 yeah for me you know i didn't know i was autistic until i was 39 so that's nearly four decades of having no idea that there's anything i knew there was something different but i didn't know what it was and so every single thing that cassandra gets told in the book is something that i have been told repeatedly from people and it is this constant voice and when you have that from childhood all the way through it becomes part of you and it becomes part of who you are the belief that you are all the time doing something wrong or all the time doing something that makes you broken