We Need To Talk with Paul C. Brunson - I Always Knew I Was Autistic - Talia Mar On Late Diagnosis At 24

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

Talia Mar shares her journey with autism from feeling different as a child to being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at 24. She opens up about bullying, masking, sensory overwhelm, and the pressure of trying to appear confident while struggling internally. Talia also reflects on why autism in women is so often missed, how music became her outlet, and the relief that came with finally understanding herself. This conversation is an honest look at neurodivergence, identity and embracing the way your mind works. We’re Talking Autism (00:00) Intro (00:35) Talia Explains Why She Thinks She Was Bullied at School (02:28) Talia on Masking and Dealing With Bullying at School (03:27) What Advice Would Talia Give Her Younger Self? (04:44) The Message Behind Talia’s Music (07:53) Talia’s Autism Diagnosis at 24 (08:45) When Talia First Thought She Had Autism (11:53) Saily Ad (13:05) Why Talia Wasn’t Diagnosed Earlier (15:28) Statistics Around Autism in Women (16:38) How Life Might Have Been Different With an Earlier Diagnosis (18:07) How Talia’s Parents Reacted to Her Diagnosis (20:11) Would Talia Encourage Others to Seek a Diagnosis? (20:56) How Miniminter Reacted to Talia’s Autism Sponsored by: Saily - Download from the app store and use code WNTT at checkout for 15% off. For more details: https://saily.com/wntt ⛵ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, turns at AKA.m.m.S. College PC. Welcome to We're Talking. In honor of Autism Awareness Day, we're joined by Talia Marr to discuss her journey with ASD from early struggles with masking to her diagnosis at 24. This is an honest conversation about breaking down the misconceptions surrounding autism and embracing neurodivergence. Clearly, you know, children are bullied and adults are also bullied for a variety of reasons.

What do you think the reasons were that you were bullied? I think people are, especially kids, they're really unhappy when they don't know what they want to do and someone else does know what they want to do. I probably came across as having a level of confidence that, one, I didn't have and two, they definitely didn't have because everyone knew I wanted to be a singer, I wanted to do this. And I think everyone at school was like, I don't know what I want to do. And it was probably just a way of being like, just shut her up. Like, that's enough. Also, I was a little bit weird. I definitely didn't present myself in the way that everyone else did.

I made myself somewhat of an easy target. Okay. How did you present yourself? I struggled with, like, eye contact, talking to people, like, openly. I ticked. I had ticks at school. Like, I had vocal ticks. And people would be like, why stop doing that?

Like, why are you making that noise? I was like, oh my God, they noticed. Like in my head, I was like, no one's going to notice. It's under my breath. Like, I did everything I could control it, but I just could not stop. And I think people, yeah, they just thought, oh, she's weird. Okay. So these are the children saying this.

Yeah. Did you have any friends among that social circle? So I had, no. I had like moments where I had friends or I had someone who like would call me their friends. and then it would kind of go downhill for various reasons or whatever. And I had a group that was supposed to be my friendship group, but those were the ones that wrote stuff on my yearbook. So I don't know if I would class them as really good friends.

Yeah. So how do you think that that impacted how you showed up at that time? I think I just got better at masking. And like, fake it to you make it has been my favorite saying. phrase quote whatever you want to call it my whole life and the older I get the more I believe it and the more I hone in to that like one saying and I think that's probably what really really triggered it so that's why when you just mentioned you showed up looking like you were confident yeah and like that that was an act oh yeah yeah 100% yeah I definitely have confidence in areas

and like I can be really confident but I think it comes from a place of, well, if I'm not confident, this isn't going to go well, so I'll fake it. And then sometimes it slips into real confidence. And you have a moment where you're like, okay, I think I got this. And then you might return to planet Earth. Okay. So if you were to give 11-year-old Talia advice who's in that environment that she hates, what advice would you give her?

