Hi, I'm Fable, and I'm autistic. I was diagnosed when I was 8, alongside a diagnosis of anxiety and depression. I was then referred to a service for my depression but they turned me away when they saw I'm autistic because "being depressed is just a part of autism". This shaped how I viewed myself and the world around me for a very long time. But I'm now in a place where I see how unfair that was, and the damage it has done to me. I'm also able to recognise that so many people are told the same thing every day, and feel helpless for it. On top of being autistic, I'm queer and disabled (chronic pain), and these things also left me feeling excluded from the people around me. I spent years feeling alone, weird and like I didn't belong due to my diagnosis, but now I know that I'm not alone or weird and I do belong. I wanted to start this blog as a way to connect to other people who are autistic, queer or disabled, and for us to have a place where we don't have to feel so alone or alienated from the world outside. A lot of my struggles came from not understanding myself and the extent of the help I needed. Sometimes I felt I wasn't allowed to breathe on my own, and other times I felt as if someone had sucked all the air out of my lungs. Figuring out how much help I actually needed, for both my autism and my pain, was the first thing that set me on the path of figuring out who I am and where I fit into the world. I'm hoping that by sharing my past experiences, and any new ones, I can help other people who feel stuck, like me, in a cycle of having too much or not enough help. I still have a long way to go in figuring out exactly who I am and how I fit into the world. But I've changed so much since my diagnosis, even in the past year alone, I've found a brighter place than I ever could have imagined for myself.