The Doe is a digital publication sharing anonymous, heart-centered narratives to promote empathy across divides. In order to build empathy, someone has to imagine themselves in another's shoes. Our physical representations—race, gender, appearance—often keep us from getting there. Enter anonymous storytelling. Anonymous storytelling is key in empathy building, especially across the toughest topics like politics, reproductive rights, parenting, money, and religion.
Our editor noticed an underlying theme surfacing in otherwise unrelated pitches: Many of these stories mentioned a person who had been diagnosed with autism later in life and the impact that that diagnosis or the lack of that diagnosis had on their life.
For example, a woman wanted to talk about how much she struggled as a young mom, but when, years later, she was diagnosed with autism, her struggles all seemed to click into place. It was like a rubric to a puzzle that was previously meaningless.
For some of our contributors, a late-in-life diagnosis proves empowering. It provides access to treatment and tools and a framework for understanding new experiences. For others, it offers a grieving point to reflect on what could have been different had they gotten the support they needed.
Our team learned that although not known to the mainstream, researchers have a name for this — The Lost Generation.
The Doe wished to shed light on these stories so that our audience, many of them seemingly touched by the impact of being part of The Lost Generation, would feel less lost and more seen.
Once our team realized we were inadvertently capturing a little-talked about snapshot of our generation, we knew we needed to put this content together in the most compelling cross-platform strategy. Our decision: a week-long dive into the topic with stories across web, social and email.
Our web team activated quickly to pull the best and broadest ranging examples of what life is like for “The Lost Generation.” Ultimately, we settled on these three stories: After my autism diagnosis at 47, I revisited my life with new eyes; I struggled as a young mom. I had no idea I had autism. ; I’ve been a pastor for years. I recently found out I have autism.
Then social activated. In planning a week of textured and impactful content, we booked interviews with two of our storytellers and captured some of their insights on audio that wouldn’t have worked as web stories, but were so interesting as social posts.
Take the audio clip we posted in which one of our storytellers explains what “masking” in autism means. She says, “Throughout my life I’ve done a lot of masking, which means I’m hiding traits that turned out to be autism from other people in order to be more accepted… how I make eye contact, when I make certain facial expressions. I have to consciously think about all of that to better fit in. It’s exhausting. I think we all do a little bit of “masking” hiding parts of ourselves to fit in at work, but for autistic people it never really stops.”
In a second audio clip, another storyteller shares what “stimming” means sharing, “There’s different ways of “stimming” like the handflapping like a lot of autistic kids will do, tapping your feet. The autistic nervous system is so much more strung out and overstimulated all the time. Stimming is a way that we can use our bodies to sort of soothe our nervous system.”
To broaden our reach, we reached out to six other creators who have spoken about The Lost Generation and asked them to send us their most meaningful content on the topic. We scheduled these to run in our stories during the themed week.
Finally, email sprung into action to put together a comprehensive curated email with all of the content.
The results blew away our expectations. Numbers aren’t everything, but let’s start there: Instagram engagement soared 64% above the monthly average, and TikTok engagement rose 24% compared to the month’s average. The share rate across our stories was a staggering 900% above our monthly average.
At The Doe, we put our faith in humanity not celebrity, but we were thrilled when Rosario Dawson, Amanda Seales, and Holly Madison shared our content. Amanda and Holly have recently come out as having received late-in-life autism diagnoses.
We were inundated with comments, DMs and emails from readers and viewers who felt seen and validated by our content.
“Reading these articles has been so profound, especially the representation of women. Please share my heartfelt thanks to The Doe and contributors for finding a way to make these experiences tangible and relatable in ways that a lot of information about Autism Spectrum Disorder is not for women or girls.”
“I was 46! Being diagnosed has been life-changing, as I finally could connect all the dots.”
“This describes how I feel so accurately!!”
We had so many additional perspectives that we decided to gather some of them into a fresh web story to document the ongoing conversation.
We feel grateful to our community who turn out with such genuine vulnerability and openness to connect. Everyone knows the comments sections on the internet can be a really nasty race to the bottom, but we credit our audiences’ commitment to connection and empathy for these wonderful results.
