“I was diagnosed with autism at 43”

Lali Dugelay has few memories of her childhood marked by numerous moves due to his father’s military profession. “If I believe my parents, I was a laughing and bubbly little girl. I was very happy in my family, which was my refuge while I was going through hell at school“, explains this 47-year-old woman. Harassed, she is verbally and physically attacked daily while she does everything to make herself invisible. “At school, I was shy, withdrawn, uncomfortable, with a feeling of never being in my placeof always bother. I forced myself to initiate conversations and laugh with others but people always turned their backs on me, often laughing.” Lali is too good a student in the eyes of her classmates.

“Who wants to be friends with the nerd in class?”

“Who wants to be friends with the bespectacled nerd in class who always has the right answer? They pulled my hair, which was very long. They pinched me, they pushed me and I regularly found myself thrown to the ground.” Her situation does not improve at college where she continues to be harassed while being extorted. She experienced a period of respite when she entered second grade. For the first time, she joined an establishment at the same time as the other students. “In second grade, I lived the best life of my entire schooling, surrounded by classmates who, like me, were new to the establishment and, like me, found themselves on the margins. For the first time, I found commonalities – exclusion, mockery – with other young people. Excluded by several people, we were a group, together, united and I even had a friend for the first time.”

November 25, 1992, a dark day

November 25, 1992 is to be marked with a black stone in Lali’s life. The young woman is victim of a gang rape a few steps from her home. Looking back, she doesn’t know how she managed not to sink. “I believe that I had the will to move forward, as in the face of the mockery and attacks that I had always suffered. Move forward, move forward, move forward, learn to live with it, to convince yourself that you are not responsible for what happened.”

“I asked my loved ones to stop calling me by my first name”

Determined to turn this painful page, she asks those around her to no longer call her by her first name, Aurélie, repeated a thousand times by my attackers. “Aurélie “was associated in my eyes with this girl forever soiled, with forever bruised genitals, with a soul forever devastated. So I asked everyone to call me Lali, the nickname that my family gave me. By changing my first name, I changed my identityI was no longer the one who had suffered this rape, I could look myself in the face“.

More and more obvious signs of autism…

After working independently for a few years, Lali found a permanent salaried job in 2007 but realized that the company was not made for her. “I always excelled at my job but I was unable to make friends with my colleagues. I live with a imposter syndrome very affected. I tried for 43 years to conform to others, to what society wants you to be in order to respond to the “norm” to imitate, to ask myself at every moment if I understand what people say to me, and if I am understood by others” she insists. It is the reception in training of a young girl who was herself in the process of diagnosing what was still called the Asperger Syndrome which will push Lali to wonder about autism. “Our brains were perfectly connected and everything with her seemed fluid! After doing research and reading a lot on the subject, I told myself that my profile matched this form of autism. I didn’t go any further at that point..” The young woman has always presented manifestations specific to autism. She encounters difficulties in social interactions because she does not understand the innuendo, the implicit, the unsaid and the second degree and also does not know how to interpret body language and facial expressions. She is also very factual, frank and direct. “I am not able to hold the gaze of my interlocutor and I am not not a tactile person. I don’t know how to express my emotions and I develop very restricted passions for particular subjects. I am also excessively sensitive to sensory stimuli. As I combine with a dyspraxiadysgraphia, mild dysphasia and ADHDthe cocktail can sometimes be quite explosive! ” says Lali, who waited another 13 years before learning in 2020 that she was indeed suffering from this neurodevelopmental disorder.

A “wave of relief” when the diagnosis falls

“When I was diagnosed with autism when I was 43, I was overcome by a wave of relief. First of all because I was not wrong about myself in my self-diagnosis. And then because the diagnosis made it possible to make sense of everything I had experienced and offered me the perspective of a new start Knowingly“This revelation changed Lali’s life.”I learned to know myself, with all the complexity of my specificities linked to autism. I no longer do violence to myself to try at all costs to do like the others since I am incapable of it. I am in peace with the woman that I am.“

Experienced as a sign, this diagnosis was an opportunity for her to take charge of her professional life and to no longer suffer in her company, which she left in 2020.”In a few weeks, I developed my liberal activity as a speaker under the name “Aspie at Work” (recently Atypical at Work), put my site online immediately and created a Youtube channel For raise awareness about autism through concrete videos of work situations. I was quickly asked to give conferences and speak in the media. In his work called “Autism is my superpower” (collection without filter, Ed. Jouvence), she explains that her “handicap” literally makes her extraordinary. “He’s the one who gives me strength and the daily energy to adapt to a neurotypical world which will forever remain a big question mark for me. It is he who keeps me away from hasty judgments about the Other. It is he who makes I don’t care about other people’s eyes and I dress as I want, my brain is a glittery disco ball rather than a low-energy light bulb, that I am resolutely joyful and optimistic, Yes, autism is indeed my superpower. I’m not saying ONE superpower, but MY superpower because everyone has their own way of experiencing it” concludes Lali who is finally in her place.