Chris Weakly: Uncovering Self-Truths - An Autistic Adult's Story of Self-Discovery and Empowerment

Welcome to Why Not Me the World?
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are not alone in this world. Hopefully you gain more awareness, acceptance,
and a better understanding for autism around the world.
Hi, I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome to Why Not Me the World.
Today's guest was diagnosed autistic a little later in life.
Chris Weekly joins us today. Now he's using his autism
to help others in the autistic community.
Welcome to the show. I really appreciate you coming on.
I am extremely honored for the opportunity to be on
your show.
Well, thanks, I really appreciated the pleasures. Allline, So, at
what age was you diagnosed autistic?
So in my thirties. It really started off as a
conversation that I had been avoiding having with my wife.
I've been married twenty seven years and pretty far along
into our marriage. She said, look, we need to figure
out what's going on with you or our marriage is
really going to suffer and may not survive this. So
we schedule an appointment with our physician, explained some of
what was going on. Was referred to a psychologist, and
then another psychologist and then a psychiatrist, and there was
all kinds of forms and things to fill out a
lot of questions, some of them uncomfortable. I had a
pretty tough childhood, you know, when you have to go
back and kind of relive some of that, it kind
of sucks, sure, to be honest, you know. When it
was probably a couple span of a couple of years
before really nailing it down, I was diagnosed with a
few other things, and they were like, well, you take
this medication and you should improve and you should get better,
and I wasn't getting better. I remember going over with
a really good psychiatrist who really specialized in autism, specifically Aspergers.
He sat down, he goes, you know, I looked through
all the paperwork and all the charts, and he goes,
I've got a handful of questions of my own that
I want to ask, and they were very direct, very
specific about how I played as a kid, how I
get my storied and created my own little games within games,
and things like that. He said look, you have aspergers
and I'm like, what is that? Well, it's at the
time they described it as a subset of autism, okay,
and he said things are not going to make sense
to you the way they will most people probably ever.
I mean, you'll get close with enough work and dedication
to making improvements in your own life.
So with that information, what was your reaction to it?
For me, it was devastating because growing up I'd always heard,
you know, there's something wrong with Chris. He's weird, he
doesn't do things like everyone else does. And I took
it very hard. I took it very negatively that everyone
had been right and I was just in this black
hole that I just couldn't seem to.
Get out of. Well, that's tough to take.
Even today, when adults are late diagnosed on the spectrum,
there aren't a lot of services or people to call
or reach out to to really start the process of
being able to manage your life. And for some of
that I really got to over the last several years
in that a lot of the starting blocks that is
an adult being diagnosed, you're starting from some of the
same starting blocks as children. Right. There was one therapist
early on that I stopped going to after probably three
sessions because I kept hearing, well, you should know this
by now.
Wow.
I really started thinking about that phrase, and I was like,
that phrase is just awful, because if you've never been
exposed to something, you can't just know it. There has
to be some exposure, somehow, some way, right in order
for that to make sense.
Absolutely.
I was told by a nutritionalist that children of different ages,
when you introduce new things to them, it takes them
up to fifteen times before they really absorb it and understand.
So that has to be common with other things as well.
Exactly exactly now. I've had the opportunity to speak with
several people that have been diagnosed autistic later in life.
One lady was diagnosed in her forties. She told me
it took her three or four years to get through it,
and then she'd realized that she'd lost four decades. But
in her fifties she started living life and things were
much better. So did you have a similar situation for me?
It was probably longer. I ended up burying myself in
my work and I went into the IT field. I
really had two options at the time. I was really
dabbling in computers. But at the church that we went to,
I found myself up in the balcony doing a lot
of things with sound and mixing and all of that stuff.
And then it was where the Internet was getting widely
used enough, and websites were starting to happen, so churches
could record services and then post them and things like that.
And this was the best of both worlds for me
because I was up where there were very few people
and these things for computers and sound are two things
that will probably always fascinate me and every time that
there's something that changes or something new happens.
Okay, those are.