Do you know what? I don't know if I would. I don't know if I would give her advice. Like, because I think, and that sounds horrible. but I think one, I wouldn't have listened to it because I was so set on the way that I was doing things and two, it worked at the time

and I think I came out pretty unscathed, considering and I think if I said something to her I might change the course of everything. But you're saying she wasn't fine then? Yeah, I don't know what I would say to her. Sorry. No. But this is what I find interesting. She wasn't fine then.

Yeah. What would have made her fine? People being nicer. I'd speak to them. You speak to them. I'd speak to them. I'd be like, look, it's enough. She's having a hard day.

But I don't know if there's anything I could have said to me that would have made it better. I really don't know. Okay. This is fair. This is fair. So at that time, despite everything that was happening, you still wanted to pursue music. Yeah. That was your North Star.

Oh, 100%. Yeah. It seems like a lot of your work. comes with a message. Yeah. Because not all, I feel like not all artists have a specific message to what you do, but you have a message around your work. Yeah, I feel like as much as I'm, I always say I'm an emotional person and I'm an open book.

I'm not. I often don't talk about that kind of thing because, I think because I'm emotional. And like, I can't just have a conversation about something upsetting or sad. logically and just have that conversation without being emotionally distraught and wrecked. So I just avoid it. I just avoid any conversation like that where I'm going to be super upset, which is under the carpet, bye-bye. Yes. So then, okay, let's write a song so that it's out there.

And, like, I then have told everyone having a bit of a hard time, but I've done it with, like, a chorus instead of actual words. Yes, you just kind of move on real quick. Yeah. Pass it. You know, what's interesting is that you've even used that technique. with me here. Oh, really? Yes.

Is that whenever there was a topic, so take, for example, the bullying that was happening to you as a young child, immediately what I saw you do is you would smile. Yeah. And make a joke of it. Yeah. Right. That's me. Yes.

So that you could quickly move on and not feel that impending emotion of sadness or fear. Yeah. Right. So I'm just curious in your day-to-day life, right, even to this day, do you ever just sit in the emotion? No, I absolutely do not do that. Do I? No, not really. I think I might have a moment. Like, it definitely gets to me.

Like, I'm a crier. The whole internet has seen me cry. Like, it's not that I don't feel it, but I hate that feeling. I mean, not that anyone enjoys it, but like, I hate that feeling so much. I feel like as soon as I have a moment where I feel I can get out of it, I grab it and I run. Right. But what is it that you hate about the feeling? You know, so, for example, a lot of us feel distraught when we feel fear.

Right. And then I say, okay. But if you can get a get out of fear card moment. Yeah. So you grab it and you run. Then that means you never sit in fear. Yeah. And you don't fully know what fear feels like.

Yeah. Now, is fear a good thing? Oftentimes it's bad. Yeah. But many times it's good. Yeah. You can save your life. Yeah.

You know, it can save your life. But you have to know how to recognize it. Yeah. So then how are you then teaching yourself to recognize these emotions? I think I'm not. I think what I do is I go, no one else reacts as heavily as I do, which I'm not. means I'm overreacting. So as soon as I can stop overreacting, I'm going to do it. Yeah. Yeah. So that's you just telling yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Or I'll just have a moment where

I spiral for a bit and then I get to the end and I go, that's enough. At what point do you have the ASD diagnosis? That was only three or four years ago. Yeah, 2021. 2021. Yeah. All right. So this is, if we could spend a good moment in this because I think this is one of these areas that even in the research for you coming in, I noticed that there's not a lot out there with regard to women. Yeah. With autism or autistic spectrum disorder. Yeah.

Okay. So you were diagnosed at what age with ASD? 24. At 24. Yeah. What led to you even going in for that diagnosis? because you had previously been misdiagnosed with dyslexia. Yeah.

So I for a very long time had thought that I was autistic for a very long time. Ever since I learned about it at school, I remember I turned to the person next to me and we were learning about it and they were telling us, you know, X, Y, Z is a common symptom, if you want to call it a symptom, common, whatever. And I said to him, I was like, everyone does that. I don't really get it. Like, this is just people. And they looked to me and went, no, they don't.

