If you've spent most of your life feeling like you're performing a version of yourself that's just slightly off from who you actually are, this episode is for you.

More info, resources & ways to connect - https://www.tacosfallapart.com/podcast-live-show/podcast-guests/angie-dixon

Angie Dixon is an author, artist and creator of the Leonardo Trait, a framework for understanding the kind of brain that runs on curiosity, cycles through a hundred projects at once and absolutely refuses to pick a lane. She's also late diagnosed autistic, and she spent decades masking before a severe back injury seven years ago forced everything to stop, and forced her to finally start living as herself.

We talked about what unmasking actually looks like, and it's not the dramatic transformation the word might suggest. For Angie, it started with novelty t-shirts. She began wearing them to physical therapy because those were the ones without paint on them. That small comfort became her whole wardrobe. Unmasking, she says, tends to be gradual, personal and a lot less cinematic than people expect.

One of the most clarifying things Angie said in this conversation is that neurodivergent people are not broken neurotypicals. We're not a defective version of something else. We're just different, and that difference is worth protecting rather than hiding.

We also got into the Leonardo Trait itself, which Angie describes as profound creativity in a chaotic world. If you think in spirals instead of straight lines, have 37 browser tabs open in your brain at any given moment and feel like the self-help books everyone else loves were written for someone who is simply not you, you might be a Leonardo.

Angie was diagnosed with autism at 55 after nearly 20 years of writing a book she thought was about creativity, only to realize it was actually about neurodivergence the whole time. That realization sent her back to the drawing board, and the result is a manifesto about being who you actually are rather than the acceptable version of yourself you've been performing.

We talked about burnout warning signs, what to do when rest isn't enough, how to stop treating unfinished projects like personal failures and how to figure out the difference between professional adaptation and genuine self-erasure. We also talked about her AI assistant Ziggy, who once told her that a plain t-shirt would make her look like she was about to hold a hostage.

If you're questioning whether you've been masking your whole life, Angie's take is simple: if you're asking, you probably already know the answer.

Find Angie and her Unmasked summit at her website, and check out the summit itself, which was designed specifically to be the least overwhelming format possible: email only, no endless video calls.

Even Tacos Fall Apart is a Mental Health Monday podcast. New episodes weekly.