This is a guest blog by Lani Watt, an autistic writer from the South Coast of NSW, written as part of our Yellow Ladybugs Mentoring Series. In this moving and introspective piece, Lani reflects on her late autism diagnosis and how it reshaped her relationship with writing, identity, and self-worth.

After decades of feeling different, isolated, and uncertain of her place in the world, Lani’s diagnosis brought long-awaited clarity—and a chance to reconnect with her creativity. She candidly explores how masking, self-doubt, and burnout impacted her confidence and writing journey, and how writing ultimately became a healing force and a tool for self-discovery.

Lani’s story speaks to the heart of many neurodivergent experiences: the power of storytelling, the weight of internalised ableism, and the joy of finally recognising your truth. It’s a reminder that writing can be a private sanctuary, a way to make sense of ourselves—and a path back to joy when we feel most lost.

Readers will take away:

• A powerful account of late autism diagnosis and its impact on self-perception and creative identity
• Honest reflections on masking, burnout, self-doubt, and the challenges of being an emerging neurodivergent writer
• Insight into how hyperfixation and observation can fuel deep, original storytelling
• Encouragement to write for yourself—without the pressure of perfection, productivity, or external validation
• A gentle reminder that creativity is a valid and meaningful survival tool, and that it’s never too late to reconnect with your voice

Hi, I’m Lani, an emerging neurodivergent writer from the South Coast of NSW. In August last year, I was diagnosed with autism after spending over 40 years not only feeling like I didn’t fit into a world I couldn’t understand but knowing I didn’t belong.

I cannot recall a time without the persistent feeling that I was broken or different — like I was battling against everything, and perhaps most of all, myself. Yet, I could never truly understand or explain it, not to myself nor anyone else. It wasn’t for lack of trying to make sense of it. I explored concepts like introversion, shyness, anxiety, depression, and asexuality (to name a few), but none of them ever fully resonated or quite reached all I was experiencing.

Being neurodivergent and undiagnosed for so long has undoubtedly created many roadblocks and challenges in my journey as an emerging writer. Fear, self-doubt, self-deprecation, anxiety (social and otherwise), and uncertainty about my writing skills and creative talent have been constant companions, manifesting in both overt and subtle ways. Even writing this blog, I found myself questioning whether my voice is the right one for this topic, whether I’m worthy of the opportunity, and whether my experiences are significant enough to share. Let’s just say I’m still learning how to silence that critical voice enough so it no longer prevents me from chasing my writing career goals. It’s a work-in-progress — much like many of the writing projects I’ve been too scared to share with the world.

Writing has always been a significant part of my identity. Yet, it wasn’t until I was well into my twenties that I cultivated even a small amount of courage to share my creations with others. By my thirties, I finally started to believe I was worthy enough to pursue writing professionally and completed two Masters degrees to guide me. Writing and autism are both integral aspects of me, but until my diagnosis, I feel they battled against each other, unsure how to coexist harmoniously, at least beyond the safety of my private space.

However, with my diagnosis, I’ve come to realise that neurodivergence is not a weakness. When it comes to writing, it’s a strength and a gift that deserves to be nurtured.

Interestingly, it was an unexpected moment of serendipity in my writing journey that first brought my autism into focus. While working on my Graduate Certificate in Research Studies, I prepared a proposal for researching my novel, which features an asexual main character. For a long time, I thought being asexual explained some of the complex and disjointed feelings I experienced, feelings I was attempting to make sense of through creative writing.

While discussing potential themes in my novel, my supervisor casually suggested that my main character could have undiagnosed autism based on how he presented. It was the first time someone had identified my autism emerging subconsciously through my writing. More importantly, it was the first spark of awareness about my own neurodivergence. That moment opened the door to so much self-discovery, and to this day, I remain grateful to my supervisor for recognising it.

From there, I began to understand ‘otherness’ through the lens of my own lived experience and the complexity of identity intersectionality when neurodivergence overlaps with other layers of our identity. My awareness and understanding of autism shifted from being objective to deeply subjective. In other words, I transitioned from observing the neurodivergent world from the outside to experiencing it from the inside, suddenly feeling disconnected from my identity and sense of self. But, as we all know, it’s far from that simple or neat — it’s chaotic, beautiful, messy, liberating, and scary… and it’s me.

