Who IS Lyric Rivera - the NeuroDivergent Rebel?

Welcome to the NeuroDivergent Rebel Substack!!! Today I share who I am, and a brief reflection on knowing my Autistic brain only for a small percentage of my adult life.

I'm Autistic, but I didn't know this fact about myself for the first 29 years of my life. This not knowing had a huge, mostly negative, impact on my life. Finding out the truth about myself, a few months shy of my 30th birthday, was life changing to say the least.

When I was first diagnosed (I may use diagnosed and discovered interchangeably moving forward, since I don’t believe an Autistic Person must have a formal Autism diagnosis to be Autistic), I was mad at the world and stuck on the fact that I went so many years not knowing my true self.

I was mad at my teachers, I was mad at my guardians, I was mad at the medical and educational systems, that I felt had harmed me by missing this crucial fact about my brain. I was pissed off that, instead of support for my differences, I had been shamed and punished (mostly by the school system) for being Autistic for my entire childhood and most of my adult life so far.

Because everyone around me (including me) assumed I was like everyone else, I was expected (and tried desperately) to preform and behave the way everyone else did. When I failed to hit the marks set by my peers, it resulted in repeated scoldings and teasings from kids and adults around me.

Not being diagnosed Autistic as a young person saved me from being forced into a formal behavioral modification program (ABA/Autistic Conversion Therapy) but it didn’t save me from the constant critiques and harassment of living in the world not built for me and being expected to fit myself into the world (when doing so was harmful to me).

I, like many late identified Autistics, learned to hide and camouflage my Autistic traits without any formal interventions, because, though my guardians (for the most part) nurtured my NeuroDivergence at home, the world itself was very cruel, and unaccepting of my differences (that didn’t seem all that different to those I was most closely related to).

Teachers were some of my biggest obstacles in school, because they often would label my Autistic or ADHD struggles as “behavioral problems” taking away my recess, or sending me out in the hallway for being “too active” “disruptive” or “not paying attention” HOWEVER they were also the first ones to spot that there was something “different about me”.

I remember one very specific confrontation between my guardians and the school when I was much younger (elementary school age). Raised voices “there’s nothing WRONG with that child” and concerns that the school was just trying to medicate and label me with something that would follow me “around for the rest of my life”.

What nobody at the time understood, was that I already had labels far worse than the labels my small town Texas school was trying to put upon me, that DID follow me around for most of my life, only to be removed when the correct labels (Autistic and ADHDer) were applied.

Those labels were NOT positive or affirming. They were labels that ate at my sense of self worth, each one weighing me down, adding up to equal a massive crushing weight, filled by self doubt.

Lazy - stubborn - difficult - freak - rebellious - difficult - disruptive - loud - emotional - sensitive - retard - twitch - weird - annoying - hyper - immature - are just a few that come to mind quickly, though I know there were many more.

This was one of the things I was angry about for so long, because I could clearly remember the school wanting to test me for learning disabilities and my guardians being extremely defensive, and waving this testing that COULD have lead to my autism and ADHD being identified all those years ago.

It WAS one of the things I WAS mad about… but it’s not something I am mad about today. In fact, knowing what I know now, it is easy to understand how my scared guardians were just doing what they thought best to protect me from a corrupt small town Texas school system.

At the time of I’m writing this piece I am almost 36 years old. My birthday is later this month, in just a few days, actually.

I was a child of the 90s. This was all before NeuroDiversity was widely understood. When I was a kid, there was ONLY pathology and almost NOTHING good to be said about Autistic children or their outcomes.

In the 90’s an autism label would have meant something VERY different than it does today.