Things that I really am drawn to. But I went
into the IT field because I knew that there were
a lot of jobs there where I could just be
neatly tucked away do my work, have very little human interaction,
and it would be really a perfect world for me. Well,
what I was doing is I was really kind of
caging myself intentionally not getting any better with social skills
and a lot of the people skills that I needed.
And by burying myself my work, I thought, if I
can just persist this way, somehow I can make it
through life. Sure, you know, being home enough to talk
to my wife and spend some time and try to
make those positive, good moments so that every thing was
probably better than what it actually was. So to speak.
There were times where I totally crashed and burned. I
just would completely just shut down, And really it all
had to do with the high level of masking that
I did, really to pass myself up just as everybody
else and literally leaving my authentic self behind in life.
Right, And there's a lot of masking that goes on.
Most people believe it's just females, but that just goes
to show that a lot of males do it as well.
I had a guest on my podcast that said that
you can go into any lab throw a rock and
you'll probably hit someone that is autistic. So that opened
my eyes as well, just like some of the things
that you were just saying. So when you go back
to your childhood, did you have some of the meltdowns
that are prevalent in stories that you hear today.
My meltdowns went from really openly melting down, throwing things,
hitting my siblings, and really just making a mess of
things to a point where I began to just really
kind of shut down and shut myself off at school,
it really wasn't any better. I barely graduated high school,
and during school it was kind of like I went
from the chaos of calm to what was chaos of school,
and I ended up probably around probably the year I
was in seventh grade, starting junior high, I really started
to lean on humor as kind of a coping mechanism.
Even to this day, the humor can be very off putting,
sometimes inappropriate, and really ill timed, but for me on
the inside, it allows me to have this release of
tension and nervousness. Unfortunately, over the years, my wife has
kind of had to kind of bear the brunt of
some of that from time to time. So into junior
high and high school, I'd find myself kind of you know,
picked out of class and in the hallway, or sometimes
they put me in an empty classroom. In those moments,
there was nobody around, and to me it was just
kind of like I had done this, but the outcome
had been the space that I actually needed the whole
time in order to try to make it through the day.
Sure, now you mentioned siblings, how many other siblings do
you have? I'm the oldest of seven seven Okay. So
that leads me to two questions. One are there any
other autistic children in your family?
And two?
How do you get along with your siblings now that
you've kind of figured it all out on what's going
on in your life?
As far as I know, and I'm pretty estranged from
my family, I have been for probably the last fourteen
years or so, which is something that I try to
go do I miss them? Is there something missing in life?
And for me on the inside, just a lot of
those things that would happen for most people, it doesn't
happen for me. I sometimes I wish it did. But
it's one of those things where if there was a
void there, I have no idea whether it's actually there.
But as far as I know, I'm the odd man
out when it comes to being on the spectrum. Of course,
my mom's been married multiple times, so I have a
few actual siblings and half siblings and what have you.
Okay, so how long have you been married now?
We have been married twenty seven years?
Okay? Any kids or just you and your wife?
We thought about having kids and then we decided, yeah,
let's let's go ahead and do that. Medically, it just
kind of turned out not to be in the cards.
Rather than just seeing specialists and things like that with
no actual guarantee, we just decided, you know what, if
it ends up happening, it happens. If not, it doesn't.
So we're kind of full. We've been for legged parents
probably the whole time.
Okay, all right now, it seems to me that you
have a pretty solid marriage with your wife saying that
you need to figure things out so that you can
get through this. What are some of the things that
she saw that you might not have seen, or if
you did see it, you tried to mask it. That
spurred you into saying, Okay, I've got to figure this
thing out.
A lot of it had to do with probably holidays
and travel. I'm not the greatest when it comes to
trying to have quick travel plans, weekend getaways and things
like that, because I have a lot of varying morning
and evening routines where I utilize things that around the
house and it's not like I can pack up the
whole house. There were things where I would struggle with
work and stuff like that, and then coming home after
masking day in and day out, just being miserable and tired,
and then still needing to meet the expectations of home life,
where really I just wanted to go home and just
kind of hide as much as I possibly could. That
was something that just wasn't possible. There would be meltdowns.
