Hello and welcome to another episode of IWe with Jamele a podcast against Shame. I hope you're well and I think you're going to really find today's chat so interesting. My guest is fascinating and an amazing communicator and in today's episode we touched on something that a lot of you have been asking me to touch upon which is

autism and neuro neurod divergence.

Now my guest this week is Rick Glassman who is an amazing actor comedian and the

podcast host of Take Your Shoes Off which I highly recommend as the weirdest listen ever.

He's incredibly entertaining. But this episode is so raw and so thoughtful and what I loved about our conversation we kind of just jump straight in

talking about how his brain works and how he experiences the world via the lens of

autism and what he has learned to change

about the way that he lives to make himself more comfortable but what he's

also learning about trying to make other people feel comfortable but also how much he needs to go out of his way to extend himself to make

other people comfortable is that our responsibility? What comes out of this chat is

massively a sense of first of all understanding someone's experience because I think

we both want to make clear in this episode that this is just one person's experience and

maybe things will resonate with you and maybe they won't everyone's different we're all

individuals and people with autism or neurodivergence are not a monolith but one

thing I think we can universally agree on from listening to this chat, is that so many things that apply to people with autism

around how we socially engage and move through this world also apply to people who don't

have neurodivergence.

There are so many ways in which people deny themselves their true authentic expression,

or getting what they want or what they need or saying the full truth or

being their full selves showing up with all the parts of themselves rather than

what the world finds the most palatable we discuss something something called masking, which when it comes to

autism is normally, and Rick explains this better in this chat, but it's kind of presenting

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