I don't do any of that. And I remember thinking like, hmm, that's interesting. And I just said, oh, no, I'm joking, obviously. Ha ha, whatever. Move on. And it just from that moment was always a thing in the back of my head of like, every single thing they spoke about there I massively relate to.

But like, no one has brought this up with me. No one's ever said it. No one's ever just. about it because we I was like maybe 10 at this point no like it's not even been a conversation around me so I kind of just had that moment let it go and then when individual incidents happened throughout the years that thought would come back and I'd go huh maybe this is the autism thing that I was originally thinking about presenting itself again can you give an example of one of those like I've really like growing up I never wanted to hug my family I struggled

having dirty hands like I didn't want to touch things I was really really over sensitive to sounds to textures to um light to sensations I wasn't good at making friends I was really bad at eye contact I I just struggled with things that are what people would call typically human traits that everyone else would go that's that's not a hard thing and I'd be like this is debilitating what do you And because of that, fake it till you make it came in, and I just learned to like, okay, well, I hate hugging people. It sends a shiver into the deepest core of my soul and it makes you feel blindly uncomfortable. But I would just, I then was like, okay, I'm just going to go into a room and say, I'm a huger, I'm a huger. And then I would start the hug, I'd initiate the hug.

I'd give the strongest eye contact I possibly could, no matter how. horrible it made me feel inside because I was like no one else is struggling with these things I see and in doing so I masked and I covered up all of these little things to new people everyone who knew me could tell and they were like oh there's something sure um but it I essentially what my psychiatrist said was I did CBT on myself um cognitive behavioral therapy yeah yeah CBT yeah um So when I got the diagnosis, he was like, there's obviously no cure, but like there is, you know, therapy and there are treatments that can help combat the issues that you might face. He's like, but it sounds like you've done this your whole life. You've essentially done all these steps and you've trained yourself to be, to cope with it.

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To give it a try, download Saly from the App Store or scan the QR code on the screen. And if you want 15% off your first purchase, make sure you use my code, WNT, NTT at checkout. Details are in the episode description. Was that you were not diagnosed with ASD earlier? I think because of the media, I think how autism is presented in the media is not how I am, the things I'm interested in, the things that I do, the way I look, the way I talk. Like, you look at these programs that talk about autism spectrum disorder and they focus on what.

one specific end of the spectrum, which is obviously the more severe end, which, okay, yeah, people might struggle to communicate fully, like they can't, they don't speak until later in life. You know, they have a lot more severe symptoms, again, if you want to call it that, that I think people forget that it's a spectrum, it presents differently in women. And also, you can have different interests. It's not, you don't have to just love trains. People are obsessed with this idea that if you're autistic, you have to love trains or you have to love these really specific niche things.

when really you just need a special interest music music there you go so with the evidence being there you said the media is the reason why so you were and if you could just unpack that a little bit more specifically what was it about was it because you were so great at basking it or was it something else as to why you were not diagnosed i think it was partly that i was masking it and partly that no one in like even just little things like the amount of makeup that I wore like you never see that presented in autism like people like the the people that play someone who has autism in a movie they they have one specific rigid image of what that person looks like or how they present and that I think my parents and the people around me just thought well you don't look anything like

that you don't speak like they do you don't have their interest so like you can't be on the same spectrum as them. I see. I see. Um, when obviously like it presents itself, one, again, differently women and two, it's a spectrum. Everyone presents so differently. And I was also hyper emotional. And I think a lot of people have this idea in their head that people with autism struggle with emotion and don't have any. And it's like, well, actually, I do struggle with emotion. I have too much. Okay. Okay. So to the point of what you're saying with regard to women, This is the one that blew me away in the research for you coming in is 80% of females with autism are undiagnosed as of age 18. Yeah.

80%. That's crazy. Isn't it? That's wild. And to your point is a component of this seems to be masking is one component. Another component is the thought is that if you have autism, it doesn't look like. Yeah. Her, it looks like him.

