A review by keepcalmblogon
A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole by Marian Schembari

emotional informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole was a Macmillan Audio pick, and going in I knew this book would resonate with me, but didn’t realize just how much!

“Marian Schembari was thirty-four years old when she learned she was autistic. By then, she’d spent decades hiding her tics and shutting down in public, wondering why she couldn’t just act like everyone else.” After a slew of therapists over the years had misdiagnosed her, Marian first self-diagnosed, and immediately found relief in the ability to recognize and begin to accommodate herself. The part that really hit me in this book was Marian’s post-”official”-diagnosis revelation that self-diagnosis is perfectly valid, especially for women and other marginalized groups, such as queer and trans people and people of color, and even more especially for those who live in the united states where not only is autism diagnosis more focused on males, but mainly children—and lets not forget our costs of healthcare!

Sidebar to my own story: I began to suspect I was on the ASD spectrum a little over two years ago and have since done research to feel confident in a self-diagnosis. When asked by my PCP, in a rather condescending tone, why I wanted to get a diagnosis as an adult, I said, “To know!” And while there was an implication that my answer wasn’t “good enough,” I did get in touch with a telehealth therapist. She subsequently “validated me to death,” which was honestly not helpful at all. I also reached out to another therapist whose first response was to negate all of my findings OF MYSELF. Finally, being an American, adult female, I found it nearly impossible to find psychologists to contact that I could also afford. I was left for a while feeling like an imposter, which Marian goes over in her book, and finally settled into a feeling of acceptance with my loved ones and my family that was a starting point for me to better communicate my needs. All of this was mirrored in Marian’s experiences throughout her book, and her final statements on self-diagnosis validated everything I had gone through and felt and honestly fought for over the last two years.

The other major revelation of Marian’s book is her discussion on how we’ve been using the term spectrum all wrong! Spectrum is not a range, people are not “more” or “less” autistic; the autism spectrum, according to the DSM5, is “an uneven profile of abilities,” therefore one person’s autism will not look the same as another’s. While I recognized the basic message in this as something I already knew about autism, redefining the word spectrum broke a barrier I didn’t realize I had placed.

Marian narrated this audiobook herself, and I truly love when nonfiction authors do that! This was five stars for me, and I’ve already recommended it to friends!