I've had my fair share of meltdowns, even shortly after
being diagnosed. Before we really kind of were able to
dig in and see how we would be able to
mitigate these things enough to get me from point A
to point B.
Okay.
Also humor. There was a time where she was incredibly
angry with me, and I did apologize later, but at
the time her mom couldn't come into town to do
the Christmas shopping, so I had to go along because
she had planned on buying some things and needed some help.
The store was packed, I believe it was a cold store,
so I ducked around to another aisle. She was rushing
to keep up with me, and then I just turned
around and I said, ma'am, why are you following for me?
This is this was this is the kind of humor
that happens for me, okay. So I started to laugh.
Everyone's looking at her, and then I just I hugged her.
I did my best to try to make her kind
of fil at ease, but she didn't talk to me
the rest of the evening. It was it was very
quiet after that.
Yeah, I can understand that.
Now, during your formative years high school, you said that
you had some issues there, Did you get bullied at all?
I was bullying was grade school through high school because
growing up I was just this scrawny, little runt of
a kid. I mean I didn't break one hundred pounds
until I was probably a junior in high school. So
I was just this little bitty guy and I was
just an easy target. I didn't have any boundaries. I
didn't know what boundaries were. I thought, yes would be
something that if I was agreeable, things would work out better.
They really didn't. I got beat up a lot, a
lot of name calling, being pushed around, and so the
times where I could find some solace was really based
on some outlandis humor in the classroom because I knew
the instructors would give me the space that I needed,
but I didn't know how to ask for help in that.
I had no idea how to do that. Now. I
did have a couple of teachers in high school who
when they would challenge me, they would see a level
of brilliance, specifically my drafting instructor. He paired me with
a guy who was kind of a class clown. Two.
We ended up building this bridge as an assignment out
of glue, cardboard, and rubber bands that held almost two
hundred pounds in between the two desks that it set on,
and it ended up being the bridge that really won out.
You know. He pulled me aside and he said, look
what you guys put together was a genius. And then
some of the scaled versions of the things that I
asked you to draw down were absolutely great. I wish
that you would apply yourself in this fashion across the board. Again,
I had no idea why things worked and looked the
way they did to me, and so I had no
idea how to really explain myself.
Right, So what years was that? Was that the eighties nineties.
That was eighty eight to ninety two, So.
That was at a time when people didn't really know
or understand what autism is. You were not only trying
to understand yourself, but you was trying to understand others
to get them to understand you. But there wasn't any
psychological tests out there so that it could be put
out there what you're dealing with, so that it could
help them understand what you're going through exactly.
And you know, fast forward to where I am now,
and a lot of the research that I've done, I'm
fairly confident that the generation before me, and a lot
of my generation, possibly a small amount of the generation
behind me, remained largely misdiagnosed or underdiagnosed. And in the
level of research, I found that women and minorities are
probably the least tested between the two and the most misdiagnosed. However,
when it comes to the numbers of just minority groups
you're talking about, there's some of the last people that
get to get tested in so they are diagnosed so
much later than even a majority of the population.
For the amount of males that will mask their autism,
there are probably four times more females that we'll mask
it because they're trying to fit in with all their
other friends. Then they're going through the home modal changes
and it makes it that much tougher, and that leads
to severe depression on teenagers, especially females, because being undiagnosed
can really add a strain to their life exactly.
I agree that the numbers are incredibly low across the board,
and not just here. I've looked at numbers across the
Pond and other parts of Europe. I've had a chance
to sit in on some other zoom calls and a
lot of different spaces on what was normally known as Twitter,
speaking to women who are even older than I am right,
that are just newly diagnosed. There ends up being a
lot of medical professionals that some of them would tell
the public that it's being over diagnosed. To me, just
be an awful thing to say, because we don't really
say that about anything else, right, I mean, when you
look at the advancements of being able to detect cancers,
that I think, oh, well, so many more people are
getting different types of cancer from these things, and so
as medical technology begins to really catch up, then you
start to see an increase. And for me, I think, honestly,
when people hear that someone has a disability or disorder
or syndrome, it's in the human nature to try to
see if they can spot it. I've got to see
if I can see it. Therefore, I know it's real.
