Haley Moss: "My Autism Is Not the Center of the Universe"

**Morra Aarons-Mele** (0:02)
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I'm Morra Aarons-Mele and this is The Anxious Achiever. I'm not going to lie, y'all, this is one of my favorite conversations I have had in a long, long time and it's with Haley Moss. Haley is a lawyer. She's an expert on the Americans with Disabilities Act. She is a disability activist, a neurodiversity activist. She is a lawyer and a speaker and a world changer and she has autism. I wanted to do this episode because I wanted to really dive deep into the protections offered by the ADA, which if you have a disability, you are entitled to by law. And we get into that. But we get into a lot of conversations around neurodivergence that feels sometimes like we so need to talk about them and are so hard to talk about online without people exploding. We talk about being neurodivergent and whether you express yourself as having a disability or not. We talk about accepting your neurodivergence versus positioning it as an advantage. Haley really blew my mind with this one. She herself, she says, is at peace with her autism. It's a piece of her, has been for a long time. But she doesn't see it as a superpower. And indeed, she is expanding her identity beyond her autism, even though for a living she talks about autism and disability. But you know, she talked about the whole idea of neurodivergent strengths, which we know is backed by data for many of us, as a strategic self-positioning strategy in a work world that isn't meant for you. We strategically self-position at work all the time. We name drop, we lead, you know, I used to say in meetings, well, when I was working with President Obama, and people were like, okay, she worked with President Obama, she must know what she's doing, right? So we give clues and sort of humble brag about ourselves all the time. And I think Haley and I, we have this really interesting conversation about presenting neurodivergent strengths in a way that tells everyone around you, respect me, I'm really good at what I do. Even though it may be a little bit of strategic self-positioning, and we may not even believe it, and we're still enduring the pain of masking. And indeed, it might be another form of masking. So I'm rambling. This is a really, really good conversation with Haley Moss. I hope you enjoy it.