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Autism through talent
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Becca Lory Hector
My life was saved by finding out about autism.
Becca Lory Hector
In a small Queens apartment, eight-year-old Becca Lory Hector spends hours reading, happiest in a world of her own. Adults know she is different but have no name for it.
Difficult, stubborn, lazy, overly dramatic, those labels come first. Years of psychologists and psychiatrists bring explanations for anxiety, depression, and social struggles. Autism is never one of them.
Difficult, stubborn, lazy, overly dramatic, those labels come first. Years of psychologists and psychiatrists bring explanations for anxiety, depression, and social struggles. Autism is never one of them.
From the outside, she didn't fit anyone's picture of autism at the time. She spoke. She read. She followed the rules, and teachers called her a good girl. Inside was a different story - noise, light, crowds, and the unwritten rules of talking to people could use up all her energy before lunch. New York never really went quiet, so leaving the apartment took a kind of planning other kids didn't need.
She went to Pace University, started law school, and left before finishing. Then came the jobs.
"I did 13 different jobs in 15 years," she said in an interview with EvoAutism.
She tended bar, worked as a veterinary technician, and managed construction projects in Manhattan. Learning a job was never the hard part. Staying in one was.
Looking back, she can name the small things that made certain jobs bearable. Behind a bar, there was a physical line between her and everyone else.
"That six-foot piece of wood between me and everybody else - that's what worked about bartending."
She also commuted against the crowd, which meant fewer people around her on the way to work. Nobody planned these as accommodations. She simply noticed, without yet understanding why, which parts of her day cost her less.
She went to Pace University, started law school, and left before finishing. Then came the jobs.
"I did 13 different jobs in 15 years," she said in an interview with EvoAutism.
She tended bar, worked as a veterinary technician, and managed construction projects in Manhattan. Learning a job was never the hard part. Staying in one was.
Looking back, she can name the small things that made certain jobs bearable. Behind a bar, there was a physical line between her and everyone else.
"That six-foot piece of wood between me and everybody else - that's what worked about bartending."
She also commuted against the crowd, which meant fewer people around her on the way to work. Nobody planned these as accommodations. She simply noticed, without yet understanding why, which parts of her day cost her less.
By 33, she couldn't keep going. After another job ended, she moved back into her childhood bedroom and largely stopped leaving the house. She has said openly that this lasted about three years, and that for most of it she was suicidal, describing herself as "not long for this world."
The way out started with a migraine. Becca had them since childhood, and while reading about the strange sensory symptoms hers came with, she found her way to information on sensory processing, and from there to Asperger syndrome - the term used at the time. For the first time, she read a description of herself.
She sent what she'd found to her mother, without saying why. A few days later, her mother wrote back three words: "You found it."
Becca was diagnosed with autism at 36.
She doesn't talk about that diagnosis as bad news. The word she uses is relief. It connected things that had never seemed related - the sensory pain, the exhaustion after being around people, the pattern of losing jobs, the need to be alone, the sense that everyone else had somehow been handed a rulebook she never got a copy of. Finding autism, she says, saved her life.
She started paying attention to what her own nervous system actually needed, and changed her work, her surroundings, how much she expected of herself day to day, and eventually where she lived.
Leaving New York mattered most. She moved first to Colorado, into the Rockies at around 8,000 feet.
"It was the first time that I really experienced sensory comfort in my life," she told EvoAutism.
Today she lives in Maine, which she describes as the place she should have been born - quiet, close to nature, with far more control over what reaches her.
The way out started with a migraine. Becca had them since childhood, and while reading about the strange sensory symptoms hers came with, she found her way to information on sensory processing, and from there to Asperger syndrome - the term used at the time. For the first time, she read a description of herself.
She sent what she'd found to her mother, without saying why. A few days later, her mother wrote back three words: "You found it."
Becca was diagnosed with autism at 36.
She doesn't talk about that diagnosis as bad news. The word she uses is relief. It connected things that had never seemed related - the sensory pain, the exhaustion after being around people, the pattern of losing jobs, the need to be alone, the sense that everyone else had somehow been handed a rulebook she never got a copy of. Finding autism, she says, saved her life.