A lot of times autism just doesn't really work that way.
Right, It's a thought process. Yeah.
I had one lady she told a friend of hers
that he was autistic because she was trying to bear
her soul a little bit and get her friend and
know her. The first thing the lady said back to with,
well you don't look autistic, and she goes, I should
have never told her. So this has been a great conversation.
Let's get an update on what you're doing now. I
understand that you've got something going that's actually pretty exciting.
Yeah, fast forward to what I'm doing now. As I
begin to really research everything about autism, I started looking
at an employment because employment has always been one of
those real downers for me, specifically even just getting through
the interview process. And depending on the study, it's anywhere
from Some studies have it at seventy two percent under unemployment,
some have it as high as eighty three percent. When
you look at other avenues or other parts of the
population with varying disabilities, the unemployment rate isn't nearly that high.
Okay.
I started looking into it, and the more I looked
into it, the more I thought there is a hidden
talent pool that I think companies are really missing out on.
So I went ahead in began to explore a lot
of the unique abilities, talents, and skills that autistic people
can bring to employment, to work to businesses and found
that according to scientific statistics, forty four percent of people
on the spectrum have an above average IQ. So with
all of the everything from stemming to different types of communication,
different responses, two different questions, and the answer is not
being maybe.
What you're used to okay.
A lot of these things tend to keep people who
are on the spectrum out of employment. The environment can
be very difficult or challenging to get through day in
and day out. I have plenty of experience with that,
So what I wanted to do is I designed a
company called logical A to go in and teach companies
how to properly outreach when they have a position that
they need filled informing people on the spectrum that yes,
go ahead and apply. I want to encourage them to
tell employers and for employers to be paired or knowing
that someone who's applying is on the spectrum so that
real communication questions that need to be asked for answers
that they definitely need on both sides, even before an
interview happens, in order to establish what the challenges are,
how these things can be handled, and where everyone is
meeting each other halfway. And then once they have an
understanding of the changes to the interview to how they
post jobs and things like that, then taking them through
their facility and showing them where and only where they
need to modify, down to the department level. Or a
candidate who's on the spectrum.
That makes really good sense.
Say that their sensory issue is smell, then what we're
doing is we're not putting them by a break room
or a kitchenet. We're putting them further away. With seventy
nine percent of companies really thinking hiring people with disabilities
is very cost prohibitive, I want to go in there
and show them that they don't have to write a
big check and be concerned about the bottom line in
order to make it possible for people on the spectrum
to work there. A lot of it, probably eighty percent
of it or more, has to do with changes in
communication and how that happens. But what they're getting on
the backside of modifying the environment, I use modify instead
of accommodate, because when people think of accommodating, they think
that they're sacrificing or giving something up, so there's resistance.
So if you're using modify, people have an understanding that
you're looking to modify something exists in order to make
it better. And when autistic people are in a job
that fits them where they're skilled in that and have
a high level of interest, but they have an environment
that really helps bring that forward, they're forty percent or
greater in their level of efficiency and productivity compared to
that of their counterparts. And so really what this is
all about is not doing something for the sake of charity,
but you're bringing on people who have a high level
of pattern recognition and attention to detail that you don't
have right now in the level of productivity that really
companies would probably like to have, they just don't know
how to find them in the talent pool.
So this company that you formed, is it something that
you're working on with people around the country or is
it just localized to where you live now.
So I'm about three months into the actual launch, still
working on getting my first customers. I've got an intake
form that I'm having a copywriter. Look at, I have
a process manual that I wrote specifically making it kind
of the that I can pass on at a point
in time where I'm busy enough where I need someone
to take on additional clients that I can't meet or
reach within a proper time frame. Okay, So a lot
of it is all me still trying to really get
logically out there, let people know that it exists and
really what it's for.
Have you tested the market at all with people letting
them know that this is coming so that you could
see if there's an interest there that you can develop
and really push towards so that you can kind of
see an endgame, so to speak.
