Renaissance Woman: Rosanna Tufts on Resilience, Reinvention, and Thriving After 60

How do you turn a disability into an advantage in challenging times? Move past divorce, self-doubt, and a cancer journey, marshalling a wide range of disparate talents to craft a fulfilling life after 60?

That’s the story we’ll be covering in an important development for LIVEdammit – our first interview.

Singer/author/speaker and autism advocate Rosanna Tufts stepped up to offer her story when I first announced LIVEdammit on LinkedIn, and we connected for a rich and inspiring conversation today.

Rosanna (shown above with her late cat Angel) is a Renaissance woman, with a wide range of talents and skills and an equally varied career. She earned a Master of Music Degree from Peabody Conservatory, worked as a church secretary, had a career in human resources at the Community College of Baltimore County, produced an original rock opera, produced a talk radio show, wrote a book, learned to sew, was ordained as an interfaith minister, became a Toastmaster, astrologer and Reiki practitioner, was married twice, raised one child, survived stage four cancer, all without knowing she’s autistic! Her discovery of this at age 64 led her to produce the documentary series “Was It Autism All Along?” available on YouTube. Now, through People On The Go, she does advocacy and training for Marylanders with disabilities, while she also assists with media promotions for the Reverend Dr Matthew Fox’s progressive theology meditations and Alessandra Belloni’s Black Madonna and Tarantella events.

I was delighted to talk with her today!

Rosanna’s Story

LIVEdammit: So Rosanna, as I’ve learned more of your story, I’ve been awed by your resilience and everything that you’ve come through.

Rosanna: Thank you, although I would rather be not known for how well I take a hit!

LIVEdammit: Well, not so much taking a hit, but navigating creatively through challenges. And so I was wondering if you could describe some of those challenges, and how you would describe your approach to moving through them.

Rosanna: My mother once said to me that “You always seem to land on your feet — you’re like your cats in that way.” I think a lot of my resilience has come from the realization that whatever happens to me, whatever adversity I faced, was not my fault.

I’m not saying that in a narcissistic way. I mean, whatever happened, it was something that I was expected to be able to do and couldn’t – whether the expectations were unrealistic, or because I simply did not have the physical strength to be able to defend myself, as in the case of school bullies.

Also, I came to the realization, in terms of my marriage, that I am not the kind of person who really should be taking care of a man as if he is my dependent. For one thing, it’s just not sexy, to put it mildly! That’s not to say that you can’t support your man, but it should only be a temporary situation when he’s going through a hard time, and he should be able to get back on his feet, and the equilibrium then gets restored. You can’t be doing that on a permanent basis. So I had to learn that hard lesson.

Another hard lesson came when I was coming out of that whole scenario: I thought it would be easy, in my late 40s, to find someone in a position to have an equal relationship with me. For a while there, my prospects were good, but then, after the subprime mortgage crisis took the whole economy down with it, the whole dating scene completely dried up. I’d been going on lots of dates before then, but by the end of 2009 it was like, where are they?

I came to the conclusion that it must have become very scary for men to put themselves out there as legitimate prospects – if they couldn’t take care of themselves, how the hell were they going to be able to take on a wife and family? Women, ironically, weathered the downturn better than they did, at least a little bit, because bosses knew that they could get away with hiring women and paying them less money.

See my autism working, connecting all of these patterns together?

Well, by 2010, the internet space was becoming awash in incels. These guys normally would have kept that kind of shame and despair to themselves, or they would have just gone to the bar and talked to whoever would listen. But now they started opening up to each other in an online space and blaming women for all of their problems, that women were perceiving them as losers. Rightly or wrongly, that was their perception and those incels became the bros that brought us Trump.

Adjusting to Autism: Reinventing Her Career

So what did I learn from this? I felt like I was just muddling through life without a partner able to match me to people and projects that fit my real skill set. I mean, I’m brimming over with talent, as you saw from my bio, but what the hell do I do with it? I want somebody who can channel that in a healthy way. And I’ve had to muddle through my life since 2007 or so without that.

And then, when I discovered as part of my cancer recovery process that I’ve been autistic this entire time, I saw that’s part of the reason why I have had such a hard time gaining traction in a career. It’s because it’s so hard for people to understand me.

So to promote myself effectively, I decided to take all of the freelance things that I had ever done in my life, bundle them up and put them on the first page of my resume. Looking at all that, you’re going to think I’m some kind of undiscovered genius! But then you look at my actual job history, and it’s kind of underwhelming: somebody is going to look at that and think, “Well, gee, who is this person?”

