Anne Hegerty, star of Channel 7 quiz show The Chase , is opening up about her health battles as she has been under the spotlight from the show.
“I’m really quite an optimist. My feeling is that life gets better and better” Hegerty said, during an exclusive interview with 7News’ Sarah Greenhalgh.
“There are so many people my age who sort of look back nostalgically to earlier times and say ‘Life was so much better in the good old days.’ And I look at them and think, ‘No, no, no. You think it was better because your joints didn’t ache and everyone wanted to have sex with you’,” she added.
“I didn’t really have a particularly good childhood. The music was better, but there’s not much else that was better when I was a kid, to be honest” Hegerty says.
Hegerty, who is among more than 200,000 Australians that live with Autism Spectrum Disorder, adds that he undiagnosed autism meant that she was seen as “odd and unhappy” by people who should have supported her.
“I just grew up feeling like I couldn’t really do anything” she said. “My mother never told me I could accomplish anything.”
“My dad (was) a complete incompetent in all walks of life. So I did grow up thinking, ‘I’m not really sure I can do things, I’m not sure I can learn to do anything’.”
Hegerty was diagnosed at the age of 45 when she came across a documentary about the disorder.
“Something in it clicked with me,” Hegerty says. “I had a look at the actual diagnostic criteria and I thought, ‘oh my God’, this is bringing together so many things that I did as a child or possibly still do that seem to have no connection except that they were weird and inexplicable, and I did them and nobody ever knew why.”
Read the entire interview over at News7.
