Drama Queen: One Autistic Woman and a Life of Unhelpful Labels

Drama Queen: One Autistic Woman and a Life of Unhelpful Labels by Gibbs, Sara. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781472274342.

It has taken me several years of exploration, but I am at a place now where I see autism as neither an affliction nor a superpower. Its just the blueprint for who I am. There is no cure, but thats absolutely fine by me. To cure me of my autism would be to cure me of myself. During the first thirty years of her life, comedy script writer Sara Gibbs had been labelled a lot of things - a cry baby, a scaredy cat, a spoiled brat, a weirdo, a show off - but more than anything else, shed been called a Drama Queen. No one understood her behaviour, her meltdowns or her intense emotions. She felt like everyone else knew a social secret that she hadnt been let in on; as if life was a party she hadnt been invited to. Why was everything so damn hard? Little did Sara know that, at the age of thirty, she would be given one more label that would change her lifes trajectory forever. That one day, sitting next to her husband in a clinical psychologists office, she would learn that she had never been a drama queen, or a weirdo, or a cry baby, but she had always been autistic. Drama Queen is both a tour inside one autistic brain and a declaration that a diagnosis on the spectrum, with the right support, accommodations and understanding, doesnt have to be a barrier to life full of love, laughter and success. It is the story of one woman trying to fit into a world that has often tried to reject her and, most importantly, its about a life of labels, and the joy of ripping them off one by one.