​For as long as I can remember, my family used to joke about my “Paddington Bear hard stare.” Whenever I looked at people with a fixed, intense, or unblinking gaze, it was laughed off as a quirky little habit. ​It wasn’t until my late autism diagnosis at 45 that the…

Before I knew I was autistic, I spent most of my life feeling like an outsider without understanding why. I didn’t know why I struggled to understand jokes, so I laughed along to avoid looking foolish – never realising how that made me vulnerable to people taking…