Yeah. Right. But then also in the research, what I found is that it looks as if a lot of the studies that determine whether or not someone has autism are predominantly based on boys and men. Yeah. And women were not incorporated into ASD studies until recently. Yeah, that's wild. It makes no sense. But I feel like that's a common theme.

in medicine. Yeah. How do you think your life would have changed for you if you had received a diagnosis earlier? I think I'd have just had that like eureka moment, I guess, earlier and feeling like a weight lifted and an understanding because the reason I went to get my diagnosis

was because I started therapy and I remember I was talking to her about an instance of me being in a club and having a panic attack and leaving. And she kept asking me, she was like, you know, what does that bring up for you? Why do you think you felt that? And I was like, I just was overstimulated. She was like, no, but what do you think that means? And I was like, I don't think it means anything.

I think I have autism and I was just overstimulated. She would not drop it. Wow. And I was like, I think I can't just go around saying I've got autism. I'm autistic if I don't have a diagnosis. So I was like, I'm going to go and get this confirmed or not confirmed and I'll find out something else about myself. Because otherwise, I'm just not going to be able to explain myself. And sometimes I need to just be able to be like, oh, that's this, by the way.

We can move on from that. Like, it's a mute point. So I think my life would have been just a little bit more. I'd have felt a little bit better about things. Yes. I'd have forgiven myself a little bit easier. Yeah. Yeah, that's so hard on yourself.

Yeah. Yeah. How did your parents react once you told them about it? They were just like, yeah, make sense. I mean, they had to fill out a bunch of forms for it about my childhood. And my mom and I were talking about the other day, and she was like, when you were a kid, I didn't think it. But now I look back and I'm like, how? How did I miss that?

How did I not think that? Because all the things that you used to do as a child that other children weren't doing, she was like, I just put down to you just being, you know, extremely interested in rules. And you just loved justice. And you just loved following the rules. And like, you were just a really good kid. And it's like, no, my brain is just a bit different. Your brain is a bit different.

Yeah. Yeah. When I look at the ASD, I think, I think this is how it's listed in the DSM, right? Is that it is a disability. That's wild to me. And that, you know, it's interesting because I think that, When I, when I, every, everyone I know with ASD, right, including family members, I see certain traits and skills as they're, they have super human ability to concentrate and focus and, um, and achieve things that I don't think I can't. Yeah.

I get that. Yeah. I definitely think, again, with it being a spectrum, obviously, there's certain points it gets to where life is a lot harder. like and things will be harder for people with it, especially at the higher end of the spectrum. But I think even with that, there's moments of like, I guess moments of beauty and moments of like, hang on a minute, like the way your brain processes that, it's actually very interesting. And that's got you to a better conclusion than it would have got someone else. Okay.

All right. It's fair. It's fair. So for everyone now who is in a space, especially for young girls, who feels if they have some of these traits of these characteristics that you were talking about are not diagnosed. Your thought is as a parent as that as that young individual to go after the diagnosis. I definitely think like it's so hard in the UK like the NHS is so backed up when it comes to anything neurodivergency, mental health, anything like that. It could take years

to get a diagnosis, years to even get that first consultation. But I think there is no harm in trying um because it can just give you answers and like it can explain things and also i think as a parent it can be overwhelming when you're trying to do something with a child that has ASD and they're not responding how everyone else's children responding it's like why is that happening and you start to blame yourself you start like what am i doing wrong as a parent it's like you're not doing anything wrong you should need you something slightly differently yes yes all right fair enough and how did you feel simon embraced your AISD You can't reason with the sun.

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If he didn't, he'd have known immediately and been like, I don't like these traits. This isn't going to work. Cool. I'm out. So it's the little things. Like, I think he just finds little things funny. And it's like, oh, ha ha, that's endearing.

That's cute. Whatever. That's just Talia. And he's good at knowing when to calm me down or when to be like, okay, let's take a moment. Let's just like, settle for a second. And when to be like, all right, it's enough. Okay. So he'd read me like a book.

All right. This is beautiful. Yeah. This is beautiful. And if you want to hear the full unfiltered stories from today's guest, you can check them out on the We Need to Talk page. Drop a like, leave a comment, and hit subscribe. See you next week.