The following podcast is a deer media production.

Hi friends and welcome to the papaya podcast. I'm your hostess,

Trine Hermosta, Sarah Nicole, and each week I'm going to be dishing out some sweetness mixed

in with some seeds of wisdom or something like that. So get ready to get inspired,

get candid, get real because we are all in this digital space together.

Charlotte, my dear Instagram friend Charlotte, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Do you want to quickly introduce yourself? Oh yes, hello Sarah and my name is Charlotte

and I am also known as the Spectrum Girl on Instagram because I'm autistic so that means

that's why I chose to name the Spectrum Girl because I'm on the spectrum.

Simplest that. Yeah. Yeah, that was a quick introduction.

I love it. No, because now we're going to get into the we're going to get into so much more.

I'm curious because I don't think I've ever heard your story on what it was like to get diagnosed.

I've only, and I'll be honest, like things have changed so much in the last five years around

social awareness with autism, our perceptions of autism, and even some of the language and what

it means to be on the spectrum. So do you want to kind of walk me through when you got diagnosed

and how you kind of got to the place of even being diagnosed? If you knew something was up,

if you always kind of felt it, if it happened at a young age or an older age, I would just love

to kind of start there. I'm going to try to be as quick as possible. You too take your time.

Summing it all up. So the road to getting diagnosed as an autistic was quite long.

I'm 40 years old now, and I got diagnosed with autism when I was 38, and also ADD,

and that came afterwards. So it was like this big package all at once, but I was very happy

when I got diagnosed, and some people might say, why were you happy about that? And that's because

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