a secret that women (especially women-of-color, although I do not identify as such) are under-researched, underrepresented, and severely under-diagnosed when it comes to most mental and physical disorders. Girls and women also don’t typically have the “luxury” of being visibly different. We’re held to a higher standard for our behavior, both socially and functionally, than boys and men. So, we adapt. We behave. Or in my case and many other autistic girls, we mask and suppress.

As a child and teenager, it never once occurred to me that I could be autistic. I mean, yes, I had some “quirky” tendencies and behavior. But it was just that: quirkiness.

It was quirky that I only ate chicken nuggets for almost every meal until I was essentially an adult. It was quirky that I had a tendency to debate and argue just about everything because I felt that it needed to be factually accurate.

There were lots of adjectives assigned to me by others that I just accepted and adopted as sort of diagnoses themselves: anxious, overdramatic, self-centered, emotional, reactive, high-maintenance. I’ve spent a lot of my life knowing I’m not a “bad” person, but self-loathing because I’ve felt others have perceived me that way.

I spent my teenage years in-and-out of talk therapy. “Generalized anxiety disorder” is the diagnosis I was handed again and again by different providers. I was high-performing in school. An advanced reader and writer (terrible at math, though). I didn’t act out. I didn’t party. I stayed in line. But internally, I was starting to rip at the seams. Anxious. Detached from friendships. Codependent on a toxic boyfriend. Generally, unwell.

I developed my own methods of coping and self-soothing. Spending hours a day obsessively picking at my skin and fingernails. Finding special interests and diving deep into them on the internet. Finding ways to keep my mind and body busy. Grounding myself in concrete regimens and routines. Desperately trying to regain a sense of control.

At 21, I became pregnant with my first daughter. I was recently engaged to my boyfriend of 4 years, and married shortly after. He helped ground me and supported my decision to leave my toxic workplace that was causing me extreme emotional distress. I felt ready to be a mom and wife.

After having my first daughter in August of 2023, my world flipped upside down. I loved being a mother and my daughter became my everything. My biggest pride and joy. But my concrete routines went out the window. I wasn’t sleeping. I was overstimulated by her hours of colic and crying. Completely touched-out from breastfeeding (but proceeded to do it on-demand until she was almost 2). I was also building and running a solo esthetics business during this time, trying to hold onto my professional identity as an esthetician. I was bleeding myself dry and I felt every drop of it.

I decided to go back to therapy. Hopefully find healthy mechanisms to help me cope with the hardships of motherhood. Because I knew that motherhood was hard, but I never expected it to feel debilitating.

After several months of talk therapy, my therapist casually (I’m assuming to avoid offense) brought up autism and ADHD - commonly referred to as AuDHD. I was confused. What does this have to do with my parenting struggles?

It sent me spiraling.

Many people close to me that I felt comfortable confiding in about this swiftly dismissed it as a possibility. I was social-able. Intelligent. Ambitious. And surely an autistic individual would be none of these things (note: sarcasm).

But what they didn’t see is that I was severely burnt out. I scripted conversations in my head before having them. I spaced out or broke down in times of overwhelm. I wore noise-canceling headphones at home and anywhere socially acceptable - part of the reason I loved being at the gym and hated the grocery store.

I ruminated on every social interaction I had, no matter how small. And I dissected them in my head for days, weeks, or sometimes even months and years after. I cried on my way home from social gatherings. I felt like my entire life was a performance I was being graded on. And honestly, I still feel this way.

After having my second daughter in March of this year, I crossed my threshold. A screaming toddler and a crying baby both demanding you hold and console them at the same time. So much noise. So much touch. Nonstop.

The suggestion of an autism evaluation given to me in 2024 never fully left my head. It sort of quietly implanted itself in the back of my head, and at times that I felt like I was completely unraveling, it seemed to reappear and suggest itself.

By June, I decided I couldn’t sustain myself this way. I needed answers and I needed support. I made up my mind to pursue a professional adult autism diagnosis and after a several-week-long process of being evaluated, I was finally told what I think I knew all along: I am autistic.

The diagnosis hasn’t changed me. It hasn’t made me a new person - but it did help me give myself permission to be myself.

I still don’t expect many people to accept my diagnosis or magically understand me better. If anything, I think it may confuse many people more. But to me, it has contextualized every aspect of myself and my life in a way that finally makes sense. And the misunderstanding of others doesn’t change the concrete fact that this is who I am.

I don’t really know what’s next or exactly what to do with my new-learned identity. But I hope to learn to be gentler with myself. To unclench my jaw and relax my body. To lean into the parts of myself that feel natural, even if they seem odd or confusing to others. To grow into a more unapologetically authentic version of myself.

Ultimately, I did this for younger Liv. The one who felt alien. Who tried so hard to be perfect. To be a perfect daughter. A perfect student. A perfectly normal person. There was never anything wrong with you. You were doing your best in a world that wasn’t designed to understand or accommodate you.

And I did this for my two daughters, who may or may not also be neurodivergent. But so that if they are, they are able to get the acceptance and support they need early. So that they don’t feel flawed for being themselves.

If you’re also autistic, you’re not broken. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re existing and operating in a world that wasn’t created with your mind and heart in mind. As debilitating as this can be, it’s also an extremely special thing to feel and experience the world so deeply and uniquely.

I felt like an alien as a little girl. When my style of communicating felt slightly off. Like I put way more analysis into conversing than other people probably did. The way I had to think about holding eye contact - How much eye contact is too much or not enough? Does my facial expression look strange? The way people around me called me controlling, dramatic, or self-centered for the ways I tried to relate to others. The desperation to be liked and accepted. To not be perceived as strangely as I felt inside. At almost 25-years-old, honestly not much has changed.

Being human most days feels utterly exhausting. I constantly feel like I’m acting out roles. Acting as a mother. Acting as a wife. A friend. A normal girl. Add the heightened self-awareness of how you’re being perceived online (if you show up on social media) to the already overwhelming feeling of being perceived at all, and you may end up spiraling into a feeling of full-blown panic and existential dread.

Honestly, I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way. I think most of us spend a lot of our lives pretending. Assessing and adapting ourselves in a way that makes others more comfortable with our existence, at the expense of our own peace and happiness. So, what do we do about it?

I think learning to let go of the pressure to perform as a human is like untangling a big ball of yarn you’ve been spinning your whole life. Unlearning that you’re a “bad person” if you’re misunderstood by someone. Unlearning that there’s a right path in life to follow. Unlearning that it’s bad to be perceived as strange in any capacity.

Ever hear that quote, “a friend to everyone is an enemy to myself?”

That exact pursuit to be universally liked has been the bane of my existence, basically.

I don’t really have a clear resolution. I’m just acknowledging and sitting in the discomfort. I feel weird in my skin a lot of the time. I don’t always say the right thing or know what to say at all. I’m not a perfect mom, or wife, or friend, or perfect anything. But maybe that’s way more human than alien, actually.

To be cringe is to be free, as they say.

as a girl of the early 2000s I was obsessed with magazines (Girl’s Life, Teen Vogue, Tiger Beat, anyone?) - to me, they felt almost like a sacred collection of everything important: fashion, beauty, pop culture, juicy confessions. you know, quintessential teenage girl stuff.

I dreamed about growing up and having a real Carrie Bradshaw lifestyle. big city, big closet, close girl friends to laugh with and confide in. so that hasn’t quite panned out how I expected, so far (more like stay-at-home midwestern mom of 2 little girls) but my love of fashion, beauty, and sharing my interests hasn’t changed.

so consider this my digital journal or articles of my own little magazine filled with my special interests and ruminations. thanks for being here! 💋