Feeling Like I’m From Mars: Late Autism Diagnosis, with Gary Hawkins

What happens when you grow up feeling like you don’t quite fit, and you spend decades assuming the problem is you?

In this episode, I speak with Gary Hawkins, a long-serving NHS clinician who was diagnosed as autistic later in life. Gary’s story is not neat or linear. It includes childhood chaos, being labelled “unteachable,” boarding school, the traumatic loss of his father in the Falklands, years of masking in professional environments, severe burnout, misdiagnosis, medication that didn’t help, and eventually, a diagnosis that brought clarity rather than cure.

This is not a conversation about labels for the sake of labels. It’s about identity, shame, exhaustion, and the quiet cost of trying to pass as “normal” for decades.

Gary speaks candidly about:

• Growing up feeling like he was “from Mars”
• The impact of trauma layered on top of neurodiversity
• Being misdiagnosed and treated for the wrong things
• The experience of masking in professional life, and the exhaustion that follows
• Why autism is not a mental illness, but a different operating system
• The increased risk of depression and suicide in autistic men
• Why diagnosis doesn’t change your life, but can change how you see yourself
• And why men are particularly poor at talking about how they really feel

We also explore the overlap between mental health and neurodiversity, and why many men may have spent years thinking they are lazy, difficult, arrogant, or broken, when in reality they may simply process the world differently.

This episode is relevant not only for those considering whether autism or neurodiversity might apply to them, but for anyone who has:

• Felt chronically out of place
• Struggled with social situations but excelled professionally
• Experienced burnout that didn’t make sense
• Been told they’re “too much” or “not enough”
• Spent years masking to survive

Gary doesn’t present autism as a superpower. Nor does he present it as tragedy. He presents it as reality — complex, nuanced, sometimes painful, and deeply human.

Perhaps most importantly, this conversation is about self-acceptance. Not as a slogan, but as hard-won ground.