Two years following the release of her controversial directorial debut, Music, which starred Maddie Ziegler as an autistic woman, Sia has revealed that she has been diagnosed with autism herself. The “Chandelier” singer opened up about her recent diagnosis during an interview with Survivor‘s Carolyn Wiger on Rob Has a Podcast.
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“For 45 years, I was like, ‘I’ve got to go put my human suit on,’” Sia said during the interview. “And only in the last two years have I become fully, fully myself. I’m on the spectrum, and I’m in recovery and whatever—there’s a lot of things.”
Sia continued, “Nobody can ever know and love you when you’re filled with secrets and … living in shame. And when we finally sit in a room full of strangers and tell them our deepest, darkest, most shameful secrets, and everybody laughs along with us, and we don’t feel like pieces of trash for the first time in our lives, and we feel seen for the first time in our lives for who we actually are, and then we can start going out into the world and just operating as humans and human beings with hearts and not pretending to be anything.”
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While Music (2021) was nominated for two Golden Globes, the film faces criticism for the inclusion of a neurotypical actress in the lead role of a nonverbal autistic individual. One scene in particular, which featured the title character in restraints, was heavily criticized. Sia ended up tweeting out an apology for the film which read, “I plan to remove the restraint scenes from all future printings. I listened to the wrong people and that is my responsibility, my research was clearly not thorough enough, not wide enough.”
Sia disclosed that a warning would be added to the film which read, “Music in no way condones or recommends the use of restraint on autistic people. There are autistic occupational therapists that specialize in sensory processing who can be consulted to explain safe ways to provide proprioceptive, deep-pressure feedback to help w [sic] meltdown safety.”
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