She started paying attention to what her own nervous system actually needed, and changed her work, her surroundings, how much she expected of herself day to day, and eventually where she lived.
Leaving New York mattered most. She moved first to Colorado, into the Rockies at around 8,000 feet.
"It was the first time that I really experienced sensory comfort in my life," she told EvoAutism.
Today she lives in Maine, which she describes as the place she should have been born - quiet, close to nature, with far more control over what reaches her.
She shares that life with her husband, Antonio Hector, and their animals, among them her emotional support animal, Sir Walter Underfoot.
Work follows the same logic. The word she keeps returning to is flexibility. She describes autism as a disability that moves: her capacity shifts from one day to the next. Some days she can do almost anything. On others, deciding what to eat takes real effort. A job built around fixed hours and fixed output leaves no room for that.
Work follows the same logic. The word she keeps returning to is flexibility. She describes autism as a disability that moves: her capacity shifts from one day to the next. Some days she can do almost anything. On others, deciding what to eat takes real effort. A job built around fixed hours and fixed output leaves no room for that.
What started as something personal became her work. After her diagnosis, autism turned into what she calls a special interest - she read everything she could find, volunteered, started speaking in public.
One early influence was Liane Holliday Willey's book Pretending to Be Normal, which Becca remembers as the first time she saw someone like herself on a page.
Even then, she struggled to recognize herself in the public face of autism. She had tattoos.
Even then, she struggled to recognize herself in the public face of autism. She had tattoos.
She'd tended bar. She went to concerts. The autistic adults held up publicly rarely looked or lived anything like her.
"I didn't have a role model," she said. "I didn't have an adult that was openly autistic out in the world and successful."
She become an advocate, speaker, trainer, consultant, and researcher. She is currently Director of Learning and Innovation Strategist at AANE, the Association for Autism and Neurodiversity. Her books, Always Bring Your Sunglasses and Growing Up Undiagnosed, are both rooted in the years before her diagnosis.
"I didn't have a role model," she said. "I didn't have an adult that was openly autistic out in the world and successful."
She become an advocate, speaker, trainer, consultant, and researcher. She is currently Director of Learning and Innovation Strategist at AANE, the Association for Autism and Neurodiversity. Her books, Always Bring Your Sunglasses and Growing Up Undiagnosed, are both rooted in the years before her diagnosis.
She was nominated to Diversability's D-30 Disability Impact List several years running, one of several recognitions of her work in the disability community.
In 2025, she co-authored a study in Autism in Adulthood that defined quality of life through interviews with 25 autistic adults, and she's now part of a follow-up project, funded by OAR, building a quality-of-life measure informed by the autistic community itself.
She was also selected for the 2025-2026 Global Heumann Fellowship at the World Institute on Disability, where she studies disability-led leadership - organizations where disabled people don't just advise, but actually hold decision-making power.
Alongside all this, she runs a consulting practice, Truly Inclusive Leadership, and built Self Defined Living, a program that helps other autistic adults work out what a sustainable, self-defined life looks like for them.
She was also selected for the 2025-2026 Global Heumann Fellowship at the World Institute on Disability, where she studies disability-led leadership - organizations where disabled people don't just advise, but actually hold decision-making power.
Alongside all this, she runs a consulting practice, Truly Inclusive Leadership, and built Self Defined Living, a program that helps other autistic adults work out what a sustainable, self-defined life looks like for them.
IMuch of her work now asks the opposite question: what happens when autistic people are trusted to describe their own lives.
She doesn't offer one formula for a good autistic life. Her own story argues against there being one. What helped her was noticing what actually worked - less noise, more control, real boundaries, work that bends, an environment that fits, and permission to stop measuring herself against a life built for somebody else.
The diagnosis didn't give her a new identity. It gave a name to the one that had been there the whole time.
She doesn't offer one formula for a good autistic life. Her own story argues against there being one. What helped her was noticing what actually worked - less noise, more control, real boundaries, work that bends, an environment that fits, and permission to stop measuring herself against a life built for somebody else.
The diagnosis didn't give her a new identity. It gave a name to the one that had been there the whole time.
