April is Autism Acceptance Month. I’m releasing my memoir on March 31st. That timing isn’t a coincidence.

I spent most of my life not knowing I was autistic. Not because the signs weren’t there — they were, everywhere, in retrospect — but because I was good at adapting. Good at performing. Good at building systems around my own wiring without ever understanding the wiring itself.

I built a career on it. Thirty years in technology. Enterprise architecture, DevOps transformation, platform engineering. Four times a Microsoft MVP. Books published. Teams led. Problems solved. From the outside it looked like a straight line. From the inside it felt like crossing ice you weren’t sure would hold.

That’s where the title comes from.

I got my diagnosis as an adult. Late. And the word that kept coming back to me wasn’t “broken” or “different” or even “finally.” It was explained. Fifty-something years of experiences that never quite made sense suddenly had a framework. A name. Not a new identity — I didn’t become someone else. But a long-overdue explanation for the one I’d always been.

Writing Thin Ice was the hardest thing I’ve done outside of raising my kids. Not because the memories were painful — though some were — but because honesty at that level requires you to stop performing. To put down the systems you built to survive and just tell the truth about what it cost to build them.

I’m telling this story in April because this month is supposed to be about acceptance. And I think acceptance starts with telling the truth — not the cleaned-up version, not the inspirational LinkedIn version, but the actual one.

So that’s what I did. Over the next four weeks I’m going to share pieces of that truth here. What autism actually looked like from inside a high-performing career. How the diagnosis changed the way I understood my own past. What it means to finally know yourself after a lifetime of moving forward without a map.

If you’ve ever felt like you were crossing ice you weren’t sure would hold — this series is for you.

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Thin Ice: Survival, Identity, and Learning Who I Was All Along is available now. Learn more about the book →