Although the ‘late diagnosis’ is recent and has shed a significant light across a world that always felt distorted to me, plunging me into depths of self-discovery deeper than I have ever faced before, being autistic isn’t new to me. Autism isn’t ever ‘new’ for any autistic person; it’s our reality from birth. It’s who we are in the most intrinsic of ways. Finally, I have a name and explanation for what I’ve experienced for four decades of my life! And that realisation is incredible and beautiful.

Now that I’ve been diagnosed with autism, this elusive yet significant part of my identity is no longer hidden in the shadows. With the right help and support, I’m hoping to not only fall in love with writing all over again but use it therapeutically to explore this part of me that has always been there but that I feel I never truly knew. I feel like I’ve never really known me, and with my diagnosis came this peculiar feeling that the real me has been lost in a void. It feels as though I’m finally meeting myself for the first time. I’m still working to reconcile that, and I know it will take time, along with guidance from my doctor and psychologist, to understand how best to unpack it.

For me, at its core, writing is about sprinkling tiny grains of your soul into your creative work. I never fully considered just how much I personally did that — how much I did it subconsciously — until recently. Writing fiction has always been my comfort zone because sharing the most intrinsic and personal parts of me in a raw, revealing way through nonfiction has always been something I’ve avoided. Indeed, my whole life, I’ve shied away from exposing parts of myself I’ve always kept protected, particularly after experiencing bullying at multiple points simply for being different and not conforming. Letting my soul bleed onto a page via words narrating my real story has been a distinct challenge to confront.

In recent years, my relationship with my muse and creativity has been a love/hate dynamic as I struggled and felt increasingly lost in the storm. The longer I went undiagnosed, the more difficult it became. Not only was I fighting against the untreated symptoms of autism and tackling the challenges of other chronic illnesses I’ve been diagnosed with, but I was masking, internalising everything, so I wouldn’t expose how much I struggled with the world. I often felt like I was drowning. As anyone with a neurodivergent diagnosis knows, masking is exhausting — all day, all night, every single day. My brain is constantly whirring and never stops.

This left very little space, time, or energy to tap into creativity. In the last couple of years, I’ll admit, I dropped the ball entirely with writing, the one thing that used to bring joy and meaning to my life and served as my biggest form of escapism. It left me feeling like a failure as a writer, wondering if I had wasted so much of my life pursuing something that now seemed like a useless trajectory. Why had I failed at it so spectacularly? Why had it become such a challenge to confront?

While this may sound melodramatic, it’s no exaggeration of what was going on in my head, all the time, about everything. The more personal hurdles life kept throwing at me, the harder it got to face, and the more I withdrew into myself. It was then that I knew it was time to reach out to a psychologist for help, which marked the first step of my diagnostic journey. All of that is what I now know as autistic burnout and inertia. It was my undiagnosed neurodivergence seeping into every raw nook and cranny of my life and reality. It was never failure, uselessness, or fault on my part. And it was never brokenness.

It’s no wonder that something had to give during such a challenging time. Unfortunately, any creative person knows that creativity and the desire to create are often the first things to fade when we’re in survival mode. The more you try to force it, the harder it becomes, and I learned just how much more complex that process can be when you’re autistic, as factors like executive dysfunction and autistic burnout compound the difficulty.

Ultimately, though, writing is the easy part (and I know many neurotypical writers might disagree, but neurodivergent writers will understand what I mean). I know I can write, and I know how to write. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words and feel the most comfortable and secure when reading, writing, or working with words. It’s what comes beyond that where the struggle lies — when we’re expected to reveal the innermost parts of ourselves to strangers to achieve ‘success’, even though autistic people often struggle to share even surface-level details with those closest to us.

Many autistic people, myself included, tend to have small social worlds and navigate much of life alone due to social anxiety. Concepts like ‘networking’ and ‘selling yourself’ have always terrified me. In 2023, I was selected via our local Writers’ Centre to attend a week-long writers retreat for emerging writers. Although it offered time and space in solitude to write and create, we were also expected to attend joint workshopping each afternoon. Due to social anxiety, the pressure of anticipating those daily interactions impacted on my ability and need to fully immerse in creative solitude. Ultimately, I was unable to achieve what I hoped with the retreat and it left me feeling like I failed and wasted the opportunity. Self-sabotage has often felt safer than putting myself out there and risking annihilation in a world I’ve struggled to understand. Without adequate support, in a society where it’s so easy to make mistakes and face judgement, rejection sensitivity can be overwhelming for autistic individuals.

