Angie Dixon (she/her)

Angie joined Momma on December 15, 2025 for a live Q&A via Twitch and YouTube to talk about Unmasking Without Spontaneously Combusting

About Angie

Angie Dixon is a profoundly creative troublemaker in the best possible way—an author, artist, lifelong multipassionate, and the original human behind The Leonardo Trait, a concept she coined nearly twenty years ago to describe people whose minds refuse to sit quietly in one box. (Her brain didn’t just refuse; it climbed out the window, scaled the gutters, and started planting a rooftop garden.)

After decades of believing she was “too much”—too curious, too scattered, too intense—Angie eventually discovered that everything she’d been told to tone down was actually the engine of her genius. A later-in-life autism diagnosis finally connected the dots: the way she thinks isn’t a flaw. It’s a creative superpower with a mischievous twinkle.

That revelation sparked the brand-new, fully reimagined 4th edition of The Leonardo Trait: Profound Creativity in a Chaotic World—a fiercely honest, funny, and liberating guide for every neurodivergent soul who’s ever been told to “focus,” “finish,” or otherwise behave like a beige file folder. Angie brings all of herself to this edition: the disability journey that changed her life, the workaholism recovery that saved it, the decades of creative detours, and the stubborn hope that people like her aren’t broken—they’re brilliant.

When she’s not writing or painting tiny works of abstract art, Angie is probably in bed with earbuds, plotting her next project, redesigning half her website, or lovingly harassing Ziggy, her AI assistant, into becoming a more civilized creature. She lives in Arkansas with her husband of 33 years, her grown kids who still make her laugh, and an assortment of cats who absolutely do not respect personal boundaries.

Her mission—whether in books, art, summits, or stray bursts of unexpected wisdom—is simple: Help profoundly creative people finally feel at home in their own minds. Because once you stop trying to “fix” yourself, you can finally start creating the life you were meant to live.

Socials / Links for Guest Connection

• Website - https://profoundcreativity.com/

• Newsletter signup - https://profoundcreativity.com/spiral

References / Things Mentioned During the Stream

• True Crime Fascination - Murdaugh Murders 

• Book Recommendation - Welcome to AuDHD: How to Survive (and Thrive) as an Adult with Autism and ADHD by Megan Griffith 

• Movie Recommendations - Weekend at Bernie's and Hot Tub Time Machine 

• Favorite Poem - Stepping Backward by Adrienne Rich 

• Life Hack Recommendation - Sleep With Me Podcast 

Episode Summary

If you've spent most of your life feeling like you're performing a version of yourself that's just slightly off from who you actually are, this episode is for you.

Angie Dixon is an author, artist and creator of the Leonardo Trait, a framework for understanding the kind of brain that runs on curiosity, cycles through a hundred projects at once and absolutely refuses to pick a lane. She's also late diagnosed autistic, and she spent decades masking before a severe back injury seven years ago forced everything to stop, and forced her to finally start living as herself.

We talked about what unmasking actually looks like, and it's not the dramatic transformation the word might suggest. For Angie, it started with novelty t-shirts. She began wearing them to physical therapy because those were the ones without paint on them. That small comfort became her whole wardrobe. Unmasking, she says, tends to be gradual, personal and a lot less cinematic than people expect.

One of the most clarifying things Angie said in this conversation is that neurodivergent people are not broken neurotypicals. We're not a defective version of something else. We're just different, and that difference is worth protecting rather than hiding.

We also got into the Leonardo Trait itself, which Angie describes as profound creativity in a chaotic world. If you think in spirals instead of straight lines, have 37 browser tabs open in your brain at any given moment and feel like the self-help books everyone else loves were written for someone who is simply not you, you might be a Leonardo.

Angie was diagnosed with autism at 55 after nearly 20 years of writing a book she thought was about creativity, only to realize it was actually about neurodivergence the whole time. That realization sent her back to the drawing board, and the result is a manifesto about being who you actually are rather than the acceptable version of yourself you've been performing.

We talked about burnout warning signs, what to do when rest isn't enough, how to stop treating unfinished projects like personal failures and how to figure out the difference between professional adaptation and genuine self-erasure. We also talked about her AI assistant Ziggy, who once told her that a plain t-shirt would make her look like she was about to hold a hostage.

If you're questioning whether you've been masking your whole life, Angie's take is simple: if you're asking, you probably already know the answer.

Find Angie and her Unmasked summit at her website, and check out the summit itself, which was designed specifically to be the least overwhelming format possible: email only, no endless video calls.