So I said, “Okay, now that I know what my limitations are, I need to just stay within those limitations, to take only work that I know my autism is good for.” And you would think that that would severely limit my opportunities, but the exact opposite has happened!

It was slow at first, but then I started getting a reputation, starting with the Matthew Fox team, and then getting a referral from there to Alessandra Belloni. Then I started to speak in the autism support groups we have around here in Baltimore. People started to see that I have good public speaking skills and good writing skills, and they were saying, “Hey, she would be really good as a trainer, for people to learn how to advocate for themselves.” And there happens to be a grant-funded program exactly for this, through Kennedy Krieger Institute.

People On The Go realized, “Hey, this person would be really good at at this, once we get her comfortable with the curriculum.” So I was trained, and I’m actually being paid as a public speaker now!

So things started coming together. Not in terms of an actual full-time job, which, being post-cancer, I don’t have the strength for anyway. It’s still all freelance stuff, but I’ve got a few good people in my corner now who are able to say, “I know a gal.” And they call me up and ask me, “Does this sound like something you can do?” And I have the option to be able to say yes or no, and not shoehorn myself into a task I’m not suited for.

And that’s what I’m doing now. I don’t know what the future is going to bring with that, with these grant-funded sources. I don’t know whether all of that is going to end up being yanked away, but at least I’m in a position now to prove to people that I have compensable value in certain very specific things.

I have found that owning my long-hidden autism has given me a kind of liberation. I now get to define my own value, without having to measure-up to either my parents’ or society’s definitions of worth.

And that’s a kind of assurance that money can’t buy.

Tools for Staying Motivated: Cats, Community, Learning, and Service

LIVEdammit: So this whole evolution, finding yourself and finding your strengths and how to present yourself, is incredibly inspiring. And how did you work through it – did you face self-doubts at times? And how did you keep yourself motivated to to continue that process?

Rosanna: Well, when I was first coming up in the world, I thought the only thing that I had going for me was my singing voice. I have a Master of Music degree, and I was a classically trained soprano, and I would have given anything to be able to do that full-time and be able to sing in the major opera houses or on Broadway.

That was the one thing I saw that could be my calling card, my currency, and it took a long time for me able to build up other kinds of skills. My skills were always things that I could only use part time. I kept trying to figure out — what’s the full-time thing going to be?

I was looking for success in all the wrong places for a long time, but what kept me going was a grim determination. Given all of my self doubts, I should have become an alcoholic or a drug addict, as so many other people do. That’s part of what drives those addictions, the self-doubts and feeling that they’re simply not up to the task of living. There’s just too many pressures. But I learned very early that if you succumb to that, it only makes you even less able to deal with whatever you’ve got to deal with.

So in terms of being able to keep my love alive for myself, having two cats at home helps. They were always an oasis of beauty and softness in a harsh and ugly world.

And then there was my connection to nature and the mystical philosophy that had always been there as a child of nature — and then finding at age 25 that, hey, I’m not the only one! There’s a whole community of people right here in Maryland who think the same way I do, and they actually create a whole ritual experience out of it — wow, with music and liturgy and mythology and storytelling and all the rest of it! I’ve been a member of communities like that for the last 40 years, and that’s always been a psychological lifeline that I could always turn to.

LIVEdammit: So for other people who are struggling through this, what would be your takeaway, your words of wisdom, having gone through all you’ve experienced?

Rosanna: In terms of what we’re dealing with now, know what your resources are, and be a resource yourself, and take the time to find out what people are dealing with. One thing that I have learned from being in the disability space is that everybody’s got some factor in their life that is disabling in some way. We need to be able to hold space for that or offer some kind of support for it.

And be careful to not doom scroll too much. I know that’s awfully hard. We have to stay informed, but at the same time, you have to set a time limit on that and make sure that you’re not absorbing too much at one time.

What else can I offer? Keep multiple points of contact for the people in your circle, so if one avenue fails in reaching them, you have backups.

And learn to do something that makes you feel strong, that you can put to use in a crisis situation. I trained and got certified in CPR, first aid, and AED (using a defibrillator). I tell my friends, “Be nice to me – I could save your life one day!” Doing this is good for your self-esteem, and it keeps despair at bay. Despair is unavoidable these days, but if you’re equipped with tools, you can lessen the impact.

LIVEdammit: Rosanna, thank you for these insights and for your sharing…it’s a privilege to know you and I so appreciate having this opportunity to hear your story!

To learn more about Rosanna, check her out at https://radiofreepagans.substack.com/ and  https://www.youtube.com/@rosannatufts855