However, I can also see how writing — living for stories and carrying so many stories within me — has helped me fit into the world as an undiagnosed autistic person. I used writing and fiction not only as an escape but as a means to understand the world and make sense of things. Being neurodivergent shaped the way I approach writing, diverging from mainstream ‘norms’ of the craft.

Two predominant signs of my neurodivergence — hyperfixation and masking — have also proven to be significant strengths in honing my writing skills. While masking has served as a survival tactic, it has also involved sitting back quietly, observing the world around me. In fact, the most comfortable I’ve ever felt in the world is on the periphery, immersed in fictional worlds created by others through books, TV, and movies, drinking in experiences different from my own to better understand them. Creating my own fictional worlds has allowed me to explore things I love and am deeply interested in, often because I can’t seem to get enough to satiate those interests. Whether I was playing with dolls and teddy bears as a child, writing stories and fanfiction from beloved universes as a teenager, or crafting my own novels and short stories as an adult, these fictional worlds filled the gaps created by social anxiety and fear.

Similarly, hyperfixations weren’t just a safety net or a form of escape as I grew up, they opened doors to knowledge and experiences I was either too afraid to try or simply wouldn’t encounter in my life. Often, I didn’t need to try or experience them firsthand; I just wanted to understand them through a lens — a safe and contented mask behind which I could observe.

Now that I know I’ve always been autistic, I understand that this peripheral perspective was my experience of ‘otherness’, of being different and not fitting in. Masking and hyperfixation helped me navigate the neurotypical world and reconcile my place within it. Writing became the vehicle for self-reflection, exploration of things I wanted to understand, and escapism when the world felt overwhelming.

Without even knowing it, I used my passion for reading, writing, and fiction to survive in a world I wasn’t built to fit into easily. Writing was my safe haven, a space where I didn’t need to worry about fitting in or being different. I was fully immersed in those worlds, safely within my private space. This is a power that neurodivergent individuals shouldn’t be expected to underestimate or dilute to better fit into the neurotypical world. We have to carve out a place in the world that fits us. As someone diagnosed later in life, I can wholeheartedly say that I often felt ashamed of the time and energy I devoted to writing, hiding or concealing it because it went against expected norms or was seen as less important due to the lack of monetary gain. Yet its value to my life transcended mere financial worth.

If there’s one piece of advice I wish I’d received at the start of my writing career, it’s this:

Seek and find comfort in writing for yourself. Learn to write for yourself before anything or anyone else — including publication. When you reconcile with the idea that most of your writing can and should be for yourself, you gift yourself a universe to explore, experiment, and reflect in without the pressure of perfection. This mindset frees you to create with imperfection and joy. The expectation to earn money or achieve external validation through writing shouldn’t define success; writing itself makes you a successful writer. Your private space for personal writing becomes invaluable, allowing you to sharpen your skills and develop a unique style and voice. This includes breaking common “writing rules” and figuring out what works best for your subjective writerly brain. You also create a collection of things you love to read yourself — so embrace and enjoy your own work without judgment or fault-finding. Save everything you write; it will become a treasure trove of resources as your writing evolves.

My decision to volunteer to write a blog post for the Yellow Ladybugs mentoring project is the first step of my goal to begin to blog more as a therapeutic tool for navigating my late diagnosis and sharing my journey as an autistic writer. Although I lost connection with that part of myself during the past couple of years, as I grappled with autistic burnout, writing has always been my strongest tool for illuminating the world around me and delving into parts of myself that are difficult to share with others.

Like a fantasy protagonist wielding their favourite weapon on a hero’s journey, words and writing are the most powerful tools a writer has. I hope that sharing my experiences and insights as an autistic writer can help other neurodivergent individuals harness the therapeutic power of writing. Writing for yourself offers avenues of understanding, self-reflection, and escapism when the neurotypical world feels too bright, loud, and overwhelming.

Thank you for letting me share my story with you.