That is a lot of why Christy had me on
again last night. She's been following the progress. We keep
in touch a lot. There's a fantastic organization here in
which talk called Heartspring. They deal with kids and adults
of all types of disabilities, and where I'm actually working
on scheduling a first workshop with their managers with a
big educational component on a lot of the finer details
and really helping them understand the things that they'll need
to be able to convey and things they'll need to
be able to understand and process to hire people on
the spectrum. Now they work with them, and to me,
their thing was, They've got to thinking about how many
do we hire and do we really look at them
as ideal candidates like we do everyone else. And the
big thing that is also an updill battle is that
companies hire like themselves. They hire people like them So
a lot of it's going to have to be getting
a change in mindset. So I have a couple of
things also planned. I've got a lunch and learn plan
with the Eliot Business School at WSU, and so really
I'm kind of just coming out of the gates with
this and still working on a proper marketing blitz. I'm
being encouraged by this Business Development Center at Wichita State
to do a presser. That's great, So how do you
feel about that? It's a challenge on us going and
presenting the information. A pressor would mean that many more
people would be seeing and being exposed to that. For me,
it's important that I take this in steps that I
can manage, because you know, just because I'm starting this
business and I see the potential and the SBDC sees
the potential in it that doesn't negate the daily challenges
that I still have.
Yeah, I get that.
I think it's great because there's just so many layers
to this that I think is really good. Number one
is you're an autistic person putting this out showing that
autistic people can be a viable source for employers, and
you're hopefully breaking down those barriers of understanding, because the
biggest challenge that I've seen is the understanding part. I
feel that you can accept something because you're aware that
it is there, but until you understand it, you don't
fully grasp what you're accepting. So I think that we
need to get more things out there, just like you're doing,
to show employers and just general people in the US
and around the world that just because someone has a
label of autism attached to them doesn't mean that they
can't contribute to society and live a good life just
like anyone else.
And really that's the thing. There are so many long
term components to this, is that then being able to
work where they can as much as they can is
going to offset a lot of the financial challenges that
families have going forward. Right I've had a chance to
meet some great agents from Northwestern Mutual who specialize in
long term financial instruments for families with kids who have
all types of disabilities. Also, in my little venture out
further into the world that I've ever gone, I had
a chance to meet with a travel agent who is
also a certified autism travel professional, and I had no
idea they existed.
Wow, that's awesome. She needs to become on my podcast.
How did that work out for you?
So I've ended up in this support lane with her,
where the object is hopefully this year, to get the
local airport to meet with us and to run a
simulation with a few families who have kids on the
spectrum through the process of actually going to the airport
and actually boarding the aircraft, using this to begin to
build a tool that can be taught everywhere. And she
gave me some fantastic news late this afternoon that I'm
still going to digest tonight and find out more. The
airport in Dubai is now fully certified in all of
their services for people on the spectrum. I really want
to know how they did it. She wants to know
how they did it so that we did possibly get
some information and say, hey, we would really like to
replicate your efforts here.
Yeah, that's that's awesome. I mean this has been great,
a lot of great information. What would you like to
tell people? What would you like to leave them with?
I think what I'd like to leave everyone with, because
it's relevant to everyone, is just as meeting one autistic
person is meeting one autistic person. This principle foundationally applies
to everyone. Everybody is one of one with something just
unique within them that no one else will ever have.
That maybe in this fast paced world that we live in,
stopping and actually seeing what some you know, the whole
of a person, seeing the whole of a person, not
just their their surface, and not just overlaying past experiences
or bias or trends on them and then making a
decision from there, really start to understand that you're looking
at another human being that has complexities just like you do.
That's that's what I'd like people to know more.
That's great. Yeah, I think that's a great thing to
do and say.
So.
I really appreciate you coming on.
It's been a great conversation and I definitely want to
keep up with how you're doing with your program you're
putting out there.
Well, I am extremely honored. I can't thank you enough
for you taking the time to have me on. This
has been absolutely terrific. You're a brilliant host at what
you do. I'm excited to see where your podcast goes.
I've been listening to some episodes when I can, and
everyone that you have on they just have a real
depth of storytelling that has really just been fantastic.
Well, thanks, I really appreciate that. Thanks for coming on.
Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to.
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