Why You Should Listen to This Episode
If you or someone you love has ever felt like an outsider in a world that wasn’t built for the way your mind works, Santiago Dominguez speaks directly to that experience. Diagnosed with high-functioning autism, Santiago opens up about the exhausting daily effort of navigating school, building relationships, and searching for a sense of value in a world that often misunderstood him. His story is one of hard-won resilience – and a powerful reminder that difference is not deficit.
In this episode:
Santiago Dominguez joins Cindy Thompson on A Resilience Project to share what it truly meant to grow up with high-functioning autism in a world that rarely made space for the way he experienced it.
For Santiago, every school day felt like a war – a constant negotiation between who he was and what the world expected him to be. Complex peer relationships and a deep desire to be understood shaped his early years. But through it all, he found his way to something more grounding: a rediscovery of his own value, on his own terms.
Now, Santiago is a real estate photographer, a history student at Vancouver Island University, a high school tutor, and a youth coordinator at Maranatha Church in Nanaimo, BC. Through his work with teenagers facing similar struggles, he channels his own experience into something purposeful – helping young people see what he had to learn for himself: that autism is a personality, not a disability.
The PULSE Community Podcasts can be found at: ThePulseCommunity.ca
Cindy Thompson’s website: cindythompsoncounselling.ca
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Episode Sponsor: Tablet Pharmacy
Check out Skookum Kid’s Stories with downloadable colouring pages on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeart Radio, and YouTube.
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